‘The blood in our veins’: Onondagas reignite effort to win back Maple Bay, a foothold on Onondaga Lake 

Soon after Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon began his first term in 2019, he and his counsel toured a section of Onondaga Lake’s shore with representatives from the Onondaga Nation. 

The Nation’s leaders and McMahon thought they had an agreement after the meeting ended.

Six years later, they disagree.

“I feel so used,” said Betty Lyons, the director of the Indian American Law Alliance. The organization helps indigenous groups navigate struggles for sovereignty and human rights.

Lyons’ husband is Sid Hill, the Tadodaho (spiritual leader) of the Onondaga Nation. 

Hill, Lyons, and their counsel, toured Maple Bay with McMahon. They believe he made a personal commitment to return that section of the shore, referred to as Maple Bay.

McMahon said in a recent interview with Central Current he told the Nation he would “try” to return the land, but made no guarantees.

The Nation issued a letter to McMahon on March 1, asking to resume discussions on the transfer of Maple Bay back to the nation.

The letter is the latest development in a saga that began in 2011, when the Legislature passed a non-binding resolution to return land on the lake to the nation and commemorate the lakeshore’s historical significance as the birthplace of Western democracy.

Discussions on that transfer fizzled out in 2022, but the Nation is hoping to jumpstart the dialogue. The parcel would constitute the Onondaga Nation’s first foothold on Onondaga Lake in roughly 200 years.

McMahon left the negotiating table at the beginning of his first term after the Nation refused to pay taxes on the land, he said. 

“What’s accurate was I made a commitment to try to get a deal done, and I think we did,” McMahon said. “I think the ball was left in the nation’s corner when they were refusing to look at different options.”

Joe Heath, the nation’s counsel, said he has yet to hear the county truly respect the sovereignty of the Onondaga Nation.

“I think it’s paternalistic and wrong,” Heath said.

The Onondagas’ letter coincides with the 20th anniversary of the Nation’s land rights case against New York State. That case was dismissed in 2010 by a federal court, but the 2005 lawsuit spurred a new era of “Land Back” legal battles for the Onondaga.

‘It’s who we are’

Onondaga Lake is a symbol of indigenous and American democracy.

The lake is a renowned habitat for bald eagles, and its shores are revered as the sacred site where the Haudenosaunee Confederacy – the oldest existing Western democracy – originated.

When the Onondaga people stand on its shores and speak their language, Lyons says the lake responds; the fish leap from the water, the birds alight on the shores, the eagles circle overhead.

To the Onondagas, the lake and its ecosystem are not commodities or resources – they are living relatives.

“That water is like the blood in our veins,” Lyons said. “It’s who we are.”

As New York State defied federal treaties with the Onondaga and gobbled up nearly all of the nation’s land, it separated the Nation from the lake. The state sequestered the Onondaga to a 9-mile reservation roughly 13 miles from the Nation’s seat of power and cultural epicenter.

“They tried to sever our spiritual connection to that lake,” Lyons said. “Which they can’t do.”

In his letter, Hill called on the county to fulfill its commitments to return land on the lake. 

“The Lake is a living relative to our people and we have responsibilities toward the Lake, which we are currently prevented from carrying out,” Hill wrote. “We have ceremonies which need to be practiced on its shores and other obligations.”

Those ceremonies include the Ganoñhéñ•nyoñ’, or Thanksgiving Address, a vibrant component of Onondaga culture that expresses gratitude for the interconnectedness of the natural world.

Lyons said the Onondagas hope to be able to close off their land on the lake to non-native people a few times a year for private ceremonies.

The renewed push for Maple Bay comes on the heels of a landmark victory in October, when the Nation reacquired 1,000 acres of culturally significant land in Tully.

That land was transferred from Honeywell, Inc., the corporation that polluted Onondaga Lake for decades before the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation ordered it to clean the waterway.

In addition, the Nation and the County finalized a transfer in 2023 of a 1-acre plot of land in Jamesville, where the remains of 81 ancestors were reinterred in 1999. Talks to transfer that land reportedly began in 1996 but faltered as the parties disputed restrictions on the land’s use. 

The parties renewed conversations two years ago and made the transfer official in what Heath called at the time “a generally cooperative endeavor.”

Fresh off those long-fought victories the nation hopes to gain ground along the lake for ceremonial gatherings, food cultivation, medicinal harvesting, and cultural education.

The nation’s main purpose, though, is to regain a physical connection to a sacred relative.

“Their relationship to that lake isn’t the same one that we have,” Lyons said. “They don’t have that familial relationship.”

In 2011, the Onondaga County Legislature took the first step toward returning a parcel on Onondaga Lake to the nation.

It passed a non-binding resolution to recognize the historical significance of Onondaga Lake, and to transfer a plot of land on the lake to the Nation for “traditional uses.”

The county’s initial plan involved returning Murphy’s Island, contingent upon an environmental review by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and the Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force.

That plan stalled after a review of the land revealed extensive pollution that would require expensive remediation. Neither party wanted to pay for the remediation, so the county rescinded the resolution.

In 2016, the legislature, under then-chairman McMahon, passed a similar non-binding resolution. This time, the resolution acknowledged that, without remediation, Murphy’s Island was unfit for the Onondaga Nation’s traditional uses. The Legislature resolved to transfer a “yet-to-be-determined” parcel of land on the lake to the nation.

Further discussion yielded Maple Bay as the most viable option, as this plot is comparatively less polluted than most other land around the lake, according to Lyons and Heath.

‘That’s the legal reality’

The conversations around Maple Bay began with gusto and goodwill, but soon stopped.

According to McMahon, two major issues soon proved intractable: Back taxes and guarantees against future lawsuits.

In recent years, the Onondaga Nation has bought small parcels of land, and does not pay taxes on the land it acquires. 

The county says that must change before any deal moves forward. 

“There’s some issues that I think are kind of on the Nation side that they need to come to grips with if they can move forward,” McMahon said. “There’s over $1.3 million of back taxes and unit charges owed to Onondaga County on property outside of the Onondaga Nation.”

If Maple Bay is transferred, the county also wants the Nation to guarantee it will not advance litigation against the county over the lake or Maple Bay in the future.

“We’ll have the conversations and we’ll find out if they’re serious,” McMahon said. “But I have a fiduciary responsibility to 476,000 county taxpayers, and we’re not going to make a deal that’s going to put us into a lawsuit.”

McMahon said that the nation’s refusal to pay the taxes or give a guarantee against future litigation were “deal killers right away.” 

The county is willing to restart conversations, McMahon said, but can’t envision them progressing without a “change of heart” on the Onondagas’ end.

“They never moved forward because it seemed to be an unwillingness to take some of these really serious issues to heart at the time,” McMahon said of the 2018 discussions.

Heath rejects McMahon’s assertions, and called his hang-up on the taxes “backsliding.” 

“There’s no mention of taxes in either the 2011 or 2016 resolution,” Heath said. “He was chair of the Legislature and voted in favor of that resolution.”

The county executive walked back his promise to Hill and Lyons to return Maple Bay in initial meetings after the tour of Maple Bay, Heath said. McMahon said he learned the nation wasn’t paying taxes on the land it acquires within its reservation boundaries, according to Heath. 

Heath dismissed the county’s belief that taxes are owed.

“I think I know more Indian Law than Ryan McMahon,” Heath said. “I’ve been doing this for 50 years.”

As counsel for the Onondaga Nation, Heath argued that substantive legal precedent supports the nation’s position that Onondaga County cannot extract taxes from a sovereign nation.

Heath pointed to two sections in New York State’s “Indian Law.”

Section 6 of the Indian Law states that “No taxes shall be assessed, for any purpose whatever, upon any Indian reservation in this state, so long as the land of such reservation shall remain the property of the nation, tribe or band occupying the same.”

Likewise, Section 454 of the state’s “real property tax law” states that land held by an indigenous group is “wholly exempt from taxation.”

Since most of Onondaga County’s taxbase, including the city of Syracuse, falls within the Onondaga Nation’s reservation established in the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua, the Nation maintains it does not have to pay taxes on the land it is re-acquiring.

A recent decision from the United States Supreme Court undergirds this argument, Heath said.

McGirt v. Oklahoma, a landmark Supreme Court ruling from 2020, reinforced the sovereignty of indigenous reservations. 

The case involved an Indigenous man prosecuted by the state of Oklahoma over sex crimes committed on the Creek reservation. Jimcy McGirt was convicted for aggravated sexual abuse against a child in 1997, but appealed his case. The Supreme Court ruled in his favor, because the crimes were committed on native land.

In a 5-4 ruling led by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the court found that the boundaries and borders established in treaties between indigenous nations and the federal government remain binding unless Congress alters them.

The court’s ruling found that the American government has no jurisdiction over those reservations.

“This Court is aware of the potential for cost and conflict around jurisdictional boundaries,” Gorsuch wrote. “But Oklahoma and its tribes have proven time and again that they can work successfully together as partners.”

Heath acknowledged that a previous Supreme Court ruling gives the county the right to tax indigenous nations. 

In 2005, the court ruled in favor of the City of Sherrill, New York, which had sued the Oneida Nation for refusing to pay taxes on the businesses and land it was re-acquiring around the city.

But Heath said since that ruling, Madison, Oneida and Seneca Counties have tried and failed to collect taxes from the Oneida and Cayuga Nations. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has twice ruled the counties can’t bring the nations into state court, Heath said, and lesser courts have delivered concurrent decisions.

In 2021, the Supreme Court refused a petition from Seneca County to review a Second Circuit ruling that found the county could not bring the Cayugas to state court to collect the back taxes from foreclosure.

“You can’t haul them into state court because of their sovereign immunity, and therefore you don’t have the mechanism to collect the tax,” Heath said. “So that’s the legal reality.”

According to Heath, the Maple Bay discussions were split into two separate conversations; one discussion focused on the land transfer, while the other looked to mediate the parties’ diametric positions on taxes.

Heath said the Nation was and remains open to making a payment in lieu of taxes to the county — an arrangement often made for developers — where appropriate, and thought the conversations were making progress down that path. 

“If there are services for which compensation should be due, let’s discuss those,” Heath said. “That’s as far as we got, and then they called off the meetings.”

Heath wants the discussions to resume because he believes there’s a clear path forward to resolve both parties’ concerns. 

The nation contends that New York State, not the nation, ought to pay Onondaga County any taxes that they would lose through a land transfer. That’s because the state defied federal treaties to gain the land in the first place.

Heath thinks this is a simple solution that could apply to future transfers between other counties and nations.

“It’s exactly what the state does when it takes property in the Adirondacks away from private ownership and puts it into preserve to grow the Adirondack Park,” Heath said. “Every one of those purchases has a signed agreement that the state will pay the lost taxes to the counties.”

‘Birthplace of Democracy’

On September 16, 1987, the bicentennial of the signing of the Constitution, the US Senate passed a bipartisan resolution recognizing the Haudenosaunee’s influence on the founders.

“The confederation of the original Thirteen Colonies into one republic was explicitly modeled upon the Iroquois Confederacy as were many of the democratic principles which were incorporated into the Constitution itself,” the resolution read. 

Lyons thinks that the Nation and the county could officially recognize the shores of the lake as the “birthplace of democracy” which could add educational benefits and tourist intrigue that would benefit everyone in the community.

She envisions a historical marker on the lake that could teach visitors the significance of the area. Lyons said the Nation might even be open to hosting gatherings with non-native people that are interested in learning more about the Haudenosaunee and the lake.

“Why can’t you also see that our presence on the lake would bring people? If you were to tout this as the birthplace of democracy?” Lyons said. “It’s right here. Our ancestors went to Philadelphia to train them on how we govern ourselves.”

Heath called for diplomacy to work through the stalemate. The recent transfer of the 1,000 acres in Tully back to the Onondaga nation, Heath said, demonstrates the power of consistent discussion to solve tough problems.

Though skeptical of progress, McMahon is willing to renew conversations, calling it “a nice story if it can happen,” and said he wants to protect taxpayers. 

“I would say that I would love to get a deal done,” McMahon said. “I make no commitment.”

To Heath, there’s no issue so large that it can’t be worked out through consistent meetings and good faith cooperation.

“We’re hopeful that diplomacy can be reinstituted,” Heath said, “and that it can be resolved in a way that I think everybody in the community would benefit from and support.”