Sacred Waters

The Onondaga Nation has endured over 400 years of colonialism and illegal thefts of the majority of their homelands, forced assimilation and removals.  The dominant culture and governments have allowed a systematic extractive economic system to use the Haudenosaunee lands and waters as its industrial dumping grounds.  Onondaga Lake, was the location of the birthplace of western democracy as it was on the shores of the Lake where the Peacemaker brought together the then Five Nations, to bury their weapons of war and to form the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, under the Gayanashagowa —the Great Law of Peace.  The Lake is sacred to the Onondaga and the Haudenosaunee.

Unfortunately, this sacred lake has been so abused that it became the most polluted lake on Turtle Island.  The Lake is so polluted that there are 12 Superfund sites in or around the Lake and its watershed and 90 % of the mercury and other carcinogenic and toxic chemicals, which were dumped into the Lake and around its shores, have been left in place, with limited attempts to contain them installed.  These caps, steel barrier walls, and cover ups are inadequate and periodically they fail.  

To add insult to injury, currently the Nation and its citizens have no direct access to their sacred Lake or its waters.  Even though the Lake is within the Onondaga Nation’s 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua recognized reservation, the Nation is still be deprived of the return of any of its shore line to their stewardship and protection.

On top of these historic and on-going insults to their homelands, waters and sacred Lake, the Nation is now facing yet another industrially caused environmental disaster.  A few miles north of Onondaga Lake and in the vicinity of Oneida Lake, a new micro-chips manufacturing plant has just begun construction.  Eventually, this Micron plant promises to bring 1000s of much-needed jobs.  However, those jobs projections appear to be highly inflated and unrealistic.

This chip factory will result in massive amounts of forever chemicals (PFAS) being dumped into rivers which are part of the Onondaga homelands and which hold very significant historic and cultural significance to the Onondagas and other Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.  

Up to 500 separate forever chemicals are used in the manufacturing process of these advanced chips and huge volumes of water are used to repeatedly wash these chemicals off the chips during the manufacturing process.  Over half of these PFAS chemicals will be secret—not even know to Micron—because their subcontractors claim their identity to be trade secrets.  

Although the company and the agencies charged with ensuring its construction with minimal environmental review or protections claim that the enormous volumes of waste water from the chip plant will be “treated”,  this is a very hollow and deceptive claim.  The very nature of forever chemicals is that they are highly soluble in water and almost impossible to remove from water.  The chip plant will rely on a new source of fresh water, taken from Lake Ontario, over 20 miles away, but the discharge of these 33 million gallons per day of PFAS chemicals polluted waste waters will flow into the Oneida River, just west of its discharge from Oneida Lake.  

The Oneida River flows to the west, where it meets the Seneca River, in the Three Rivers area.  The Three River area was where “The five [Nations] of the Iroquois found it a beautiful and convenient place to meet as they paddled east. west, and north from their hunting grounds.”

So, 33 million gallons a day of waste waters, polluted by 500 PFAS chemicals will be dumped into the Oneida River.  These pernicious chemicals are essentially unregulated, with state standards set for only 2 of them.  So, the company’s false claims of “meeting all regulatory requirements” are essentially meaningless and remarkably deceptive and evasive.  The studies of removal methods of PFAS chemicals from water are at a very preliminary stage and have only shown limited effectiveness in very small quantities.  

The current reality is that PFAS cannot be effectively removed from 33 million gallons of water per day, and hence these huge volumes of water, still contaminated with carcinogenic and bioaccumulating chemicals will now be dumped into these Haudenosaunee Rivers.  

Yet another historical and culturally sensitive area will be trashed and not preserved for the future generations, in violation of the Nation’s leaders’ mandates to be stewards of the natural world, so that future generations will be cared for.  

It is time to listen to the Indigenous mandates and wisdom of the Haudenosaunee and all Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island.  It is time to reign in the extractive, dominant economic and cultural devastation of the waters and the lands.  It is time for justice;  time for healing.