County’s plan to build an aquarium on Onondaga Lake shore ignores a 1794 treaty

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Syracuse’s $85 million aquarium project is set to be built in Syracuse’s Inner Harbor near the shore of Onondaga Lake, on Haudenosaunee ancestral lands. But a 1794 treaty means New York state took that land unjustly.

The Treaty of Canandaigua – signed November 11, 1794 by U.S. Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and 50 chiefs, or sachems, and war chiefs of the Iroquois – outlined reservations belonging to each nation, which “shall remain theirs, until they choose to sell the same to the people of the United States who have right to purchase.”

According to the treaty, Syracuse’s Inner Harbor and land within a mile of the lake belongs to the Onondaga Nation.

“We would all be better off if everybody worked together for the common good,” said Joe Heath, legal counsel for the Onondaga Nation. “That’s not what’s going on here. And the aquarium, unfortunately, is the latest chapter of that.”

The U.S. government never repurchased the reservations’ land from the Oneida, Onondaga and Cayuga Nations. Legally, Heath said, the treaty is still in effect.

Heath pointed to McGirt v. Oklahoma, which held that once Congress ratifies a treaty and creates a reservation, the reservation stays intact unless Congress acts to either diminish or terminate it. He said the 1790 Trade and Intercourse Act – which mandates that anyone other than the federal government is prohibited from any transfer of land – is void in effect because it “gives no remedy.”

Essentially, he said, the federal government still recognizes treaties like the Treaty of Canandaigua, but has no recourse if a state or local government violates it.

In 2011, the county legislature passed a resolution promising to return a portion of the land on the lake to the Nation, but Heath said it never followed through.

“(The resolution meant) the Nation would once again have a footprint there, so that its citizens could carry on their relationship with the lake that’s been interrupted for about 250 years,” Heath said. “That promise has not been kept.”

Heath said an elder clan mother didn’t believe the integrity of the resolution at the time and expected it would end up like “every other promise.” Heath, who at the time felt like they had made progress, said he now understands.

“Every time a promise is broken, it adds to the historic trauma of not being able to interact with their living relative, because that’s how they feel about the lake,” he said. “There’s constant historic trauma that keeps coming back because people won’t face the real history.”

Members of the Nation aren’t able to complete their cultural and environmental obligation to protect the land and water because of their forced separation from the lake, Heath said. Onondaga Lake, historically sacred to the Haudenosaunee, remains polluted after a century of chemical dumping.

As a part of a 1,000 acre land return from New York state to the Onondaga Nation, the state will require Honeywell Inc. to implement 17 restoration projects and pay over $5 million toward additional restoration of the Onondaga Lake Watershed.

Megan Thompson | Digital Design Director

The agreement is part of the Onondaga Lake Natural Resource Damage Assessment Restoration Plan, which cites that Honeywell and its predecessors dumped “large quantities” of mercury in the lake between 1881 and 1986. Sophia Powless, a member of the Onondaga Nation who works for the Climate Reality Project, said building an aquarium is counterintuitive to promoting the environment that’s already there.

“What I’ve seen a lot with environmental and climate action (that) is quite ironic is that we always want to create new spaces and create a space to conserve a certain species, while neglecting to care for the region that is already being degraded, the region that … hasn’t been fully cleaned yet,” she said.

The trout which used to live in Onondaga Creek are no longer there, Powless and Heath said. An estimated 7 million cubic yards of sediments in the lake remain contaminated by mercury.

Kirstin Lyons, an Oneida Nation member who grew up on the Onondaga reservation, is a Human Development and Family Science Ph.D. student at Syracuse University. She said she worked extensively with the refugee population of Syracuse, some of whom subsist on fish from the lake, in nutrition education for the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Onondaga County. Lyons said she saw a gap in transparency and public education surrounding the polluted fish.

Lyons also said her experience as a Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program educator makes her question how the aquarium is going to help kids both in the city of Syracuse and of the Onondaga Nation.

“The argument is always, ‘it’s going to bring in tourism, it’ll provide jobs,’ but with Onondaga being sovereign, are they included in your sentiment?” she said. “At that individual level, I’m more aware of, ‘how are you helping these children right now?’”​​

For Heath, the aquarium represents the county’s neglect of those efforts.

“What we’re doing is we’re building a monument to fish that don’t live here. And ignoring the fact that this lake used to be crystal clean, producing an overabundance of clean, cold water fish that’s gone,” he said.

More coverage on land rights for the Onondaga Nation:

• Months after land return victory, transfer yet to be realized for Onondaga Nation
• Over 1,000 acres of land returned to the Onondaga Nation
• ‘The Land You’re On’: New podcast takes a deep dive into SU’s land acknowledgement
  

Heath said Onondaga County first made an attempt to contact the Nation to include them in discussion on July 28, a day before County Executive Ryan McMahon announced that the aquarium had the votes necessary to pass.

With the 2011 resolution to return land on the lake going unfulfilled, Onondaga County Office of the Environment Director Travis Glazier said the resolution’s enactment was an “anomaly” in the first place amid the county’s efforts to make the entire shoreline public in a 2016 interview with syracuse.com. He clarified the county’s intent to “keep this land in the public domain.”

Powless said when it comes to the lake, legislators overlook the Haudenosaunee’s traditional knowledge and history with the land when deciding what’s best for the community. She said one group is dominating the conversation, over the Indigenous people who are directly affected.

“I think there’s a lot of hesitation that people have toward talking about land rights – because these are our ancestral lands, the places where we used to be – (because) now people don’t understand exactly. They’re like, ‘oh, but you’re not there anymore,’” Powless said. “But in reality, we still are. That is still a part of our culture, that’s something that we are still deeply connected to.”