The Treaty of Canandaigua and a Fire Kept Lit

In November 1794, representatives of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the United States signed the Treaty of Canandaigua, one of the earliest treaties the young United States negotiated with any Native nation and one that Haudenosaunee governments still cite today as a binding acknowledgment of their sovereignty and their remaining lands. Onondaga chiefs, as Firekeepers of the Grand Council, held a central place in the negotiation alongside representatives of the other five nations, and the treaty's own wampum belt, presented by the American negotiators, is preserved and periodically read aloud at Onondaga as a record of what both sides promised. William Fenton's political history of the confederacy treats the 1794 treaty as the closing act of the political history it covers, the last major settlement of Haudenosaunee territory and standing before the pressures of the following century began eroding both.

The treaty did not end the story it began. Onondaga has continued to describe itself as a sovereign nation whose relationship with New York State and the United States rests on Canandaigua's terms rather than on any later arrangement it did not consent to, and the nation's Grand Council still meets and keeps its council fire in the same territory the treaty recognized. What the treaty could not settle by itself, land taken afterward without the nation's consent and disputes over the treaty's boundaries that continue in some form today, is a separate and later history; the treaty itself remains the reference point Onondaga returns to in describing what was promised.