Haudenosaunee TraditionSacred Site
Onondaga Lake
The lake near present-day Syracuse, New York, where, in the account the Onondaga Nation and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy publish today, the Peacemaker and Hiawatha united the warring nations and planted the Great Tree of Peace.
About 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.
On the map
Onondaga Lake among other places of the Haudenosaunee Tradition.
Sources and further reading
Source notes
These references are recorded in the catalog. Their passage wording and translation have not been checked, so quotations are not displayed here.
- Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Confederacy's Creation
- Onondaga Nation, History
About this entry
By Elizabeth Stein for Mythos Atlas. About the author. Editorial notes are grounded in the site's cited sources and can be challenged through the contact page.
Coordinates mark where the myths place a site, or where the tradition locates it today. Mythic realms are left off the map or marked as symbolic placements.
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