Onondaga Land Rights & Our Common Future II

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EDITED by Ramsden COPY

Onondaga Land Rights & Our Common Future II

October 25, 2010

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PROFESSIONAL REPORTING SERVICES, INC.

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This is being provided in a rough-draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.

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Caroline Tauxe:

I'd like to thank you all for coming and give you a very warm welcome.

I'm Caroline Tauxe, I teach at LeMoyne College, and I'm also the director of the Center for Urban and Regional Applied Research, and I'm very grateful for the honor of getting to introduce this evening's activities here.

Many of you are probably regulars at this series, but I'll say it anyhow, this series is organized by a major community and University partnership that's been coordinated by the Neighbors of the Onondaga Nation, NOON. It involves 12 different universities and colleges and several different community organizations. It began on February 8th, and it's going to be continuing through early December of this year.

At the opening event, the Tadadaho, Sid Hill, gave a full Thanksgiving Address and the series will also close with the traditional Thanksgiving address.

In order to maximize our time for the content of these very important presentations we will not be doing the Thanksgiving Address at each event. What we'll be doing this evening is that our speakers will be presenting what they have to say. This will not be followed by a question and answer session, but there will be facilitated discussions upstairs afterward for those of you who would like to continue the conversation in that way. There will also be a reception in the lobby following the presentation today.

And please check out the NOON table out there. It has a lot of interesting materials and information, books, DVDs, and fliers about the next events that are coming. There are posters that you can check out there. Please help spread the word about this important series.

As most of you know, a federal judge dismissed the Onondaga land rights action about two and a half weeks ago. An action which makes this series even more important as a real public forum in which to think about what….. the way forward.

So please mark your calendars for the next event which will be Monday, November 8th, right here in this very same place. That next event is entitled “Finding Common Ground: Indigenous and Western Approaches to Healing our Land and Waters”. The speakers will be Robin Kimmerer, who's a Potawatomi, and Rick Hill, who's Tuscarora. They will be discussing the challenges and the opportunities of weaving together these two very different approaches to understanding and working with the natural world.

I want to thank all of the organizations and individuals who have helped to make this massive undertaking successful. You can see on your program the complete list of sponsors, as well as the web addresses for NOON and for the Onondaga Nation.

I'd like to introduce our speakers briefly, you can look at their bios on the program, so I don't feel I need to go into a lot of detail here. We are honored to have the Tadadaho, Sid Hill, with us. He will be speaking first. He will be followed by some words from Joe Heath, who's the General Counsel to the Onondaga Nation for over 25 years.

I certainly hope I join you in feeling a lot of anticipation to hear what they have to tell us today. So I'm going to turn the podium over to them now.

Thank you again for coming this evening.

[Applause]

Sid Hill

[Onondaga language]

It's become my responsibility to pick up a few words for the people, our community. Of course when we started out with the series, it's been a lot of work from a lot of people, a lot of support, a lot of different input into where we've come today. Maybe it's best that I start with a little excerpt from a speech from George Washington on December 29th, 1790. It's a speech to the Senecas in that time, talking about the treaties.

“Here then is the security of the remainder of your lands. No state, no person can purchase your lands unless there is some public treaty being held under the authority of the United States. The federal government will never consent to your being defrauded, but it will protect you and all your just rights.”

And they had a discussion about some of the other things and it ends in “If, however, you should have any just cause of complaint, the federal cost courts will be open to you for redress as to all other persons.”

This is the stuff that we hear from our leaders as you're going out in the community and I'm hearing of land rights and being defrauded by the state and losing our lands and all the hunting and fishing rights, the conditions with all the pollution. So to come to -- to go back into history and to come to this point here and have this kind of the land rights dismissal is quite a setback.

There's a lot of disappointment and a lot of frustration with our people and, you know, over the years just from statements like they always thought that there was a way for us to seek justice in the system. We've always tried to stay outside of that to keep our ways, our language, our culture, our ceremonies, all these things we try to stay separate. Going back to what we call the Two Row Wampum, not pass laws against each other and to share what we have, traveling the road of life in peace and friendship forever. I believe my leaders feel that this is the right thing to do, to share, to welcome, for people to get along, that was the foundation for all of our doings with our brothers.

So and like I said, we wondered whether we should go into the courts, whether we would ever get any kind of justice in that system. We feel that if we let -- a lot of things be kind of a racist attitude that we're up against, and I know we're not the first people to experience this.

So when we work with our lawyers and Joe for many years and all the other lawyers that are trying to tell us, to direct us which way we should go, this is -- I always thought this was a fair process that we were trying to do, we would try not to be disruptive and share the land, be concerned about the environment. Our lawyers directed us, they say this is what we think will happen. So in that process it's been quite a learning process also.

It's even been hard for our lawyers to kind of guess what the courts are going to do because, as Joe keeps telling us, the more he reads and the more he learns about Indian law, how they deal with us, they're just kind of making it up along the way. So it's already hard for them to guess how the courts are going to act.

I think a lot of it is public opinion, what's political, plus not all of our people understand that, but we just thought this was the time that we would have that day in court.

When we first -- years before we actually went into court, there was this word “laches” and the Oneidas in the '70s were allowed to go into the courts, and through the years we were assured that and through their process we were sure that laches would not be an issue. And we said well, maybe we should put laches in there and address it in our land rights action. And the lawyer says, well, no, it's already been proven that it wouldn't be an issue.

So we did it, we filed it, we took their advice and so it wasn't a few weeks -- a few days later after we had filed that the Sherrill decision came down, and I think laches was a big part of that. So again our lawyers assured us that this is the way it should go, this is the history of it, and yet it was a complete opposite, with all their experience and knowledge with the court system, they were unable to predict some of the obvious.

But it was also a few years back that our people knew and prepared, were skeptical about going into the courts, thought well, maybe if we don't get any justice in there then maybe we can go to the international arena, to the World Court.

And so back 30, 40 years ago, our leaders decided with a lot of the other leaders across the Nation, decided to address Geneva, Switzerland, and go there and speak for the people, trying to introduce ourselves to the world and our concerns for the environment. And so when we did have a chance to speak, we didn't speak for ourselves, but were speaking for the eagle. So that's where we started from, the environment - the animals, the birds, the fishes. They have suffered along with us, along with everybody of what -- of the condition of our environment nowadays.

So we went to the UN and thought that this was a way to get any justice in the courts. And we knew that we had to exhaust those in order to go to the UN, go to the World Court. And so we did this. Our former leaders went there.

It's kind of hard to -- I'm just remembering how much work those people had to do to get to where we are today.

So when we went to the UN in that arena we found out that indigenous people were not recognized as peoples. So for the last 100 years we've been trying to get that right for indigenous people around the world. And you have to know the politics, again, and how all that stuff works, how you get to be heard. We did get that message out to the world; it's been very helpful to us. We got a lot of support from people that think we have a right to be heard.

So I just kind of -- just a little background of our journey through the court system and a lot of frustration and disappointments – remember. So, we thought this was a time for sure, positive we went where our leaders went through the school system, were knowledgeable of all the laws, and we had the lawyers and we had our treaties, the Supreme Law of the Land, we had this all, it should be the right time.

And then to come up with a dismissal of it….

But it hasn't been all bad, despite our journey through all these years of finally doing this. And we did file, and what we wanted to do was convey our concern for the healing amongst our people, our own people, other people, our brothers and the world. And in that process a lot of the people I see out here now are the support that we've learned to interact with on different issues and where they came and supported us and wondered how can we help; what can we do.

I guess the biggest problem is just educating people, educating people, get that interest to the young people, the ones who are learning, the ones that are going to be stuck with all the problems that we're going to leave them, try to make them conscious of what's going on and how are they going to -- how can they clean the waters, the air, the lands. We're putting it in their hands. But we have to direct them, we have to let them know the history, give them some direction for solutions.

So educating the people is one of the major reasons for this event tonight - is to educate more people as much as we can and keep it positive. Many good people, very hard-working people are fighting to protect the Earth, protect the people's rights, doing the right thing the best you can.

We all do it, we all have this little part, but when we all are working together it becomes a force, and it has to be heard because we're not going to stop. So I'll just kind of end there for now and let Joe speak. He knows all the history and stuff that we've done through the courts, but we always were kind of skeptical about getting justice in the court, but we never thought we wouldn't have the our day in court.

Thank you.

[Applause]

Joe Heath

Well, as I thought about trying to talk this evening over the last few weeks, I thought it would be good to start out by comparing injustice on one hand, because that's what we all know the dismissal of the Onondaga land rights action is - one of the worst injustices that the United States court system has thrown at us - so we have injustice on one hand and healing on the other hand.

And I think as I thought about that more and more that the cultural difference between those two results is very educational, and in thinking about injustice I just happened to -- every once in a while I get to read novels, I can't remember the last time I read this particular novelist, but I am reading the new novel by Jonathan Frisane called Freedom, and there's a quote about injustice in it. It's written in kind of an autobiographical way by a young woman who suffered a date rape in high school. So in that context she wrote, “Injustice has a shape and weight and a temperature and a texture and a very bad taste.”

That's what I have, is a very bad taste for this injustice. But what can we learn about this? There's no way to deny that this was a very painful event, I will never forget having to call up Tadadaho with this news. And it brought tears. We wouldn't be human if it didn't.

But as those tears dried, I was reminded that we need to become stronger from these kinds of setbacks and that very little has changed on the ground here, the work of the Nation with your support continues and will continue. And very little has changed historically.

New York has built its history on injustice to the Haudenosaunee, and the United States has once again failed to live up to its treaty obligations. So we will continue to implement the Onondaga Nation's vision and its call for healing and stewardship.

There is no choice. And the work and the healing will go on.

Because five and a half years ago, when we filed this lawsuit, the Council and Clan Mothers and Faithkeepers instructed to us keep this first paragraph. I changed a few words toward the end because I'm going to continue to read it as our work continues, we all know what it says, but I think we need to hear it again.

“The Onondaga people wish to bring about a healing between themselves and all others who live in this region that has been the homeland of the Onondaga Nation since the dawn of time. The Nation and its people have a unique spiritual, cultural, historic relationship with the land which is embodied in the Great Law of Peace. This relationship goes far beyond federal and state legal rights, legal concepts of ownership or possession. The people are one with the land and consider themselves stewards of it. It is a duty of the Nation's leaders to work for a healing of this land and to protect it and to pass it on for future generations. The Onondaga Nation continues this land rights movement on behalf of its people in the hope that it may hasten the process of reconciliation and bring lasting justice and peace among all who inhabit this area.”