Native News Online
by JENNA KUNZE
On Wednesday, June 29, 1,000 acres of ancestral homeland in the Tully Valley in Central New York was returned to the Onondaga Nation.
The land return–one of the largest transfers from a state to an Indigenous nation—was part of a 2018 Natural Resource Damage Assessment and Restoration settlement. The settlement is an agreement between the Dept. of the Interior’s trustees U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, and the landowner, Honeywell International Inc., to transfer the land title back to the Nation.
In 2005, the Onondaga Nation filed a federal lawsuit against the State of New York for taking 2.5 million acres of their homeland in violation of federal law and treaties between 1788 and 1822. The case was dismissed in 2010, and the Nation then brought the case to the International Court of Justice at the United Nations in 2014.