In search of justice for our waters

It was with deep sadness that the Onondaga Nation learned in February that Honeywell International is responsible for yet another Superfund site. Honeywell is now responsible for 140 Superfund sites, including our sacred Onondaga Lake, and has an entire corporate division that works solely on minimizing their liability for each site. Our experience at Onondaga Lake should serve as a warning – at every decision point, the New York state Department of Environmental Conservation has ignored our calls for a full cleanup of Onondaga Lake in order to settle for a sub-standard remedy. Their acquiescence to Honeywell bodes poorly for the future of Honeywell’s newest Superfund site, Hoosick Falls.

Onondaga Lake was a sustaining life force for our people. It plays a central role in our national, cultural and spiritual life, the site where, a millennium ago, the Peacemaker brought together warring nations beneath the Tree of Peace on its shoreline to create a confederacy we call the Haudenosaunee, and history books call the Iroquois. The Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca Nations, later joined by the Tuscarora, formed a confederacy that has lasted more than a thousand years, and was studied by Benjamin Franklin as a model for creating the federal system adopted by the United States.

Onondaga Lake remains a Superfund site and one of the most polluted lakes in the world, even after years of remediation. The state Department of Environmental Conservation reports that the lake – assaulted by more than a century of chemical dumping and extractive solution mining – still has more than 9.5 million cubic yards of polluted sediments at the bottom. Mudboils caused by solution mining in the Tully Valley still dump 20 tons of sediment a day into Onondaga Creek, which feeds into the lake.

The Environmental Protection Agency warns that Onondaga Lake is still unsafe for swimming and the state Department of Health warns that its fish are still unsafe for eating.

Even Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Onondaga County Executive Joanie Mahoney have fallen for Honeywell’s spin. Last year they built a new amphitheater on Onondaga Lake’s western shoreline on a toxic waste bed that qualifies as a Superfund site, with minimal restrictions in place to ensure that concertgoers do not expose themselves to danger while attending events there. The partial cleanup efforts appear more committed to public relations victories than a true reclamation of the lake.

In 2005, the Onondaga Nation sought to reassert our right to make decisions about the environmental concerns throughout our traditional territory by filing our Land Rights Action in U.S. Federal court. This was the same year the Record of Decision for the Onondaga Lake Superfund site was agreed upon by the Department of Environmental Conservation without meaningful consultation with the Onondaga Nation. Our Land Rights Action simply sought recognition that our lands had been taken from us illegally by New York state, as only the U.S. government may make treaties with Native Nations, as established by the 1790 Trade and Intercourse Act. We have a right and responsibility to be stewards of this land.

The Land Rights Action never got its day in court. Based on decisions in the Cayuga and Sherrill cases that invented law that only applies to indigenous peoples, our case was dismissed before it could ever be heard on its merits.

President George Washington and the United States acknowledged our sovereignty in the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua, which is still valid to this day. In February we celebrated the 220th anniversary of the ratification of this treaty with White House and State Department staff in Washington, D.C., and received our annual treaty payment of muslin cloth.

As a sovereign nation, the Onondaga Nation has charged the United States with human rights violations in an appeal to the Organization of American States Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, where the petition has been accepted for review.

Haudenosaunee leaders met in May with United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in New York, and made a presentation to the annual meeting of the UN’s Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues as part of our ongoing search for justice, and in solidarity indigenous peoples all over the globe struggling to protect and restore their native lands.

Our statement read, in part: “The continuing effects of the Doctrine of Discovery have many Indigenous Nations facing the same issues in the protection of their lands, waters and resources. Our Indigenous sisters and brothers, while in peaceful protest, are being detained, criminalized, persecuted and killed daily, to protect their homelands from extractive industries and member states in their never-ending quest for the consumption of natural resources. We are left with the devastation of pipelines, toxic waste disposal, mining, dams, as well as hydraulic fracturing and tar sands in our territories.”

We were honored to meet with the secretary general, and presented him with an engraved plaque featuring the Tree of Peace and the flag of the Confederacy, and Faithkeeper Oren Lyons personally presented the secretary general with a print of his Tree of Peace painting.

We discussed water issues and climate change, particularly raising concerns about the removal of protections for the rights of indigenous peoples from the text of the Paris climate change agreement. Corporations and governments continue to take indigenous peoples’ lands. This is a fight for our very survival, and the survival of Mother Earth. It is a planetary struggle we are engaged in as a sovereign nation before the United Nations and the Organization of American States, and in our homeland with county, state and federal authorities that ignore our treaty rights with impunity.

We know each one of the six Nations of the Haudenosaunee is affected by serious water pollution issues upstream of their territories. For many indigenous peoples, there is no water treatment plant. We drink the water as it is, from our rivers and lakes. So do many others. All of our waterways are in desperate need of healing.

When it comes to Onondaga Lake, a slightly less polluted lake is not a clean one. The state DEC should hold Honeywell accountable, not help it gloss over how much toxic waste remains submerged in the lake bottom. Honeywell can afford a full cleanup – they made over $4.7 billion in profit last year alone. Onondaga County should not be building on top of toxic waste beds on the lake’s shoreline. Finally, the federal government should respect its obligations and commitments under its treaties – supposedly the supreme law of the land – instead of dismissing those obligations as too old and disruptive.

Our obligation to Mother Earth extends to preserving the purity of its waters – including Onondaga Lake – to the seventh generation to come.

Sidney Hill is the Tadodaho, or chief, of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy.