Why a Native American nation is challenging the US over a 1794 treaty
Four or five years ago, Sidney Hill’s young son came to him with a question that Mr. Hill did not know how to answer.
The boy had learned that day about the millions of acres of land his people, the Onondaga, had once called home, and the way their homeland had been taken piece by piece by New York State until all that was left was gone . 18 square kilometers south of Syracuse.
“We lost all this land,” Mr. Hill recalled his son saying. “How can that be?”
In many ways, Mr. Hill was the best person to answer that question. As Tadodaho, the spiritual leader of the Onondaga Nation, he was responsible for protecting its legacy and guiding it into the future. He was one of a handful of elders who worked for decades on a legal and diplomatic strategy to fight back against the historical abuses that his son was now trying to understand.
Still, it threw him off balance.
The younger generation needed to know, he said. “But they have little interest in that.”
Mr. Hill tried to reassure his son that all those injustices were in the past.
But he knew how difficult it was to accept past mistakes, especially when their consequences so affected the present. That was why he had pushed for so long for a correction of that history—first the Onondaga elders, then the United States legal system, and finally an international human rights commission.
The Onondaga claim the United States violated a 1794 treaty signed by George Washington that guaranteed them 2.5 million acres in central New York. The case, filed in 2014, is the second filed by an Indian nation against the United States before an international human rights body; a finding is expected as early as this year.
Even if the Onondaga are successful, the result will be largely symbolic. The entity, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, has no power to enforce a finding or settlement, and the United States has said it does not consider the commission’s recommendations binding.
“We could beat them, but that doesn’t mean they have to comply with anything,” Mr. Hill said in an interview.
Its 2.5 million hectares have long been transformed by highways and utility lines, shopping centers, universities, airports and roller rinks.
The territory includes the cities of Binghamton and Syracuse, as well as more than 30 national forests, dozens of lakes and numerous streams and tributaries. It is also home to 24 Superfund sites, the environmental waste of the powerful economy that helped downtown New York thrive in the early and mid-20th century.
The most infamous of these is Lake Onondaga, which once held the dubious title of America’s most polluted lake.
Industrial waste has left its mark on Onondaga territory, depriving the country of fishing in its streams and rivers. The history of environmental degradation is part of what motivates the Onondaga, who see it as their sacred responsibility to protect their land.
One of their main goals in filing the petition is to have a seat at the table on environmental decisions on the native territory. The other is an acknowledgment that New York owes them, if only in principle, 2.5 million acres.
Across the country, government officials have grappled with the idea of reparations to address historical injustices. In 2022, officials in Evanston, Illinois, began distributing $25,000 to Black descendants of enslaved people as reparations for housing discrimination.
In New York, people once imprisoned for marijuana crimes were given preference for licenses to sell cannabis; Gov. Kathy Hochul also created a statewide task force last year to explore whether reparations can be made to address the legacy of racial injustice.
Some indigenous nations have been willing to drop land claims in exchange for licenses to operate casinos. But the Onondaga say they are not interested in cash. They are also not interested in getting licenses to sell cannabis or operate a casino – whatever they are considering socially irresponsible and a threat to their tribal sovereignty.
There is really only one thing that Mr. Hill believes would be an acceptable form of payment: land.
The Onondaga insist they don’t want to displace anyone. Instead, they hope the state can turn over some pristine land to the nation to hunt, fish, preserve or develop as it sees fit. A Such repatriation efforts are underway: the return of 1,000 acres as part of a federal settlement with Honeywell International for the pollution of Onondaga Lake.
The United States has not disputed the Onondaga’s account of how the country lost its land. The lawyers representing the United States in the Onondaga case have focused their argument on legal primacy, noting that courts at every level — including the U.S. Supreme Court — have rejected the Onondaga’s claims as too old and denying most remedies too disruptive for the region’s current residents. .
To the Onondaga, the logic required to substantiate these claims seems disingenuous. Why should the United States be allowed to steal its land and not be obligated to give anything back?
Joe Heath, an attorney representing the Onondaga, said the refusal to acknowledge the past prevents healing from the future.
“If we don’t admit that these things happened, how can we move forward together?” he said. But Mr Heath understood that such an admission would have serious legal and practical implications.
“The problem is that all the land in New York, in the United States, is stolen Indian land,” he said. “What does that mean in terms of American property law?”
‘All of our country and for a very little something’
There was a time when the United States worked with the Haudenosaunee, the confederacy that included the nations of Onondaga, Cayuga, Oneida, Tuscarora, Mohawk, and Seneca, as the fledgling government sought to defuse conflict in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War.
The federal government entered into three treaties that affirmed the Confederacy’s sovereignty and ownership over much of the northern part of New York State. Crucially, these treaties guaranteed that no one other than the federal government would have the authority to deal with the Haudenosaunee.
But as early as 1788, New York State had begun to chip away at the Haudenosaunee’s land and sovereignty. Over the next 34 years, the state would gain control of nearly all of the Onondaga land—as well as most of the land owned by the other Haudenosaunee nations—through a series of transactions that the Onondaga believed were illegal.
“The [New] The people of York have received almost all our country, and that for a very small thing,” Onondaga leaders told federal officials in 1794, according to the papers of American Indian Commissioner Thomas Pickering.
Over the next two centuries, the Onondaga continued to press their case fruitlessly in countless personal meetings with presidents, members of Congress, and governors of New York.
Legal options were limited: in New York, for example, it was not accepted until 1987 that indigenous peoples could sue in their own names.
When Indian lands reached the courtroom, many claims were dismissed.
The Onondaga’s decision to go to court had been decades in the making, with the first discussions beginning more than four decades ago. For the next twenty years, the Council debated in the long house – a long, low building made of whole logs that was used for ceremonial events and Haudenosaunee gatherings.
Mr. Hill is one of fourteen leaders on that council, each representing a different clan. In the Onondaga tradition, these leaders are male, but are appointed by the clan mothers.
Leaders did not initially embrace the idea of a lawsuit, seeing it as another venue for broken promises.
“Our elders were always afraid of going to court,” Mr. Hill said. Many were concerned that a loss in court could result in them losing what little land they had left.
“Finally we said, we have to do something,” Mr Hill said.
In 2005, the Onondaga filed a version of their current claim in the Federal District Court in the Northern District of New York, naming as defendants the State of New York, the Governor, Onondaga County, the City of Syracuse and a handful of the responsible companies mentioned. for environmental degradation in recent centuries. A similar case, filed by the Oneida Nation, was pending in the Supreme Court at the time.
But just 18 days after the Onondaga filed their petition, the Supreme Court dismissed the Oneidas’ case. The decision referenced a colonial-era legal theory known as the Doctrine of Discovery, which holds in part that native title claims were nullified by the “discovery” of that land by Christians.
The “prolonged passage of time” and “the associated dramatic changes in character” prevented the Oneida Nation from the “disruptive solution” they sought, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in the majority decision.
The ruling appeared to undermine the chances of any indigenous nation seeking compensation through the courts. History seemed set.
‘Disruptive to whom?’
Of the more than 1,600 words in the Supreme Court’s ruling, one stood out to Hill: “disruptive.”
“When I heard that, I said, ‘Well, okay, disruptive to who?’” he recalls. “It has already disrupted us, as indigenous people.”
Some may have left it at that: the recognition that Indigenous people could never be healed because of the profound injustices inflicted upon them.
Instead, Onondaga attorneys used the rejection as a starting point for a new argument. They argued that the American legal system’s refusal to rule in their favor proved that they could not find justice in the United States.
The petition filed with the international commission amounts to the most direct challenge to the United States’ treatment of indigenous peoples in terms of human rights to date – and the first to apply the lens of colonialism.
“What the Onondaga lawsuit does right now is force a political dialogue with the colonial occupier,” said Andrew Reid, an attorney representing the Onondaga, adding that a favorable outcome could lead to a political conversation about how the United States treats indigenous peoples. the world stage.
State Department representatives declined to be interviewed and did not respond to requests for comment. But in legal documents, the United States claimed that the Onondaga’s central claims had been dismissed in previous cases; that they have had “abundant opportunities” to have their cases heard; and that they are just unhappy with the outcome. It also claimed that the commission has no jurisdiction as most of the country’s losses occurred two centuries before its founding.
“The judicial process functioned as it should in this case,” the United States wrote in legal documents.
The committee’s decision could come at any time, but Sidney Hill is trying not to focus on that.
Most days he’s glad he tried.
“We’re not sure yet how it will go,” he says. “But at least it won’t stay there for the next generation.”