Book Talk & Signing: An Oneida Indian in Foreign Waters: The Life of Chief Chapman Scanandoah with Author Laurence Hauptman

On April 5th, 2017 at 6:00 pm, the Onondaga Historical Association, in cooperation with Syracuse University Press, will host a book talk and signing book with author Laurence Hauptman on his book, An Oneida Indian in Foreign Waters: The Life of Chief Chapman Scanandoah, 1870-1953.

The event will take place at the Skä•noñh-Great Law of Peace Center on Onondaga Lake Parkway in Liverpool, New York.

About the book: Chapman Scanandoah was an outsider at the primarily African American Hampton Institute where he was educated in the late 1880s and early 1890s; one of the very few Native Americans in the US Navy from 1897 to 1912; an Oneida with no land or political rights on the Onondaga Reservation, where he resided for much of his life; a litigant in the white man’s court attempting to prevent the loss of the last remaining Oneida lands in the Empire State; a Native American inventor earning patents in the age of Thomas Edison; one of the founders of the Indian Village at the New York State Fair; and a valued employee and mechanic working for major companies in Schenectady and Syracuse. While he was traveling in all of these “foreign waters,” he was serving his Oneida people as the primary advisor to Chief William Hanyoust Rockwell.

Reviews: 

“In this book, we have that very rare thing: the biography of a Native American figure who moved through what I have called ‘the many worlds of the Iroquois.’”—Michael Leroy Oberg, author of Peacemakers: The Iroquois, the United States, and the Treaty of Canandaigua, 1794

“Widely admired for combining meticulous research with deep sympathy for his subject, Hauptman is the foremost historian of recent Iroquois history. Now he has given us a work illuminating the notable life of Chapman Scanandoah. . . . This book casts new light on neglected chapters of the Oneida land claims story.”—Anthony Wonderley, author of Oneida Iroquois Folklore, Myth, and History: New York Oral Narrative from the Notes of H. E. Allen and Others

About the author: Laurence M. Hauptman is SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History. He is the author of numerous books on the Iroquois, including Seven Generations of Iroquois Leadership: The Six Nations since 1800, which was awarded the Herbert Lehman book prize by the New York Academy of History, and In the Shadow of Kinzua: The Seneca Nation of Indians since World War II, which was awarded the annual book prize by the American Association for State and Local History.