The Iroquois Are Not Giving Up

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/08/the-iroquois-are-not-giving-up/278787/



The history of Native Americans is still alive and ongoing, and the Iroquois Confederacy, or Haudenosaunee, wants you to remember that. On Friday, August 9 th, their chiefs met with the Dutch Consul General on the 57th Street Pier in Manhattan to honor the 400th Anniversary of their 1613 treaty with the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It was the culmination of a thirteen-day paddle down the Hudson River, with daily stops where tribe members and supporters held cultural events and lectures, and invited locals to listen to traditional music and dance. The goal: not just to raise consciousness over land rights--suits for which have been uniformly unsuccessful in recent years--but to build support for enforcing treaties between natives and settlers for the purposes of environmental conservation, as well.

"It brings to the public's attention that we have operated on a nation-to-nation level with our European brothers and sisters for four hundred years," said Tonya Gonella Frichner, founder of the American Indian Law Alliance. "It's about extending a hand of friendship to the Netherlands, to all of the member nations of the UN, and to our neighbors."

The Iroquois Confederacy comprises six nations: the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Tuscarora, and Seneca, whose historical territory is Upstate New York.

In 2005, the Onondaga filed a lawsuit against New York State, the city of Syracuse, Onondaga County, and five corporations, claiming that the state had illegally seized the tribe's land and that the corporations had been destroying the environment in the area. At the time, The New York Times reported that the tribe was using the land claim as leverage to force environmental cleanup--they had no intention of taking back the land by evicting people currently living on it. Rather, one of the key issues was that the company Honeywell International, among others, had for decades been dumping chemical waste into Onondaga Lake, a sacred site. The lake, an EPA superfund site, is now one of the most polluted in the country, and has a thick layer of mercury at its bottom.