Property Rights and the Well-Being of the Land

The Great Law Establishes the Preeminent Agency of the Land


Seattle, WA. The Onondaga Nation is one of the affiliated tribes of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy in upstate New York. I just completed a second reading of the Haudenosaunee "Letter to the Western World." My graduate student, Karen Capuder (Mohawk), kindly shared the document with a class I am teaching on environmental anthropology.

This is a document of sublime significance because it marks a definitive critique of the Western world from the location or positionality of a people who have been democratically self-governing in their homeland for a longer span of uninterrupted time than perhaps any other place-based culture in the world.

I have also revisited and reflected on the The Great Law of Peace, Kaianere'ko:wa, adhered to by the five First Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. The Great Law of Peace is the framework of a place-based and deep tradition of democratic self-governance.

However, at the heart of their concept of "democracy," the Haudenosaunee prioritize the well-being of the land as the true measure of freedom, dignity, justice, and right livelihood.

According to the Great Law, the only way to ensure well-being and peace (the two are equivalent in Haudenosaunee epistemology) is to show respect for the original instructions that are manifest in the agency of the land, in the land's display of health, diversity, and resilience. This is an alterNative concept of property rights where the original and primary rights derive from the land's well-being and ecological integrity.

Now, the Onondaga are working to interject this principle of the well-being of the land into U.S. federal laws governing property rights. They seek to transform American property law through the intervention of the Great Law of Peace.

As long as the land is reduced to the status of a "property right," private or public, the well-being of the land will be violated and the people's capacity for stewardship will be diminished.

According to Haudenosaunee ethics, there are no "individual rights" to property and the land is not a commodity. Instead of focusing on "rights," people also have "obligations" to care for the land and ensure its vitality and integrity. Out of this respect for the well-being of the land as a basic obligation of people, humans find their own needs for right livelihoods met within a widening sense of common wealth that honors the earth, our home.

Why are the Onondaga leading this audacious attempt to transform nearly 300 years of law-making in the United States on that most pivotal of all "rights," the right to private property?

Perhaps it is because of the legacy of environmental racism in Onondaga land? Lake Onondaga is the site where Aionwentha (Hiawatha) once bound together the five arrows symbolizing the strength of the union of five in the Confederacy.

Today, the soils on the shore of Lake Onondaga are contaminated and leaching into the lake waters and feeder streams. A good portion of the watershed is officially designated as a Superfund site. The corporate polluters, including Allied Chemical and Honeywell, Inc., at Lake Onondaga have disrespected the well-being and integrity of this Native land.

Like other indigenous peoples, the Onondaga propose that all living things have standing before the Great Law of Peace. The privileging of private property rights are thus a fundamental violation of the sovereign law of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

The Onondaga have declared that the system of private property law is a violation of the Treaty Rights granted the Iroquois First Nations and remembered in the Two Row Wampum belt.

Ecological restoration remains one of the fundamental obligations spelled out by the Onondaga Nation in its quest to transform American property law. At the heart of the Onondaga legal complaint filed in a Syracuse federal court (March 11, 2005) is the argument that the Nation's unique relationship to place "...goes far beyond federal and state legal concerns of ownership, possession, or other legal rights. The people are one with the land and consider themselves stewards of it. It is the duty of the Nation's leaders to work for a healing of this land..."

This is not a typical "Indian land claims" lawsuit. In the context of federal litigation, it is based on concepts that speak more to human "obligations" to the land than to individual or even collective property "rights." The Onondaga struggle is for "justice" for the land and water as agencies of their own making.

This lawsuit should be watched and supported by all who support indigenous peoples' and the quest for a just and sustainable future through place-based ecological democracy. Restoring the health of Aionwentha's shoreline at Lake Onondaga is the only true measure of environmental justice in this case.