S06E05: The Sloan Lecture - The Oneidas, the Best Land, and the Erie Canal - By Susan Brewer

We trace the Erie Canal’s celebrated corridor through one farm in Oneida, New York, revealing how innovation rode alongside broken treaties, pressured sales and the erasure of Oneida lives. Through the intertwined stories of Polly Denny and Angel De Ferrier and the Brewer family, we face the costs of progress and the weight of paperwork.

• why the Mohawk Valley corridor made the land strategically vital
• Fort Stanwix line splitting Oneida towns and futures
• Oneida alliance with the Americans and postwar betrayal
• Angel De Ferrier and Polly Denny as cultural go-betweens
• New York’s illegal “treaties of purchase” and legal sleight of hand
• Skenandoa’s warning and the vanishing myth in print
• paperwork dispossession through surveys, mortgages and courts
• canal, railroad and thruway turning Wampsville into a boomtown
• erasure of Polly in local memory and records
• tenant to owner: Brewer family path on the best land
• land claims, sovereignty and a modern economic reversal

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