Onondaga, a reservation of 7,300 acres just south of Syracuse, New York, is both the geographic and the political center of the Iroquois Confederacy in New York State. The community is also the religious center of the Gaiwiio, the traditional religion of the Iroquois founded in 1799–1800 by Handsome Lake, the Seneca prophet, who is buried there.
Originally centered in and around Onondaga Lake, Onondaga before the American Revolution was 12 million acres, extending north to Lake Ontario and south to the Susquehanna River. Ten of the Onondaga villages were destroyed by an American army in 1779. The reservation was established in 1788 by the Onondaga–New York State Treaty of Fort Schuyler, an accord that set aside a tract of one hundred square miles. In a series of state treaties from 1793 to 1822, all negotiated in violation of federal law, Onondaga was reduced in size.
The Onondagas, "fire keepers" and "wampum keepers" of the Iroquois Confederacy, convene Grand Councils on the reservation. Their fourteen chiefs include the Tadodaho or spiritual leader who presides at the Grand Councils. During the second half of the twentieth century, the reservation became the center of Iroquois political activism. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, approximately 1,600 enrolled Onondagas lived in New York State.
Bibliography
Blau, Harold, Jack Campisi, and Elisabeth Tooker. "Onondaga." Handbook of North American Indians. Edited by William C. Sturtevant et al. Volume 15: Northeast, edited by Bruce G. Trigger. Washington. D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1978.
Hauptman, Laurence M. Conspiracy of Interests: Iroquois Dispossession and the Rise of New York State. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986.
———. The Iroquois Struggle for Survival. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986.
———. Formulating American Indian Policy in New York State, 1970–1986. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988.
———. The Iroquois and the New Deal. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1999.
Vecsey, Christopher, and William A. Starna, eds. Iroquois Land Claims. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1988.
