Central Current
by Patrick McCarthy
Steps away from a small gravel parking lot off Tully Farms Road, Sid Hill and Joe Heath reflected on the clear, upstream waters of an Onondaga Creek tributary flowing beneath their feet.
For the first time in centuries, the gleaming waters belonged to them. 
After the completion of a land transfer from Honeywell International on Sept. 30, the Onondaga Nation reclaimed over 1,000 acres of their historic land, which include the pristine headwaters of Onondaga Creek and a bounty of native wildlife and natural medicines.
Hill, the Tadodaho of the Onondaga Nation, remembers swimming in the creek water as a child. Nowadays, Hill said, children don’t swim in the creek, whose downstream waters are brown and murky. Those downstream waters run full with silt and other deposits from mud boils, caused by salt mining.
“You have Onondaga Creek, you have Onondaga Lake. Can’t use these places,” Hill said. “I’m an Onondaga. What’s that tell you?”
Here, however, in the land the Onondagas reacquired, dozens of headwaters remain clean, clear and cold – safe for consumption, and ideal for native brook trout to thrive.
The 1,000 acres — two separate 758-acre and 256-acre parcels — are a mere fraction of the 2.5 million acres guaranteed to the Onondagas in treaties with the US government. This title transfer, though, represents a critical milestone in the Nation’s ongoing battle to regain its ancestral lands.