CANANDAIGUA, NY – November 11, 2024 – In the northwestern reaches of present-day New York State, winter comes hard and early, scrubbing the long green ridges between the finger lakes with wind, rain, and snow, and today is no exception.
But today, such weather will not stop the six Haudenosaunee peoples – known for centuries by the collective name the French missionaries gave them, the “Iroquois” – from gathering as they do each year to march and commemorate what happened in this town in 1794. Because today is the 230th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Canandaigua.
Here are photos of the Haudenosaunee – four generations’ worth – marching toward the Ontario County Courthouse, the same place their ancestors gathered with a delegation sent by President George Washington to establish permanent diplomatic relations between the two nations.
As with dozens of treaties the United States government would execute in the decades to follow with the original inhabitants of its territory, the Treaty of Canandaigua of 1794 recognized the Haudenosaunee as a sovereign nation. Wholesale, unilateral, and often shameless violations of the land ownership provisions of nearly all those treaties would follow, and much of the territory marked out for the Haudenosaunee in this one would suffer the same fate. But after two centuries of Supreme Court battles about the language and meaning of various other rights guaranteed by those treaties, this foundational provision still holds: the Haudenosaunee remain a sovereign people.
The boisterous, colorful parade – which feels very much like the family reunion it is – turns down Canandaigua’s North Main Street, slick with new rain and a mat of red and golden leaves, to the courthouse. Several Elders lead the parade, draped in large wampum belts, mosaics of white and purple shell beads recounting the historic event. Close behind and all through the parade, come the flags: a field of purple with five white figures for the five original tribes – the wampum again – signifying the Great Law of Peace agreement that formed the Haudenosaunee confederacy 834 years ago.
One block down North Main, a large white tent has been set up on the courthouse lawn, over a massive gray boulder that serves as a kind of ancient altar for the commemoration. Next to the boulder is an easel holding a framed original of the Treaty, its ink a shadowy dancing scrawl across yellowed paper, the columns of ghostly signatures beneath faint as smoke.
The tent is crowded with maybe 200 people and dark but for what little daylight spills in from one side. The elders carefully place the wampum belts across the rain-washed surface of the same rock that was surely sitting there bearing witness 230 years ago. People find their places, and settle into stillness, a reverent hush.
Outside, the rain and wind and Monday afternoon traffic come and go out on the street.
The ceremony begins as the Haudenosaunee begin most gatherings: with a recitation in their language of their ancient “Thanksgiving Address.” It is a long, rhythmic incantation of gratitude – for the people, earth, animals, elements, teachers, the whole universe – each section circling back always to what translates as “and now our minds are one.”
The commemoration is led by Jamie Jacobs of the Tonawanda Seneca, the westernmost tribe of the Haudenosaunee.
“Our ancestors did the best that they could for our future,” he says, his words slow and measured.
He reminds us that the Haudenosaunee “clan mothers…refused to be shipped west” long before the Treaty, in the midst of the 18th century’s nearly continuous wars between different tribes of white people for control of their land.
They held on through all that war, Jacobs says, and through the wave of land thefts that followed. “The Fort Stanwix Treaty [of 1768 and 1784] was forced on us,” he says, then looks at the treaty there on the easel.
This was a gegendacku, a new agreement, one which those clan mothers and their daughters and granddaughters held out to make. The war between the whites was over; the settlers had beaten the occupiers, and the Haudenosaunee had less obvious political leverage than ever. Yet, they had agency enough – perhaps borne of sheer will, the stubborn fact of survival? – to stand shoulder to shoulder with the new regime and make this Treaty, one that still stands.
Jacobs explains that the other provisions of the treaty around land ownership are also still in force, notwithstanding the violations to come with more white settlement in the 1800s. “This treaty gave us free use and enjoyment of our land,” he says. “We never gave up any of our land.”
He does not go on to the say the obvious, to remind everyone of the hard truth about that aging piece of paper next to him: much of the Treaty of Canandaigua was a formalization of massive amounts of land stolen over the prior centuries.
The original homeland of the Haudenosaunee ran from the great waterway in the east (the Cahohatatea, or Hudson River) to the “thundering waters” in the west (the Onguiaahr, or Niagara River) that connect present-day Lake Erie to Lake Ontario – essentially, the entire central land mass stretching across what is now New York State.
By 1794, the French and British had fought three wars in their midst, then the British and American Colonists, and this vast, naturally rich homeland had been almost completely overrun by squatters turned settlers. By then, the Haudenosaunee – a confederacy of five nations since the forging of that Great Law of Peace six centuries earlier – had welcomed the Tuscarora, refugees from a war of extermination down in present-day North Carolina and the “Stockbridge Indians,” driven from present-day Massachusetts. Those earlier treaties forced on the Haudenosaunee at Fort Stanwix were mere declarations – “here’s what you get for your land” for some bare necessities and a few trinkets – cram-down, map-making exercises for what had already been seized by 1768 and 1784. Nearly the entire eastern third had been taken by then, forcing most of the Mohawk north to present-day Quebec.
The Treaty of 1794 here at Canandaigua did attempt to compensate the Haudenosaunee for all of those prior losses, and the additional ones ceded with this gegendacku: a one-time payment of $10,000 and a guaranteed annual payment of $4,500 in perpetuity.
The total land mass swept up under the final tallying of this Treaty would amount to 40,000 or so of the roughly 55,000 square miles that now make up New York State, and includes the metropolitan areas of Albany, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo and still some of the richest farmland in the world. The final tally in today’s dollars? A one-time payment of $286,967, and $129,135 in annual rent, which amounts to $7.17 per square mile, and annual rent of $3.23 per square mile.
The Treaty also acknowledged reservations established between the Haudenosaunee and the State of New York for the Oneida, Onondaga and Cayuga to the east, and delineated a large reservation for the Seneca to the west.
A significant portion of those reservation lands would be surrendered in subsequent treaties forced on the Haudenosaunee, as was the case with dozens of treaties the US government would execute with the original inhabitants of its territory. And yet, the nationhood provision in the Treaty of 1794 still stands.
“The Chosen Town”
Ganondegwa – the “Chosen Town” – was the Haudenosaunee’s name for this place when the Americans chose it to negotiate and sign the treaty. It was chosen by Colonel Timothy Pickering, Washington’s emissary.
The remaining Haudenosaunee land carved up by the Treaty was out near present-day Buffalo, and meeting there would have made more sense. The negotiators could have surveyed it themselves, and far more people directly affected by its terms could be present at the signing. But Col. Pickering and his entourage were afraid to head that far west: the British still ruled just across Onguiaahr in present-day Canada and were still smarting from their military defeat and retreat; it was from there that they would launch a war against the United States in 1812.
There was no militarized national boundary here at Ganondegwa, at the wide-open, northern end of a long lake framed by two long forested ridges. From the air, as we imagine a bird of prey might see it, this spot where the lake ends would be one of the marks made by a fingertip of the Creator, reaching down to sculpt the earth with lakes running north and south.
The natural richness and beauty of this place has become its economy. Ganondegwa is now Canandaigua, New York, a historic lakefront resort town surrounded by rolling dairy farms and vineyards. It’s far from the population centers east and south, with more woods than houses, and a pristine, 16-mile long lake. With hiking trails, new and historic hotels, a great little ski area at the south end of the lake, and New York State’s wine country in every direction, it is travel-magazine beautiful.
It is also a working town, county seat to the surrounding farms, as we are reminded when a train horn blasts through the commemoration ceremony.
Jamie Jacobs does his best to talk over it, as the train rumbles across North Main a hundred feet away.
“We have to remind our brothers that this is an equal agreement,” he says again, scanning the crowd in the tent for any local officials who might have joined the ceremony this year.
We had heard earlier that the Haudenosaunee always invite federal, state and local officials to attend; one year, the Mayor of Canandaigua did show up. But no one from the federal government.
We had also heard that a fourth-generation descent of Col. Pickering had shown up one year. The Haudenosaunee we spoke with said he had happened across the event by chance and was touched to be there; and the word was they were as touched by his presence and graciousness.
Maybe this is him?
This conversation looked like too much fun to interrupt, and we lost track of him in the crowd after the ceremony. But he was definitely representing.
Also present, and included in the commemoration was a representative from the local Quaker congregation, the 1816 Farmington Meeting House, whose original members had served as third-party observers at the Treaty. He told us that William Savory of Philadelphia had led their delegation and proofread all executed copies. Subsequent members of his congregation would step in to help the Haudenosaunee enforce their rights when confronted with wholesale violations of the Treaty in the 1830s and 1840s.
Jacobs finishes with “This treaty gave us free use and enjoyment of our land,” he says, reminding everyone of the other provisions of the Treaty that still stand.
Spencer Lyons of the Onondaga, the tribe located at the former center of the confederacy in present-day Syracuse, would follow Jacobs and say more on that: the Haudenosaunee still have a “first claim” on all public lands set aside by the State of New York. (He did not elaborate, but surely knows that if the Haudenosaunee wanted to force a dispute on first uses of that land – on all New York State forests, management areas, recreation areas, and state parks – the way the salmon tribes out west did in the 1970s, they could press the claim. The landmark Boldt Decision in federal court in 1974 upheld treaty provisions that allowed original inhabitants to hunt and fish in their reasonable and customary places.)
Rather than elaborate on what those “first claims” on state lands might mean, Lyons said only that it comes down to something simple: recognition. “We want to be recognized…each of us across the six nations.”
Lyons instead chose to focus on their own recent good news in the burgeoning Land Back Movement: the Onondaga had recently re-acquired from Honeywell International 1,000 acres of their own land a month earlier, once exquisitely beautiful land with special cultural and spiritual significance that had been compromised by industrial pollution, land they would be restoring to its native state.
Lyons remarks about the 1,000 ancestral acres the Onondaga will rehabilitate reminded us that this was not an historic exercise, but an assertion of legal rights and obligations going forward.
As the ceremony neared its end, Jamie Jacobs asks one more time: are there any dignitaries or local officials in attendance who would like to acknowledge the Treaty and say a few words?
Again, no one. But it does not matter: the Canandaigua Treaty of 1794 still stands.
Jacobs went on to say that the many white people in attendance – and that appeared to describe maybe one-third of the crowd, though it is impossible to tell by appearance – are not just symbolic but literal representatives of the US upholding its end of the agreement. Speaking for only one white person in attendance, I cannot think of a better way to honor my country on this day than to be here representing our obligations under this Treaty.
Here is a photo of the Treaty. The little paper tags on the glass are the ancestors of people sitting in this tent with us.
Yes, the gegendacku – the Treaty of Canandaigua of 1794 – is still in force, which makes this cold and rainy day at the tip of a finger lake such a good one. A good day for the Haudenosaunee to remind the world that they are still a sovereign nation. That for all the colonial warfare that scorched and scarred their homeland, and all the stolen land and forced relocations and cultural genocide their ancestors endured, they managed to retain enough power and unity to come together as a confederacy of six nations and force the new American government to recognize their original rights to these lands and their permanent sovereignty as a people.
While there were representatives from the various tribes in the confederacy, the ceremony ended with personal remarks by a representative from the Tonawanda Seneca, the tribe pushed to the furthest reaches of the land covered by the Treaty. Those remarks took the form of his 11-year old daughter, who came to the front of the tent with him.
“Here is my daughter,” he says. “She is proof. We’re still here.”
Screenshot
Add comment