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).
Greene's family has stood on this same shoreline a lot longer than that, and he says the 250th U.S. celebrations do not 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.
In 1794, while George Washington was President of the newly formed United States, Grand Council of the Six Nations belonging to the Haudenosaunee Confederacy signed the Treaty of Canandaigua, offering Washington's representative, Indian Commissioner Timothy Pickering, a sacred wampum as a symbol of the monumental peace agreement.
The treaty returned thousands of acres of stolen land to the Haudenosaunee's and promised to permanently recognize some million acres of their existing land as sovereign.
By the very next year, poverty prevailed, struggling factions of the confederacy were vulnerable to loopholes found in the treaty language that were later exploited leading to massive land grabs. New York state negotiators convinced members of the Cayuga Nation to sign 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."
A ceremony recently in June, took place a few miles from Onondaga Lake's shoreline and suggested how rarely the Haudenosaunee Confederacy enters into agreements since America's birth.
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 the venerated 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.
It formed a passage for tribal members to move between their nations when necessary for food and medicinal needs, so that, "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.
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.
