Focus on the Onondaga: A chronology of dispossession

Beginning in 2014, University Chancellor Kent Syverud initiated several measures honoring the Haudenosaunee. One of the measures is the University’s policy of opening public events acknowledging our connection to and respect for the Onondaga and the Haudenosaunee people. Relations between the Euro-Americans and the Six Nations have been fraught with war, broken treaties, racism, and a long history of land grabs that can be documented in maps and historical records. This chronology explores and illustrates the history of that relationship with maps that tell the story in a way difficult to imagine from published histories. It is a story about Onondaga land.

In order to tell this story, I have drawn from scholarly books and articles, government documents and websites, news articles, conference proceedings, and the Onondaga Nation’s website. Visual sources and maps include the Library of Congress, the New York State Archives, and the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian. However, it is also intended to be accessible to a non-academic audience, rather than a purely scholarly one.

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