Syracuse, N.Y. – Centuries after losing nearly all of their land to the state of New York, the Onondaga Nation will see the return of a 1,000-acre sliver of their original, 2.5-million-acre territory.
U.S., state and Onondaga Nation officials announced today that the nation will be given two heavily forested parcels, one at the headwaters of Onondaga Creek, considered sacred by the nation.
The Tully land is now owned by Honeywell, the company responsible for cleaning Onondaga Lake and restoring area lands and waterways after decades of pollution.
It is one of the largest land transfers made to an Indian nation in the United States, officials said, and the first time that land has been returned directly to a New York tribe.
“This return is a monumental thing that has happened to us,” said Jeanne Shenandoah, an Onondaga Nation member. “This returning of this acreage demands a massive celebration, a celebration that we finally have found somebody that will listen to our words and will understand us and understand our culture and our way of life and the historical things that have happened to us.”
The land, which consists largely of woods and wetlands, will be kept wild. Nation attorney Joe Heath said the highest priority will be to help clean up Onondaga Creek, which runs through the land, for native brook trout.
Honeywell, the company responsible for polluting and cleaning up Onondaga Lake, will turn the land over to the Onondaga as part of the company’s settlement with the state to clean up the lake.
“This historic agreement represents a unique opportunity to return traditional homelands back to Indigenous people to steward for the benefit of their community,” said Department of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, in a news release. “We look forward to drawing upon the Onondaga Nation’s expertise and Indigenous knowledge in helping manage the area’s valuable wildlife and habitat.”
The deal, however, is far from done. Many details have yet to be ironed out, including potential sticking points like who will pay for any restoration work, how much public access the nation will be required to allow, and even whether the nation will pay property taxes.
And the Onondaga have been promised land before that they never got.
In 2011, the Onondaga County Legislature agreed to give the nation a 40-acre tract on the southeastern shore of the lake called Murphy’s Island. The county reneged on that promise after an environmental study revealed widespread contamination that would require an expensive cleanup.
The county is instead building a bike trail there.
The Tully land will also come with a conservation easement, a legal agreement that will restrict development and emphasize protection of the environment.
The nation plans to preserve the “relatively pristine” land, Heath said. It consists of 980 acres of forest, 45 acres of wetlands and flood plains, and at least two waterfalls.
Heath said the land includes headwaters of several tributaries to Onondaga Creek, which the tribe fished for native brook trout for centuries.
“That’s a very significant interest to the nation to be able to restore and protect and enhance that native population,” he said.
The exact boundaries of the land were still being negotiated this week, but it will consist of two parcels: One at the corner of Nichols Road and Route 11, and a larger parcel to the south, straddling Tully Farms Road mostly north of Solvay Road.
Heath and state DEC Commissioner Basil Seggos said more land could be transferred to the Onondaga in the future, but there are no specific plans to do so.
“We of course will look at other parcels as they become available to us and there’s a clear mechanism to make this transfer,” Seggos said in an interview with Syracuse.com.
The land transfer is part of a 2018 agreement between the state, Honeywell and the Department of Interior’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that goes above and beyond the decades-long lake cleanup. This agreement spells out 18 projects Honeywell must complete to restore and make accessible Onondaga Lake and nearby areas.
One of those steps is this land transfer. The transfer could take up to 10 months; the agreement sets March as the deadline.
Before then, the land will be inventoried by the nation, DEC and researchers from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry to catalog all the land and the plants and animals that live there. Once that’s done, Heath said, the nation will develop a plan on how the land will be used.
“It’s a beautiful area,” said Sid Hill, the nation Tadodaho, or spiritual leader. “It’s a nice, small stream. There’s fishing there, there’s wildlife there, and there’s medicines there.”
The Onondaga have traditionally hunted and fished their lands and use native plants as medicines.
The Tully land will be owned outright by the Onondaga Nation. That’s unlike 13,000 acres in Madison and Oneida counties set aside for Oneida Indian Nation. That land is owned by the federal government but reserved for the exclusive use of the Oneida nation.
The Onondaga Nation will own outright the land in Tully, although it will not be considered sovereign.
And the transfer will come with stipulations set by the state government. The land must be kept mostly wild, and the nation must allow public access.
The transfer is part of the decades-old cleanup of Onondaga Lake. The federal Superfund law that mandated the cleanup of Onondaga Lake and several nearby sites requires polluters to do two things: Clean up the toxic mess they left behind and reimburse the community for the losses that the pollution caused. That second part, called a natural resources damage assessment, is what compelled Honeywell to give over the land.
Under the assessment agreement with the state and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Honeywell was also required to complete 17 other projects, including the boat launch on the west side of the lake, wetlands restorations and trails.
On the Tully land, Honeywell agreed in 2018 to build parking lots and trails before turning over the land to the DEC or “a third party.” In other Superfund cases, that third party has often been a nonprofit conservation group. Honeywell didn’t build any of those lots or trails.
Seggos said Gov. Kathy Hochul has urged state agencies to be creative in solving problems, and the Onondaga Lake plan gave DEC a chance to view environmental conservation in a new way.
“It was an opportunity to right the other wrongs of the past, and by that I mean the way in which the land and in the past have been taken away from the Onondaga Nation,” Seggos said in an interview with syracuse.com | The Post-Standard. “It is an exciting moment for our relationships with indigenous nations in New York and a significant shift in the way that we were prepared to see land management.”
Seggos said the land will come with a conservation easement, which will restrict building and emphasize protecting streams, wetlands and animal habitats.
“There will be an expectation that that the land will be protected under traditional ecological knowledge,” he said. “Ultimately, we expect the land to be very well-managed and cared for.”
Allied Chemical, which was later renamed Honeywell after a merger, owned land in the Tully valley to extract salt. The company practiced solution mining: injecting water underground to flush out the salt, which was then conveyed to chemical plants along the lake to create soda ash. The extraction of that salt led to sinkholes and collapsing land, Heath said, and created the mud boils that pour silt into Onondaga Creek as it winds 27 miles to the lake.
The Onondaga’s land is upstream of the mud boils, Heath said, and contains no sinkholes or other ecological damage.
The land of the Onondaga Nation, a part of the six-tribe Haudenosaunee Confederacy, once stretched across the center of what is now New York state. During the 18th and 19th centuries, they signed a number of treaties ceding land to New York state. The Onondaga, along with the Oneida Indian Nation, later said those agreements violated federal law, and the tribes filed land claims in court to win their land back.
The Onondaga Nation filed its land claim in federal district court in 2005, alleging that New York illegally obtained about 4,000 square miles of land that included nearly all of Syracuse, plus Oswego, Fulton, Watertown, Cortland and Binghamton.
Just weeks after the claim was filed, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an 8-1 ruling that the Oneida Indian Nation had waited too long to pursue its claim to 250,000 acres in Madison and Oneida counties. That ruling essentially ended Indian land claim cases in New York.
The return of the Tully land is a small but significant step for the Onondaga to have control over what deeply matters: land.
“We would like to keep it pristine and pure,” Shenandoah said. “We have our cultural teachings that show us how to live with the earth and how to proceed and be thankful for things that we can do.”