By Patti Zarling
April 26, 2006
ONEIDA — Oneida tribal member Walter Reed, 61, lived as a young boy with six siblings and his parents on the Oneida reservation in a two-room house that had no running water or electricity.
Reed's summers were spent weeding and watering a large vegetable patch his family depended on for year-round food, as well as picking cherries in Door County for added income. For fun, kids played baseball using a makeshift bat and the only baseball in the neighborhood. Some of his schooling occurred in a local mission school.
Reed sat in a paneled room at the Holy Apostles Episcopal Church office Tuesday to share these and other stories of his youth.
In an effort to preserve such oral histories of Oneida elders, tribal member L. Gordon McLester has joined with two video producers to interview hundreds of Oneidas, on tape, about their families, childhood memories, education and cultural practices.
The interviews will be put onto DVD and shared with schools, libraries, families and others interested in remembering Oneida culture and history.
"It's important to do this because the youth today have no idea how things were back then," Reed said. "They can see how good they've got it."
Reed recalled his family was very poor. His father was a laborer and his mother got on a bus with other Oneida women each day to go to the Green Bay area to clean homes. If family members were sick, medicinal herbs were used to make tea. They had no money to go to a doctor and the Oneida Health Clinic did not yet exist.
He never learned the Oneida language, though his parents spoke it fluently.
"It was sad, really," Reed said. "The one thing I really wish we had was the language."
Like many, Reed moved away to find work, but always missed Oneida and felt compelled to come back. That's a typical reaction among tribal members, McLester said.
"This is home to them," he said. "No matter where they go, this is home."
Reed acknowledged he's not one to be in the spotlight, but he's glad he participated in the video project.
His interview lasted about an hour, and included a chance for him to share an old photo of his parents and the story behind it.
McLester works as a consultant for the tribe and is working with Bob Rozoff and Alan Condra of Source Media Network on the oral history project. Rozoff has produced award-winning video programs on a number of Native American topics. McLester also organizes conferences on a variety of Native American issues and has helped edit several books about Oneida culture.
So far he's interviewed 375 Oneida elders. He's scheduled to interview 70 more this year and another 70 next year.
His goal is to put the information on the Internet, either on an internal tribal link or an external site. He also plans to cross-reference the material, so people who want to learn about a specific topic, such as holiday traditions, for example, can view information that way.
He's interviewing elders mostly age 65 and older. The majority live in Oneida, though many live in Milwaukee and some in other parts of the country.
McLester said it's important to record the information while people who remember the times still are living.
"What we want to do is tell our story from our point of view," McLester said. "Our children need to learn our history from our point of view.
"We want to give them some pictures of what life was like and to hear it from the people who lived it."
The idea for the project came from a collection of stories gathered in the 1930s and 1940s as part of a government program. Those stories were collected in both English and Oneida and put into a manuscript.
"This is a continuation of that, told about a 100 years later," McLester said. And they figured a DVD is more user-friendly these days than a book.
Both Reed and McLester hope kids will see the larger picture of the Oneida tribe.
"My concern is that they understand what it is to be Oneida," McLester said. "They have a heritage."