William Greene stands on the shore of Onondaga Lake, gazing out at the calm waters. He notices the algae blanketing the surface, the old cement plant, and Destiny Mall crowding the lake's background.
"The lake is still holy and sacred," said Greene, a member of the Onondaga Nation. "Just because they put a bunch of junk in it doesn't stop the spirit of the lake."
His family and close friends call him Dehakhasyonñhe' (day-hawk-uh-SHOO-nay).
The United States is marking 250 years of its own history this year. Greene's family has stood on this same shoreline a lot longer than that, and he says the anniversary doesn't look the same from where he's standing.
"People go about their everyday life not recognizing the sacrifices that we made for them to be here," Greene said.
Roughly 230 years ago, the United States promised this land would remain the Haudenosaunee's forever. A ceremony a few miles from this shoreline this month suggests how rarely that promise has actually been honored since.
At SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, scientists gathered for the American Malacological Society's annual conference on mollusks, the family of shelled animals that includes clams, snails and the whelks found along the Atlantic coast. In front of them, the Onondaga Nation presented the university with something far older than the conference itself: a wampum belt, woven from beads drilled out of those same native shells.
For the Haudenosaunee, the belt's functions are multifaceted and highly significant. They use wampum as a legal record, woven in shell rather than written on paper.
"They chronicle and document and confirm all of the rights and laws and responsibilities, the tenets and the constitutional foundations of their confederacy in wampum," said Michael Galban, a Native material and culture expert at the Seneca Art and Culture Center, who spoke at the conference.
Neil Patterson, ESF's Executive Director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, accepted the belt on behalf of the university.
"Wampum was also created in a way to address the grief of loss," Patterson said. "And so it becomes very important in terms of the foundation of our Confederacy."
The belt won't go behind glass. Patterson said it will live in an ESF classroom, used to teach environmental science alongside Haudenosaunee ecological knowledge.
"It's not something that is in the past," Patterson said. "It's not a relic of some kind or a static procedure. It is a living tradition."
The belt presented at ESF was modeled after one of the oldest surviving examples of wampum diplomacy: the One Dish, One Spoon belt, sealing a roughly 1700 peace agreement between the Haudenosaunee and the Anishinaabe of Western Ontario.
"Nobody should starve or be without need, even though they were enemies," said Richard Hamell, the retired professor who wove the ESF belt and has reproduced more than 135 others in his retirement.
That framework, one dish shared by all, with one spoon so no one draws blood over it, became the template for the most consequential agreement the Haudenosaunee ever made with the young United States. In 1794, Haudenosaunee leaders met U.S. representatives at Canandaigua and signed a treaty guaranteeing their sovereignty and their land, nation to nation.
The United States broke it within a year.
In 1795, New York state negotiators went after the Cayuga Nation already impoverished by the Revolutionary War. State officials found loopholes in the Canandaigua treaty, the same one guaranteeing the Cayuga's land a year earlier, and maneuvered them into signing away nearly all of their remaining reservation. Within 13 years, the Cayuga had lost the entirety of their land in New York.
Greene says that pain comes from intergenerational trauma, and it resurfaces every time he hears people talk about America 250.
"Things are triggered in me from the celebrations, because we're still here and they act as if we're not still here," Greene said. "We're not just some people in a book that people read about. We're actually in the community all over the place."
Hamell, presenting the ESF belt to a room of conservation scientists, left them with this:
"When the last tree is cut down, and the last fish is caught, and the last stream is polluted," Hamell said, "you can't eat money."
Two hundred fifty years into the country's history, the belt now sitting in an ESF classroom is already four thousand years into its own.
