Full Description
Glimpses of Oneida Life is a remarkable compilation of modern stories of community life at the Oneida Nation of the Thames Settlement and the surrounding area. With topics ranging from work experiences and Oneida customs to pranks, humorous encounters, and ghost stories, these fifty-two unscripted narrations and conversations in Oneida represent a rare collection of first-hand Iroquoian reflections on aspects of daily life and culture not found in print elsewhere.
Each text is presented in Oneida with both an interlinear, word-by-word translation and a more colloquial translation in English. The book also contains a grammatical sketch of the Oneida language by Karin Michelson, co-author of the Oneida-English/English-Oneida Dictionary, that describes how words are structured and combined into larger linguistic structures, thus allowing Glimpses to be used as a teaching text as well.
The engrossing tales in Glimpses of Oneida Life will be a valuable resource for linguists and language learners, a useful source for those studying the history and culture of Iroquois people in the twentieth-century, and an entertaining read for anyone interested in everyday First Nations life in southern Ontario.
Contents
PART I: PRELIMINARIES
1. Introduction
2. Oneida Sounds and Orthography
PART II: STORIES
Language
Lessons
Ghostly Tales
Pranks and Mishaps
More Favourite Memories
Customs
Growing Up and Working
Reflections
PART III: GRAMMAR
1. Introduction
2. Word Structure
3. Possession
4. Clauses
5. Negation
6. Questions
7. Indefinites
8. Free Relatives and Corelatives
9. Counting
10. Degree and Comparison
11. Possibility and Necessity
12. Other Linkages Between Clauses
APPENDIX 1: List of Particles
APPENDIX 2: Segmented Texts
