Onondaga Lake, The Sacred Site That Became Most Polluted

Onondaga Lake sits at the edge of Syracuse, a modest body of water about four and a half miles long, visible from the highway. It does not look like a place of exceptional importance. But according to the Onondaga Nation, this is the lake where the Great Law of Peace was established, where the Haudenosaunee Confederacy was founded under the Great Tree of Peace, and where the fire that has burned ever since was first lit.

For most of the twentieth century, the lake was also one of the most contaminated bodies of water in North America. Allied Chemical, later known as Honeywell, operated a soda ash and mercury chlor-alkali plant on the lake's southern shore beginning in the nineteenth century. Industrial operations deposited mercury, industrial salts, and other toxic compounds into the lake and its tributaries for decades. Municipal sewage from Syracuse flowed in untreated for much of the same period. By the nineteen seventies, the oxygen levels in parts of the lake had dropped so low that fish could not survive. Bacterial contamination made contact with the water inadvisable.

The cleanup that followed has been described as one of the largest and most complex Superfund-related remediation efforts in the northeastern United States. It has run for more than thirty years. The official cleanup plan was costed at around four hundred fifty million dollars, though the Onondaga Nation has estimated that a truly thorough restoration would cost more than two billion dollars, and the precise figure continues to accumulate with ongoing work. The Onondaga Nation has participated in the restoration from the beginning and has stated consistently that the lake's full ecological healing cannot be separated from the restoration of the land rights that were taken from them in the nineteenth century.

The fire-keepers of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy live a short drive from the most polluted lake in their ancestral territory. The remediation continues.