3/25/2023 0 Comments Ifire onondaga![]() Thus began a pollution legacy that would continue for more than a century. The most convenient place to dump the waste was right in front of the plant, along the lakeshore. Searing calls the soda ash industry an “engine that connected Syracuse to American expansionism in the Industrial Age like no other.” Its process was also stunningly inefficient, producing about 50 percent more waste material than product. For that, he says, “You can’t find a much better place anywhere in America.” “There are three main ingredients you need for the Solvay process: limestone, salt and water,” says Robert Searing, staff historian at Onondaga County’s Historical Association. Cogsworth staked out much of the eastern shore for his Solvay Process Company, named for a method of making soda ash, which is used in making common products from glass to baking soda. ![]() Hundreds of acres around the lake would be converted to salt evaporation beds and boilers. Word spread and during the next two centuries, the business boomed and the commodity was shipped across the country. French missionaries began commoditizing Onondaga Lake almost immediately after they arrived in the 17th century and noticed it had rich deposits of salt. Yet European colonists thought differently. “It’s a reciprocal relationship that we have with all the living things around the lake and the water,” adds Lyons. “We were taught how to give thanks to all the things that the Creator had put down for us,” says Sid Hill, who wears the ages-old mantle of Tadadaho, or leader of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. The Onondaga today take the stewardship and preservation of nature no less seriously than they did when these charges were first brought to them. The confederacy is represented by a longhouse, and as the Onondaga Nation is traditionally the central meeting place for the nations, the Onondaga people are known as the Keepers of the Council Fire. On the shores of the lake, the Peacemaker set forth what would become the principles that their people would live by, including nonviolence, fundamental elements of democracy, stewardship of the natural resources that support all life and preservation of nature for future generations. ![]() The Haudenosaunee say that about a thousand years ago, their prophet known as the Peacemaker brought the first five nations of the confederacy-the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca (the Tuscarora joined the confederacy in 1722)-together in peace. It was the setting for the establishment of the principles of the people of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (which French colonists called the Iroquois). Though generations of the region’s Indigenous people once relied on Onondaga Lake for its abundant fish, this body of water has been far more than a source of sustenance. “And we do, when we go and bring our children. “The lake is weeping,” says Betty, who is also executive director of the American Indian Law Alliance, an organization that has helped the Onondaga fight for rights to take care of the lake. Even Garrett’s Onondaga name, Ohneganoh, means “cool water.” This has been an open wound for the Onondaga people, who maintain their sacred connection to the lake. Their people’s territory once stretched to the lake and beyond.īut by the late 20th century, 300 years after Europeans colonized the area, Onondaga Lake carried the stigma of being the country’s most polluted body of water. Garrett and Betty Lyons are members of the Snipe Clan of the Onondaga Nation, which now lies about 8 miles south of the 3,000-acre lake on the outskirts of Syracuse in Central New York. In that innocent question-who will take care of this lake-a millennia of culture and hundreds of years of history were embodied. He then inquired, “Did they ask the fish?” When the boy asked his mother why people didn’t clean it up, she explained that no one wanted to spend the money. Betty explained to Garrett that the odor was from pollution in the lake. On a sultry summer day more than a decade ago, Betty Lyons and her young son, Garrett, were driving past Onondaga Lake when the 7-year-old noticed an acrid smell.
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