- [Jake] Well, the impact of the Erie Canal started long before the Erie Canal.

You look at the history of the colonizers, the way they write their history is, it was one of the best moves to help build America and that the American people had ever done.

Well, you look at the Native American side of it, and it's the most devastating and betrayal acts that the government of the colonizers has done to us to obtain our land.

And we still feel the effects today.

They considered the Haudenosaunee, New York State's Indian problem, and we view it the opposite.

(steady guitar music) Haiwhagai'i.

(Jake speaking in indigenous language) Jake Edwards is my English known name.

I'm from the Onondaga Nation Eel Clan.

Our home is what's now called New York State.

This is our house, the trees, the forest, and all our walls to our house.

The skies are our ceiling and Mother Earth is our floor, and we consider it that way, to this day.

It's been recorded and and studied to be around 1142, the forming of the confederacy of, what we are called by the French, the Iroquois, and we're called by the Americans, the Six Nations, and what we're also known by our own name as the Haudenosaunee.

And all of our communities are still intact.

And Onondaga nation still functions as a government and as the fire keepers of the confederacy, as the fire keepers of the Haudenosaunee, as the capital.

And we still function under the leadership of our traditional chiefs and clan mothers.

And so we're still in existence, and we're not going anywheres.

The Erie Canal were actually our original waterways as far as they were prior to the canal.

- All of the nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, from Albany, which is Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and then later Tuscarora, all are involved in the territory of the canal.

The canal was all about westward migration, and the dispossession of Haudenosaunee people, and then native people out west as well.

We are on the unseated land of the Onondaga nation.

In fact, all of Syracuse, all around the lake is on unseated Onondaga nation land.

- Indigenous people, all over the world, understand their proper relationship with the natural world, and especially water, because it is the river of life where bodies are comprised of water.

We have this special relationship that is regenerative.

We couldn't live, we couldn't produce without our association and relationship with water.

I would like to go back as far as the very first treaty that was made with colonizers, who were the Dutch.

And this was in 1613.

It's known as the two row Wampum.

The Haudenosaunee were following the principles of peace and establishing this agreement whereby the earth is viewed as a river of life, and the Haudenosaunee would be sailing down the river in their canoe, in a parallel route to the Dutch who would be sailing in their ship.

And they both would be living in respect with one another, down the river of life.

What the Dutch failed to understand and future colonists that came to this land was that the river of life entails that you live in proper relationship with the Earth.

What came through after the Revolutionary War, several decades later, was that they had in mind to build the Erie Canal, which was an artificial river, and devastated all of Haudenosaunee land.

So we have moved on as a country of ill made relationships, right from the get go.

- [Philip] These two worldviews come into stark contrast in the canal.

(steady violin music) The Sullivan Clinton campaign, that historical moment first began with an attack at Onondaga early in the spring of 1779.

The larger context is that George Washington saw that this was an opportunity, right during the Revolutionary War, to redirect his resources to the extermination of the Haudenosaunee.

The Haudenosaunee Grand Council here at Onondaga signed a treaty, 1775, that they were going to be neutral.

George Washington used the occasion of the Cherry Valley massacre to justify the attack throughout Haudenosaunee territory.

And what this was, was a scorched earth campaign.

All these corn fields were burned, all kinds of fruit trees and other things were being destroyed as a consequence of this.

The Onondagas had to escape.

Many of them went towards, you know, Niagara Falls, Fort Niagara, many of the Seneca, the Cayuga, and it was a very bad winner, so many of them died, but some of them stayed.

- [Sandy] Washington paid his troops with Haudenosaunee land because he had no money or other means to pay them.

So it established a military presence throughout the state.

- [Philip] So these are called the military tracks that come as a result of the Sullivan Clinton campaign.

And that opens up, particularly in the western part from Fort Stanwick's west.

Patriots, Americans wanted to go west, and this becomes the mythology, the myth history of manifest destiny for westward migration.

And so the Erie Canal makes that possible.

The Revolutionary War makes that possible.

And George Washington's scorched Earth campaign makes that possible.

- And in the meantime, we survived their strategy of eliminating us didn't work.

Some of us moved, and some of us hid.

We hid in different rooms of our house in the woods, and we returned back home to find our villages burned.

Destroyed.

They put back in their reports that it was a accomplishment.

Majority of our people moved to Buffalo Creek, up near Lake Erie, and we established a community there, but a lot of the people stayed here at home, at Onondaga, where we are today.

The newly formed United States government passes these laws and one of the laws that sticks out is the Intercourse Act, or the Nonintercourse Act, you could call it.

(steady guitar music) And so New York state violated federal law.

They were authorizing some of our young men as signatures to treaties, what they call treaties, and buying up land from our individuals.

They knew the value of our home and so they pursued it and they looked at it as advancing and growing America, the newly formed government.

We did make treaties with the United States government, 1794, George Washington, after the treaty was ratified from Canandaigua, George Washington and the United States Congress ratified the treaty, which made promises that this land is still ours, undisturbed.

And so the treaty was violated shortly after 1794, and we're still arguing for our rights today to the land.

Organization of American States is where we have our human rights case, today, to be heard.

So when you talk about the prosperity of the Erie Canal, it only benefited a few, and devastated many.

Our original instructions are to live in peace and harmony with Mother Earth and Mother Nature.

And we still do our very best that we can today as Onondagas, to carry that message on so that future generations will have the abundance of good life that we know can exist here on Mother Earth.

(bright music)