When Dutch colonists first began to settle on Haudenosaunee land in what is now Central New York, the 1613 symbolic agreement to the Two Row Wampum became the first contract between Europeans and the Indigenous poeple on whose land they would come to live.
It tells the story of two boats, one representing each people, traveling separately but side by side down the river of life; as long as each respected the other’s ways, the boats would run in parallel peace forever.
Two centuries later, the white settler population set out to construct the Erie Canal, seeing in artificial waterways the power to transform commerce and build their young nation into an economic powerhouse. The rivers and waterways that the Haudenosaunee historically used for trade and fishing ran north to south. The settlers mapped out the Canal east to west.
For Philip Arnold, a religious studies professor at Syracuse University and founding director of the Skä·noñh Great Law of Peace Center, the Canal and its construction represent the fundamental rift that undermines the Haudenosaunee ideal of the Two Row Wampum.
“You have to respect the river of life for that agreement to have force,” Arnold said. “And for the most part, Europeans did not. Right away, their thinking about waterways was just to transport goods and Europeans into the inner continent.”
In the years before the Canal opened in 1825, the fledgling United States was still poor and reeling from the Revolutionary War. Water transportation offered a way to dramatically reduce the cost of moving goods from the farmlands of upstate and western New York to the growing population centers of New York City — cutting a route across the ancestral territorial lands of the six Indigenous nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
But beyond its economic utility, the Canal played a key role in reshaping the physical and political landscape of New York state. Its construction accelerated Indigenous land dispossession, and much of the land it passed through was acquired by the state through treaties that violated federal law. The project also accelerated patterns of settlement and development that helped entrench a new social order — one that overrode existing systems of governance, land tenure and mobility.
The Canal’s trajectory illuminates a broader story: about the collision between Indigenous and settler worldviews, the legal frameworks that enabled and obscured land theft, and the selective way American history remembers the roots of its own democratic ideals.
In turn, the Canal facilitated upstate migration by settlers from those crowded urban areas and ultimately drove up land values, said Jon Parmenter, a historian at Cornell University who specializes in Indigenous land dispossession. Essential to the equation, he said, was how artificially low those land values were to begin with.
During this time, which Parmenter identified as the most active period of Indigenous land dispossession in New York state, the U.S. government paid Haudenosaunee nations about two cents per acre they surrendered, then sold that same land to white settlers for $1.25. That kind of stolen profit, he said, played a significant role in how infrastructure projects like the Erie Canal were funded — and entrenched a deep structural economic disadvantage for the Haudenosaunee, stripping them of generational wealth that has never been restored.
“It puts orders of magnitude of disadvantage into the equation,” he said. “People look around and say, ‘Gee, why are people living in these sort of straitened economic circumstances on reservations? I don’t get it.’ Well, that’s why. The economics of what they surrendered were deeply unfair.”
To build the Canal itself, the state acquired Haudenosaunee land illegitimately, said Joe Heath, who serves as legal counsel for the Onondaga Nation. Deals like the purchases of 1817 and 1822 alongside a host of illegitimate treaties were negotiated via coercion, manipulation and deceit on the part of New York officials. But beyond their unethical means, Heath said the cessions are plainly unconstitutional and illegal under U.S. statutory law.
The Trade and Intercourse Act — which provides that only the federal government, and not any individual state, is allowed to engage in land transactions with Indigenous nations — was passed in 1790 as a way to enforce the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause in response to aggressive state-level land grabs.
The three treaties that the Haudenosaunee Confederacy holds to the federal government — the 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua and the 1838 Treaty of Buffalo Creek — recognize the six nations’ sovereignty and guaranteed the Haudenosaunee the land that was later taken by New York state.
The state’s dealings with the Haudenosaunee violate these active treaties as well as the constitutional and federal laws meant to enforce them, Heath said. On top of the violations, New York entered into treaties reserved for the federal government — the Oneida Nation claims that at least 26 illegal treaties were signed after the passage of the Trade and Intercourse Act — but the law provides no mechanism for enforcement. In other words, Heath said, it’s completely unenforceable.
Perry Ground, a traditional storyteller and educator from the Onondaga Nation (Turtle Clan), locates identity in the stories encoded within Haudenosaunee diplomacy — stories traditionally preserved in beaded treaty belts created to mark agreements and intentions. He points to belts like the Two Row Wampum and the belt made to commemorate the Canandaigua Treaty of 1794, often referred to as the George Washington belt.
Washington’s direct involvement in that treaty — and its promises of peace and friendship — was itself a testament to Haudenosaunee stories: Ground said the oral tradition of the Peacemaker story had laid the groundwork for the democratic ideals ratified in the U.S. Constitution five years earlier.
“These founding fathers were looking for models of a form of government, a way of living, not under a king, not under authoritarian rule, how to give voice to everybody, almost everybody, within their boundaries,” he said. “They were looking for this different way, and they found a good way within this story, and our people were very willing to tell that story.”
The story, which tells of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s founding on the shores of an ancient Onondaga Lake, lays out ideas like union, representative government, deliberation, and checks and balances. Ground identifies each of these among the democratic principles that captivated Benjamin Franklin and informed his 1754 Albany Plan of Union. Ground also pointed to the role of storytelling itself as an iterative and intimate form of political transmission.
“Why did he do it in Albany and not in Philadelphia? That’s where the Mohawks were — he was listening to the story,” he said. “By hearing it over and over, you hear us. In fact, one of the tenets of the story is, go tell this to other people. Get them to believe the same thing. Get them to come and live under the tree of the long leaves.”
Franklin’s plan, which proposed the union of the 13 colonies under a centralized government, was never carried out. But it laid the foundation for what would become the U.S. Constitution.
Yet the ideals that inspired American democracy were immediately in conflict with the systems designed to implement them. Colonists had been enslaving and displacing people for centuries, and the system that emerged from the Constitutional Convention in 1789 affirmed that the tenets of democracy initially extracted from the Haudenosaunee worldview didn’t apply to everyone.
The role of women in Haudenosaunee society was among the most essential governing principles that the new American system left out, Heath said, and pointed to the dissonance between a U.S. system that denied women the right to vote and a Haudenosaunee model that placed women at the center of political decision-making. Clan mothers held real political authority — including selecting war chiefs and holding veto power over decisions to go to war.
For writer, lawyer and advocate Doug George-Kanentiio, Akwesasne Mohawk (Bear Clan), this disconnect undermines the American conception of democracy altogether.
“You cannot have democracy unless women have freedom,” said George-Kanentiio, who is also a former land claims negotiator. “Our people knew these contradictions back then. We saw them for what they were. Our teaching was very clear from the beginning, and they took that out, excluded it.”
Still, he said, Haudenosaunee people have made a project of changing attitudes and influencing American society, using means from education reform and legal advocacy to political organizing and storytelling. In large part, he said, that was necessary for survival.
“We were emphatic about teaching and converting these people to our way of thinking, because we knew they were here and they were permanent, and unless we did something to convert them to rationality, that they were going to come after us,” George-Kanentiio said. “And so we tried real hard.”
