Daily Orange
by Ahna Fleming
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 forested land being returned to the Nation are at the headwaters of Onondaga Creek, which flows from about 20 miles south of Onondaga Lake in Syracuse. Prior to Monday’s agreement, Onondaga territory consisted of an around 7,300-acre plot of land south of Syracuse.
First announced in 2022, the land transfer is one of 18 remediation projects New York state and the United States Department of the Interior mandated Honeywell to complete due to its over 100-year water contamination in the creek and the nearby Onondaga Lake. The lake is considered a sacred site across the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
“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.”
Joe Heath, general counsel for the Nation, 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.
“The way that this is being returned is historic, because the control over land will be with the nation, not with some other government,” Heath said.