Onondaga

Onondaga holds a role no other Haudenosaunee nation shares: rather than sitting as an Elder or Younger Brother, its fourteen chiefs, the largest delegation of the fifty the founding five nations divided among themselves, sit as Firekeepers, hosting the Grand Council's sessions and holding its central council fire and its wampum records. The Tadodaho, the title that presides over the Grand Council itself, is by tradition held by an Onondaga chief, named for the historical Onondaga sachem whom the Peacemaker and Hiawatha are said to have persuaded to support the founding of the confederacy after fierce initial resistance. William Fenton's political history of the confederacy, drawing on both the oral tradition and the written colonial record, traces this Firekeeper role across the whole span from the confederacy's founding to the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua.

Onondaga territory sits at the geographic center of Haudenosaunee lands, in what is now central New York around present-day Syracuse, a position that mirrors its political centrality. The Onondaga Nation retains a reservation south of Syracuse today, one of the smaller Haudenosaunee land bases in New York but the one that still hosts the Confederacy's Grand Council in practice as it long has by tradition. The Longhouse religion, reformed by the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake in the early nineteenth century, continues to be practiced at Onondaga, and the nation's medicine societies and ceremonial knowledge, like those of the wider Confederacy, are restricted to initiated members rather than published outside them.

In November 1794, representatives of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the United States signed the Treaty of Canandaigua, one of the earliest treaties the young United States negotiated with any Native nation and one that Haudenosaunee governments still cite today as a binding acknowledgment of their sovereignty and their remaining lands. Onondaga chiefs, as Firekeepers of the Grand Council, held a central place in the negotiation alongside representatives of the other five nations, and the treaty's own wampum belt, presented by the American negotiators, is preserved and periodically read aloud at Onondaga as a record of what both sides promised. William Fenton's political history of the confederacy treats the 1794 treaty as the closing act of the political history it covers, the last major settlement of Haudenosaunee territory and standing before the pressures of the following century began eroding both.

The treaty did not end the story it began. Onondaga has continued to describe itself as a sovereign nation whose relationship with New York State and the United States rests on Canandaigua's terms rather than on any later arrangement it did not consent to, and the nation's Grand Council still meets and keeps its council fire in the same territory the treaty recognized. What the treaty could not settle by itself, land taken afterward without the nation's consent and disputes over the treaty's boundaries that continue in some form today, is a separate and later history; the treaty itself remains the reference point Onondaga returns to in describing what was promised.