Onondaga Lake

The Confederacy's own account of its founding site

Onondaga Lake is named by the Onondaga Nation and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, on their own websites, as the place where the Great Law of Peace was founded: where the Peacemaker and Hiawatha persuaded the feared Onondaga leader Tadodaho to accept peace, and where the united nations planted the Great Tree of Peace. The Onondaga Nation's territory sits along the lake's southern end today, and the lake remains central to Haudenosaunee identity and to the Onondaga Nation's own environmental restoration efforts, work explicitly connected to caring for the site the Confederacy names as its birthplace.

A living connection, not only a historical marker

This site follows the Onondaga Nation's and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy's own framing: Onondaga Lake is treated as a place of ongoing significance to a living political and cultural institution, the Confederacy's Grand Council still meets at Onondaga, not only as the site of a past event.