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The Onondaga Nation has reclaimed about 1,000 acres of its ancestral homeland from Honeywell International Incorporated following a federal settlement agreement, the Nation announced Monday.

The 1,000 acres of forestland are at the headwaters of Onondaga Creek, which flows from about 20 miles south of Syracuse to Onondaga Lake. Prior to Monday’s agreement, Onondaga territory consisted of an around 7,300-acre plot of land south of Syracuse.

“The headwaters of Onondaga Creek in the Tully Valley are part of the system of waterways leading into Onondaga Lake that have sustained our Nation for millennia,” Onondaga Tadodaho Sid Hill said in the announcement. “This is a small but important step for us, and for the Indigenous land back movement across the United States.”

First announced in 2022, the land transfer is one of 18 remediation projects New York state and the U.S. Department of the Interior mandated Honeywell to complete due to its more than 100-year water contamination in the creek and the nearby Onondaga Lake. The lake is considered a sacred site across the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

Heath said the Nation has been involved in decades of legal battles with federal courts and is currently pursuing a 2.5-million-acre land claim with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an international autonomous body that analyzes alleged human rights violations. The 1,000-acre return is a part of this larger claim.

It’s thought to be one of the largest plots of land returned to Indigenous peoples in the United States, Heath said.

“The way that this is being returned is historic, because the control over land will be with the Nation, not with some other government,” he said.

The Monday land transfer was completed in an agreement facilitated by the DOI and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation under a federal Superfund, which gives the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency the funds and authority to clean contaminated land.

From 1881 to 1986, Honeywell released various contaminants and large quantities of mercury into Onondaga Creek and Onondaga Lake. The company first faced a Superfund lawsuit for polluting the lake in 1989, which the EPA filed in an attempt to mitigate pollution, Heath said.

Onondaga Creek has been severely polluted due to a century of salt mining and chemical pollution, Hill wrote in 2022.

Heath said the damage Honeywell’s salt mining caused on Onondaga Creek led to a phenomenon of mudboils. After salt mining began, the first mudboil – a mixture of silt, clay and muddy salt water – was documented in Tully Valley in the 1880s. The Tully mudboils became saltier over time, leaking into Onondaga Creek and flowing upstream to pollute Onondaga Lake and destroy what was once a flourishing trout fishing habitat, according to the Nation.

The Nation is working to restore the brook trout population in Onondaga Lake so there will be access to clean, healthy fish within a couple of years, he said.

Under the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua, the Nation is guaranteed 2.5 million acres of land that has been stolen from them for centuries, according to the release. If IACHR issues a recommendation in favor of the Nation’s claim, its decision is still not guaranteed to be enforced federally, The New York Times reported.

Since the colonial era, Indigenous peoples have lost almost 99% of their historically occupied land to the U.S. government, according to the American Association for Advancement of Science. Indigenous peoples across the U.S., including the Onondaga, have since worked to regain stewardship of the environment and its resources.

“We are grateful that the Department of the Interior and New York State have worked with us to return to our stewardship the first 1,000 acres of the 2.5 million acres of treaty-guaranteed land taken from us over the centuries,” Hill said.

With 2,499,000 treaty-guaranteed acres still unreturned to the Nation, Heath said the U.S. courts provide limited legal solutions in terms of getting the land back.

“The best way to protect this land is to return it to the nation, and they will be stewards of it as they were for centuries before the Europeans got here,” Heath said.

Because an IACHR ruling does not guarantee federal legal action, Heath said the Nation’s long-term strategy is to urge the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn colonial era policies such as the 15th-century “Doctrine of Discovery.” The Nation has sued at the federal level multiple times, but none of the suits have reached the Supreme Court.

News Editor Julia Boehning contributed reporting to this article.

Published on September 30, 2024 at 11:24 pm

Contact Ahna: arflemin@syr.edu