The Land You’re On: Acknowledging the Haudenosaunee

Signed one year after the end of the War of Independence, the 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix was one of the first treaties between the newly independent U.S. and a Native nation. It punished four of the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) Six Nations—the Senecas, Onondagas, Cayugas and Mohawks—for supporting the British during the American Revolution and required them to give up tribal territories in western New York and the Ohio Valley. And although the treaty recognized the land rights of the Oneidas and Tuscaroras, who had allied themselves with the Americans during the war, New York state soon pressured these two nations into ceding their treaty-guaranteed homelands.

Articles concluded at Fort Stanwix, or the twenty-second day of October, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-four, between Oliver Wolcott, Richard Butler, and Arthur Lee, Commissioners Plenipotentiary from the United States, in Congress assembled, on the one Part, and the Sachems and Warriors of the Six Nations, on the other.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued a decision rejecting the state’s attempt to dismiss the Nation’s lawsuit, filed in 2018, over ongoing violations of federal law related to the continued occupation of the New York State Thruway on the Nation’s Cattaraugus Territory. The court’s decision upholds an earlier United States District Court decision, which denied the State’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

There are many theories as to why there is a roughly hewn dugout canoe at the bottom of Cazenovia lake. A few popular ones claimed the canoe was made by the Natives who once lived on the lake shore.