Top 10 Onondaga Nation Historical Sites and Cultural Significance

By Charles Shack, Senior Reporter

South of Syracuse, past the strip malls on Route 11, the road opens into 7,300 acres of sovereign territory. This is the Onondaga Nation, the Central Fire of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and its history is woven into the ground beneath Central New York. The Onondaga have lived here since time immemorial, and the places that matter most to them are not tourist attractions. They are living sites of governance, ceremony, and law.

What follows is a grounded look at ten places across Central New York where Onondaga history sits on the ground itself. Some are owned and governed by the Nation. Others are public sites that carry layers of Onondaga meaning. All are worth approaching with care, and with respect for the fact that the Onondaga are a sovereign people with a continuous government that predates New York State.

1. Onondaga Lake

Onondaga Lake is not simply a body of water northwest of Syracuse. For the Haudenosaunee it is the place where the Peacemaker brought his message of peace, and where the Five Nations buried their weapons of war beneath the Tree of Peace. According to the Onondaga Nation, this happened “over a thousand years ago on the shores of Onondaga Lake, in present day central New York.” Scholarly estimates for the founding of the Great Law of Peace range from the 12th century to the 15th century. The Haudenosaunee call the lake Ganentaha, and early French Jesuit accounts from 1654 referred to it simply as Salt Lake after the Onondaga revealed the brine springs that rimmed nearly nine miles of shoreline.

The lake measures 4.6 miles long by 1 mile wide, with a maximum depth of 63 feet. Between 1946 and 1970, Allied Chemical discharged roughly 165,000 pounds of mercury into the water. Swimming was banned in 1940, fishing in 1970. It was added to the federal Superfund National Priorities List in December 1994. Honeywell International, the corporate successor to Allied, performed the court-approved cleanup plan at an estimated cost of $451 million. Dredging from July 2012 to November 2014 removed roughly 2.2 million cubic yards of contaminated sediment. Capping of 580 acres was finished in 2016.

2. Ska·nonh, Great Law of Peace Center

The Ska·nonh Great Law of Peace Center sits at 6680 Onondaga Lake Parkway in Liverpool, on the shore of the lake itself. The word Ska·nonh is an Onondaga greeting meaning “Peace and Wellness.” The center opened in November 2015 and is operated by the Onondaga Historical Association with the Onondaga Nation and Syracuse University. Its exhibits walk visitors through Creation, the Thanksgiving Address, European contact, and the Great Law of Peace itself, all told from a Haudenosaunee perspective.

This is the rare museum where the subjects of the exhibits helped design them. Hours are Wednesday through Friday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Saturday 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

3. Onondaga Nation Territory, Route 11A, Nedrow

The administrative heart of the Nation is at 4040 Route 11, via Nedrow, south of Syracuse. The current territory covers 7,300 acres. Between 1788 and 1822, the Nation lost roughly 95 percent of its land through a series of five agreements with New York State that the Onondaga Nation says were never ratified by the Nation, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, or the United States government. The Onondaga rejected the term “reservation” on their own government materials, noting they have lived on this land since time immemorial.

In 2005 the Nation filed a federal land rights action covering roughly 2.5 million acres of treaty-guaranteed territory. Judge Lawrence Kahn dismissed the case in September 2010. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that dismissal, and on October 15, 2013 the U.S. Supreme Court denied the Nation’s petition for certiorari. The Nation then filed a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights at the Organization of American States in April 2014, arguing that the United States had violated its own treaty promises and international human rights obligations.

4. Onondaga Nation School, 3285 State Route 11A, Nedrow

The Onondaga Nation School serves students from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade. It is operated within the LaFayette Central School District but sits on Onondaga Nation territory and teaches Onondaga language and culture alongside the standard curriculum. Enrollment is roughly 121 students. The school is the only public school in the United States located on Haudenosaunee territory that is part of a public district. The Onondaga language program expanded in 1972 and now threads through every grade, a long-running effort to keep a language with relatively few fluent speakers rooted in the youngest generation.

5. Onondaga Nation Arena

Opened in 2002 on Nation territory, the Onondaga Nation Arena is a 1,900-seat facility of more than 40,000 square feet. It hosts both lacrosse and hockey, for Onondaga citizens and for neighboring school, college, and town teams. The Nation hosted the 2015 World Indoor Lacrosse Championship on this site, with games also played at the newly built Onondaga Nation Fieldhouse, at the War Memorial Arena in Syracuse, and at the Carrier Dome.

The Haudenosaunee Nationals lacrosse team, co-founded in 1983 by Onondaga Faithkeeper Oren Lyons, travels on Haudenosaunee passports and is the only First Nations team with international recognition as a sovereign competitor. The team is currently ranked second in the world in box lacrosse by World Lacrosse, with silver medals in all five World Indoor Lacrosse Championships, and third in the world in field lacrosse after a bronze at the 2018 World Lacrosse Championship. In 2022 the team dropped the name “Iroquois” and adopted “Haudenosaunee Nationals,” and later that summer finished fifth in men’s play at the World Games in Birmingham, Alabama after Ireland ceded its berth so the Haudenosaunee could compete.

6. Onondaga Historical Association, 321 Montgomery Street, Syracuse

Founded in 1863, the Onondaga Historical Association occupies a downtown Syracuse building that houses the Onondaga Historical Museum, the Richard and Carolyn Wright Research Center, and the gift gallery. The Research Center holds roughly two million archival photographs, maps, cemetery records, and other documents connected to Onondaga County history, including materials relevant to the Nation.

OHA also manages the Ska·nonh Great Law of Peace Center and the Salt Museum at Onondaga Lake Park. Hours at Montgomery Street run Wednesday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is free. Phone is 315-428-1864.

7. Onondaga Creek Corridor

Onondaga Creek runs from the Tully Valley north through the Nation territory and into Onondaga Lake. The creek has long been a travel and cultural corridor. Mudboils and tributary degradation in the Tully Valley, tied to historic brine mining, have sent sediment into the creek for more than a century. The Onondaga Nation has spoken publicly through its leadership about the importance of clean water downstream, and the creek forms part of the Nation’s broader environmental concerns reflected in its land rights filings.

8. Salt Museum, Onondaga Lake Park, Liverpool

The Salt Museum at 106 Lake Drive in Liverpool stands near the spot where 19th-century salt production reshaped the lake and the regional economy. The building is constructed from timbers salvaged from 19th-century salt warehouses. The industry that grew up around the salt springs fed state coffers and pulled immigrant labor into Syracuse, but the brine and industrial waste also contributed to the degradation of Onondaga Lake that later required federal Superfund cleanup. Admission is free. The museum operates seasonally from early May to early October.

9. The Tree of Peace Sites Across the Territory

In Haudenosaunee tradition, the Peacemaker uprooted a tall white pine, and the warring nations buried their weapons beneath it. Five needles on each bundle represented the five founding nations: Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. The Tuscarora joined the Confederacy in the 18th century, bringing the count to six. Ceremonial white pine plantings at Onondaga Lake Park, at the Ska·nonh Center, and at sites connected to the Nation serve as living reminders of this founding act. The image of the great white pine also anchors the Hiawatha Belt, whose 38 rows of purple and white clamshell wampum bind four squares to a central pine. Reading east to west, the four squares mark the Mohawk (Keepers of the Eastern Door), the Oneida, the Cayuga, and the Seneca (Keepers of the Western Door). The central tree marks the Onondaga, firekeepers of the council. The design is the flag of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy today.

10. LaFayette and the Tully Valley

The towns of LaFayette and Tully, south of Syracuse, surround much of the Nation territory. LaFayette Central School District covers about 44 square miles and includes portions of LaFayette, Onondaga, Fabius, and Tully. The district serves around 750 students across four schools, one of which is the Onondaga Nation School. The LaFayette Apple Festival each October draws tens of thousands of visitors to a region that is also home to an Indigenous government with its own laws, ceremonies, and clan structure. The Onondaga clan system today includes nine clans: Wolf, Turtle, Beaver, Snipe, Heron, Deer, Eel, Bear, and Hawk. Clan membership passes through the mother, and Clan Mothers nominate the Chiefs who sit in the Grand Council at the Central Fire.

Leadership and Treaties That Still Hold

The Onondaga government is not a memory. It operates. Chief Tadodaho Sid Hill, raised to the seat in 2002 after serving as seat warmer from 1996, holds the only Haudenosaunee title selected by the other 49 Confederacy chiefs. He is the presiding chief of the Grand Council, a role the Peacemaker conferred on the Onondaga at the founding. Onondaga Faithkeeper Oren Lyons, a Turtle Clan member born in 1930, addressed the United Nations General Assembly in 1992 to open the International Year of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, co-founded the Haudenosaunee Nationals lacrosse program in 1983, and helped found the Native American Studies department at the University at Buffalo. He was an All-American on the undefeated 1957 Syracuse University lacrosse team and appeared in the 1991 PBS documentary Faithkeeper with Bill Moyers.

The oldest treaty still invoked on Onondaga territory is the Two Row Wampum, known as Gaswenta, recorded as a 1613 agreement between the Haudenosaunee and Dutch traders. Two rows of purple beads on a white field mark two vessels, one Haudenosaunee, one European, moving down the same river and neither steering the other. Three white rows between them stand for peace, friendship, and a promise to last forever. Haudenosaunee leaders still cite Gaswenta as the foundation of every treaty that followed, including the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua with the United States. The influence runs the other way too. In October 1988, Congress passed Concurrent Resolution 331, formally acknowledging that the confederation of the original Thirteen Colonies was “explicitly modeled upon the Iroquois Confederacy” and that framers including Washington and Franklin studied Haudenosaunee governance.

Approaching These Sites

The Onondaga Nation has its own government, its own press office, and its own guidance on visitation. Ska·nonh and the Salt Museum are open to the public. Ceremonial events on Nation territory generally are not. The Longhouse on territory remains the center of traditional spiritual life, including the Midwinter Thanksgiving observance each January or February and the Code of Handsome Lake recitations at the Six Nations meeting each September. Respectful visitors follow the lead of the Nation itself and the Onondaga Historical Association, and they skip the urge to photograph the Longhouse or other ceremonial spaces. The history here is not a museum piece. It is a living tradition under a government that predates New York State.

Sources: Onondaga Nation (onondaganation.org), Onondaga Historical Association (cnyhistory.org), Ska·nonh Center (skanonhcenter.org), Haudenosaunee Confederacy (haudenosauneeconfederacy.com), U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Superfund profile for Onondaga Lake, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, National Museum of the American Indian, LaFayette Central School District, World Lacrosse, Native American Rights Fund Onondaga case summary, Library of Congress In Custodia Legis blog on H. Con. Res. 331, Syracuse University Office of Communications profile of Oren Lyons, Wikipedia entries for Onondaga Lake, the Great Peacemaker, Tadodaho, Oren Lyons, Two Row Wampum Treaty, Haudenosaunee National Teams, and the Longhouse Religion.