Maple Bay, Onondaga Lake Credit: Mike Greenlar | Central Current

The shores of Onondaga Lake are the birthplace of Western representative democracy. 

On Onondaga Lake’s banks, the Peacemaker and Hiawatha convinced Tadodaho, the leader of the Onondaga people, to unite with the Mohawk, Oneida, Cayuga and Seneca. 

Once at loggerheads, those five nations came together through dialogue and diplomacy beneath the Great Law of Peace, burying their weapons on the shores of the Onondagas’ sacred lake.

Now, those same shores are mired in pollution and politics.

Fifteen years after the Onondaga County Legislature first resolved to transfer a parcel of land on Onondaga Lake back to the Onondaga Nation, the county has added a new consideration: Christopher Columbus.

In an email sent on July 18 to the nation’s representatives, Onondaga County Director of Intergovernmental Affairs Dan Kranz shared a list of notes that County Executive Ryan McMahon sent to him regarding Maple Bay.

One of those notes appears to suggest McMahon wants the nation to abandon its push for the city officials to remove a controversial Christopher Columbus statue.

“I am also looking for a clarified position on the Columbus Statue,” Kranz’s message reads. “The removal of the statue has been divisive. If Maple Bay can help bring people together on one hand a partnership not to divide the community on this issue could be good common ground.”

In his email, Kranz made clear he was accurately representing McMahon’s thoughts, writing that he copied McMahon’s message in full because “it illuminates his current thinking on the matter.”

The push comes as President Donald Trump and federal officials have taken steps to reinstall Confederate monuments, remove historical information from government websites and influence the Smithsonian Museums’ presentation of history.   

Onondaga Nation’s lead counsel Joe Heath and other representatives say McMahon has never before involved his thoughts on the Columbus monument during Maple Bay discussions, and are furious that the county executive is now including the statue in the talks.

Heath believes McMahon is floating a clear trade: Maple Bay, in exchange for the nation’s submission on the Columbus statue. 

“Stop with the quid pro quos,” Heath said. “Keep your promises.”

Syracuse Mayor Ben Walsh pledged to remove the statue, but after years of lawsuits aimed at preventing him from fulfilling that promise, a judge in 2020 ruled the city could remove the statue. 

Even though the city owns Columbus Circle, Onondaga County has not involved the city in discussions regarding Maple Bay, according to city spokesperson Greg Loh. 

While Kranz in his email said the statue’s removal was divisive, Loh pointed out that the statue itself has caused decades of division, which prompted city officials to consider its removal in the first place.

“We continue to believe, as we have since the 2019 Dialogue Circles on the Columbus controversy, that considering and respecting all perspectives will lead to the best outcome for the entire community,” Loh said. “Mayor Walsh’s proposed path forward for Columbus Circle is rooted in finding common ground and addressing the longstanding division created by the Columbus statue.”

Near the shore of Maple Bay, Onondaga Lake. Mike Greenlar | Central Current.

In an interview with Central Current, McMahon stood by Kranz’s request for a “clarified position” from the nation, which has for years supported the removal of the statue.

“I’ve offered to try to find a middle ground here, to maybe keep the Columbus statue, but maybe do something that’s representative with the statue of Hiawatha, or tells the story of the history from the perspective of the Haudenosaunee,” McMahon said.

That offer has provoked the ire of the Onondaga Nation’s leaders.

“He’s as contaminated as the water,” said Betty Lyons, the director of the American Indian Law Alliance. Lyons is married to Sid Hill, the Tadodaho of the Onondaga Nation. 

Lloyd Withers, the concerned resident who in 2007 first organized the grassroots effort to transfer some of the lake’s shore back to the nation, lampooned the suggestion of morality parity between Hiawatha, a force for peace, and Columbus, the explorer and slaver whose 1492 arrival in Latin America marked the beginning of centuries of calamity for indigenous peoples.

“I think of that supposed compromise or suggestion as being the same as putting up a statue of Harriet Tubman next to one of Jefferson Davis,” Withers said. “It makes no sense. It’s not the way to face reality and address sins of the past.”

McMahon called the Columbus statue controversy a “leadership opportunity,” and said he was simply inviting the nation to consider compromise.

But Heath and Lyons believe McMahon is trying to extract more value out of the land transfer, leveraging the statue to make the deal more lucrative for the County. 

“We’ve given up enough. We have nothing left to give. We have nothing left to offer,” Lyons said. “They have taken all of it. They’ve already taken it all, and so we’re not bargaining.”

‘The right thing to do’

The Onondaga Nation’s landback effort for a foothold on Onondaga Lake dates back to 2007, when Withers, a local businessman, began organizing a grassroots effort to give the Onondaga Nation a physical presence on their sacred lake.

Withers spent years meeting with local and state elected officials, university professors, government agencies, advocacy groups, religious leaders, and any residents who were interested in returning lake land to the Onondagas.

Though not a representative of the Onondaga Nation, Withers felt compelled to play a part in bridging a better relationship between the residents of Onondaga County, and the descendants of the original residents of the region.

“I thought it was something we could ask our government leaders to follow through with, because it would cost them virtually nothing, but the gain would be huge for the community, and the support about that was widespread,” Withers said.

Withers’ vision earned an important victory. The Onondaga County Legislature in 2011 passed a non-binding resolution to transfer a piece of shoreline back to its ancestral owners.

When Murphy’s Island, the parcel initially slated for transfer, was deemed too toxic for the nation to accept as-is — and neither the county nor the nation wanted to foot the bill for the necessary environmental remediation — the legislature in 2016 committed to identifying a different parcel for transfer.

McMahon, then the chair of the legislature, voted to preserve a transfer of land on the lake to the Onondaga Nation.

Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon in the audience during an event with President Joe Biden. Photo by Mike Greenlar | Central Current.

The nation and county then settled on another parcel, Maple Bay, as a viable replacement. Since then, the two parties have not reached an agreement on the terms of the transfer. 

Withers said that the county’s failure to follow through on the 2011 and 2016 resolutions, and McMahon’s new negotiating tack, have marred the project with broken promises and bitter extraction tactics.

“It wasn’t ever that the nation was asking for these sites back. It’s that we advocated to give them back, because it was good to do. The right thing to do,” Withers said. 

Hill, Lyons, Heath and Withers in 2019 toured Maple Bay with McMahon and his legal counsel. They say the newly-elected county executive made an emotional pledge to return the land on which they stood.

Withers remains optimistic that McMahon may still fulfill that promise.

“All he has to do is simply say, ‘you’re right, let’s return Maple Bay,’ and get back to business,” Withers said. “It’s not a big deal, at least for the county. For the Onondaga Nation, for those people who feel strongly about social justice, it’s a huge undertaking, and would be an enormous benefit to our county.”

‘We are resilient people’ 

After almost 15 years of on-again, off-again discussions, a plan originally envisioned as a healing gesture to strengthen community bonds has become a strained stalemate. Both parties feel aggrieved by the other.

The county and nation governments have been at odds since 2022, when talks to transfer Maple Bay stalled.

McMahon said that the nation’s unwillingness to pay taxes on land it acquires outside its current reservation borders, and refusal to commit to not pursue future litigation against Onondaga County for environmental harm done to the lake and surrounding land, were non-starters for the County.

“‘Give us Maple Bay, or else we’re gonna say bad things about you,’” McMahon said of the Nation’s approach to the negotiations. “That’s where it seems to be right now.”

The county executive wants the nation to either pay the taxes that he believes the nation owes, or submit a pilot payment in lieu of taxes, sewer fees, and other municipal payments.

“It’s not our job to find a resolution. We’re the victim in the process,” McMahon said, “because we’re spending money each and every year, paying other governments and paying for the uses of the individuals who are on that land.”

A 2005 supreme court decision supports Onondaga County’s position that a county can tax a sovereign nation, but other counties in NY have tried and failed in the decades since to successfully collect taxes from the Cayuga and Oneida Nations.

A recent landmark Supreme Court ruling in 2020 reinforced indigenous nations’ sovereignty, undergirding the Onondaga Nation’s position that the county cannot levy taxes from the nation.

Heath acknowledged Onondaga County’s concerns for reimbursement for performed services on the Onondaga acquired land, but thinks there is a simple solution to that issue.

Since New York State, not Onondaga County, is the” original wrong-doer,” Heath said, the state should foot the bill for lost taxes when the Onondaga Nation acquires land that comes off the county tax rolls. 

“It’s what they do in the Adirondacks. When they preserve forest land, they make an agreement. Every one of those agreements to grow the Adirondack Park includes a promise to the towns to pay the lost taxes in perpetuity,” Heath said. “Complex issues of history and culture, and actually spirituality, do not get resolved by people not talking to each other.”

Heath suggested bringing the state and federal governments into the Maple Bay negotiations to help hash out a similar agreement, in which New York would reimburse Onondaga County.

Onondaga Lake, viewed from the shore of Maple Bay. Credit: Mike Greenlar | Central Current

McMahon said the talks ended in 2022 because the nation wasn’t taking his two main demands seriously. Heath said the county canceled scheduled Maple Bay meetings without explanation, and never rescheduled them.

The Maple Bay transfer idled until late 2024. Fresh off a historic victory in finalizing the transfer of almost 1,000 acres of ancestral territory in the Tully Valley from Honeywell, Inc., the Onondaga Nation and its allies restarted efforts to win back land on the lake.

Then, in March of this year, Onondaga Nation Tadodaho Sid Hill sent a letter to McMahon asking to renew the Maple Bay negotiations.

Hill’s title, Tadodaho, comes from the Onondaga leader who first resisted, then agreed to unite his people with the other nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

“I hope that a meeting can be set up in the near future to renew our talks and to move towards a healing of this separation, and towards the county fulfilling its commitments, contained in the 2011 and 2016 County Legislature’s Resolutions — to return property on the Lake to the Nation,” Hill wrote.

The parties have exchanged few communications since Hill sent his letter. 

While Kranz has responded to messages from allies of the Onondaga Nation, Heath said the county has yet to officially acknowledge that the leader of the Onondaga Nation issued a letter requesting a meeting with the Onondaga County executive.

Tensions have quickly risen. The County’s only correspondence to the nation so far has done more to provoke anger than it has to progress the conversation forward.

“We haven’t lasted for thousands of years by giving up, by laying down,” Lyons said. “We are resilient people. And I think he underestimates our determination.”

The county executive said the Columbus statue is not one of the two main issues impeding the land transfer. Rather, McMahon said the statue exemplifies the sort of issue that the county and nation could address together, if the two governments strengthen their bonds.

But Heath thinks McMahon is compelling the nation to exchange silence on the Columbus statue for talks on Maple Bay.

“Don’t talk about colonialism. Don’t talk about forced removals, ethnic cleansing, the fact that there are no more indigenous people in the Caribbean because of what happened almost immediately after Columbus,” Heath said. “Don’t talk about that because it’s divisive.”

For the nation and its coalition of supporters, McMahon’s comments have done more to strain ties than strengthen them.

Lyons keeps thinking back to the fateful meeting with McMahon, on the same shoreline where the leaders of the Haudenosaunee nations surmounted their divides to unite.

When the soon-to-be most powerful elected official in Onondaga County hugged her and pledged to try to transfer Maple Bay back to the Onondaga Nation, Lyons believed him. 

“He has a heart,” Lyons said. “I saw it.”

Lyons still hopes McMahon will display the compassion he showed her on the shores of Onondaga Lake – but she is quickly losing faith.

“You don’t look at somebody, put your arm around someone, shed actual tears with them talking about how you’re gonna have the political capital to make it happen — and then change your mind,” Lyons said.

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Patrick McCarthy is a staff reporter at Central Current covering government and politics. A graduate of Syracuse University’s Maxwell and Newhouse Schools, McCarthy was born and raised in Syracuse and...