Reflections on Erie’s Waters Symposium

The Onondaga Historical Association is proud to participate in a special symposium presented as part of the Erie Canal Museum’s Sloan Lecture Series and in commemoration of the Erie Canal’s bicentennial. Held at the Skä•noñh Great Law of Peace Center, this event brings together scholars, authors, and Indigenous leaders to examine the enduring impact of the Erie Canal on the Haudenosaunee and their ancestral lands.

Through three thought-provoking talks, the symposium will explore the environmental, cultural, and political consequences of the canal’s construction—highlighting stories of dispossession, resilience, and historical erasure that are too often left untold.

Symposium Schedule:

• Sunday, October 5@ 11:00 AM – “Sacred Waters: The Trauma of the Erie Canal”

Jake Haiwhagai’i Edwards and Dr. Philip P. Arnold discuss the impact of the Erie Canal on the Haudenosaunee. For millennia, waterways in Haudenosaunee territories have been profoundly important. In the Haudenosaunee cosmology, water is sacred as fundamental to all life. Therefore, while waterways were used for transportation, as food resources, and as locations for settlement, it was widely agreed among Indigenous peoples that they also be protected. The Erie Canal disrupted the natural flow of water, essentially damming watersheds so as to flow in an east-west direction. As Laurence Hauptman has discussed in Conspiracy of Interests: Iroquois Dispossession and the Rise of New York State, the creation of the Erie Canal corresponded with the dispossession of the Haudenosaunee. Transformation of the landscape throughout the 19th century had profound environmental effects and traumatic consequences on Haudenosaunee relationships to their lands.

• Sunday, October 5@ 1:00 PM – “Clearing Iroquoia: New York’s Land Grab in the 1779 Campaigns of the American Revolution.”

Join authors Travis M. Bowman—the head of museum collections for the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation’s Bureau of Historic Sites–and Matthew A. Zembo—associate professor of history and military history at Hudson Valley Community College and instructor of American history at Bard Early College—for a talk about their new book, Clearing Iroquoia: New York’s Land Grab in the 1779 Campaigns of the American Revolution.

In 1778, George Washington, Philip Schuyler, army officers, and New York officials began planning invasions against Iroquoia, the homeland of the Haudenosaunee and several other allied Indigenous nations. Bowman and Zembo’s Clearing Iroquoia offers a fresh perspective on the Clinton-Sullivan campaign and hard truths about of the dispossession of the Haudenosaunee homeland and American colonialism.

• Sunday, October 5@ 3:00 PM – “The Oneidas, the Best Land, and the Erie Canal”

“Our children’s hearts are sick,” mourned Skenandoah when he learned that New York State in 1815 had purchased almost 1200 acres of Oneida land. This tract  was the last piece of Oneida land the state needed to acquire before it built the Erie Canal through the center of the state. I grew up on this tract on our family farm, which my grandfather once referred to as the best land in Madison County. When I was in high school in the 1970s, the Oneidas asserted that New York State had purchased their land in violation of federal law and the courts agreed. Through the years of litigation, confusion, prejudice, and revival that followed, I carried questions about what had happened on the best land and why didn’t I know anything about it. The answers include the Erie Canal and the silencing and erasing of Native voices and presence that accompanied the transformation it wrought on the ancestral land of the Oneidas in central New York.

Susan A. Brewer is the author of The Best Land: Four Hundred Years of Love and Betrayal on Oneida Territory and other books. After 25 years as a professor of American history at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, she retired from teaching and is now an independent scholar who makes her home in the Adirondacks.

The symposium is free to attend but registration is encouraged.

Register Here