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FROM: THE SYRACUSE POST-STANDARD NEWSPAPER

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Claims Come And Go, Clan Mother Keeps Values

Friday, July 15, 2005
SEAN KIRST
POST-STANDARD COLUMNIST
From the door of Dorothy Webster's small home on the Onondaga Nation, she can
see the place where she first met Laura Cornelius Kellogg.
"She would come here and stay at my mother's house," said Dorothy, who was a
little girl when Kellogg would show up for visits, a traveler wearing
orthopedic shoes.
"She wanted the land back," Dorothy said, "but it never got going."
Dorothy is a clan mother, a position of authority among the Onondagas. Her
story about Kellogg helps to explain her calm reaction to last month's ruling
by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which dismissed the Cayuga Indian
land claim in Seneca and Cayuga counties. The judges ruled the Cayugas waited
too long to take their claim to court, sending waves of anxiety across the Six
Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy.
With the Onondagas in the early legal stages of asserting ownership of
thousands of square miles of Upstate land, it might seem as if Dorothy would
respond with stark despair.
Hardly.
She has seen too much, starting with Kellogg, to let this keep her up at
night.
"That's all down the road," Dorothy said, referring to long-term implications
of the ruling. "I'm not even going to think about it. I just thank goodness
I woke up this morning."
She is a master of the dry humor of her people. When a doctor recently said
she needed a new hip, Dorothy replied, "I need a whole new body." She is in
her 70s. Her husband, William, died 11 years ago this month, but her three
daughters - and her grandchildren - don't live far from her house.
"It's not that fabulous to some people," she said, "but to me it's always
home."
That is her passion, a place to put her faith. She does not trust casino
money. She does not trust the federal courts, or New York's government. She does
not trust the fast-moving culture in the city just beyond her nation's
borders, a culture that she blames for drug and alcohol abuse among the young.
She trusts only in the sense of permanence at Onondaga, an atmosphere she
sees as increasingly threatened, which to her should drive all decisions by her
people.
"I support the nation in every way to keep what we've got left, what little
we've got left," Dorothy said.
To make her point, she offered the story about Kellogg, an Oneida Indian from
Wisconsin. In the 1920s, long before Dorothy met her, Kellogg often
journeyed among the Indian territories of Upstate New York. She maintained the Six
Nations had been cheated of great swaths of land by state officials.
Kellogg needed money to pursue the case. Many Onondagas got behind her, swept
up by visions of a rich settlement. "People sold their hogs and cows and
horses to help," Dorothy said.
That court victory never happened. Amid the disappointment, angry Onondagas
removed their tadadaho, or spiritual leader, who had been a vocal supporter of
Kellogg.
The saga, for Dorothy, served as an early warning. It was reinforced when her
parents taught her the painful origins of her English name. Dorothy is a
direct descendant of Ephraim Webster, often described as the first white pioneer
in Central New York.
Ephraim, who married an Onondaga woman, was the interpreter for the disputed
1790s land deals in which the Onondagas turned over most of what is now
Central New York to state agents. Harry Webster, Ephraim's Onondaga son, would
grow up to serve as a 19th-century tadadaho.
Yet Ephraim left his Indian family to marry a white woman. According to old
records at the Onondaga Historical Association, he continued to live on land
he had received as a gift from the Onondagas. As an older man, Ephraim chose
to die among the Iroquois, but his will listed only his white wife and their
white children as his legal heirs.
In the 1830s, Harry went to court to claim a piece of his father's estate. If
you look at a map, you can clearly see it as a bite-sized chunk in the
corner of the Onondaga territory. That is land the Onondagas gave as a gift to
Ephraim Webster, who left none of it to his own Indian son.
The trial, by all accounts, was dramatic. You might call it the first
Onondaga land claim, although Dorothy mainly recalls a familiar precedent:
Harry lost.
She kept that in mind last March, when her people filed their court papers.
Throughout an interview, when Dorothy comes to an idea difficult to express,
she will sometimes turn to Onondaga words. She still "thinks in Indian,"
which puts her among the few surviving elders fluent in the old language. Some
concepts and ideas, Dorothy said, don't translate into English.
Without the language, that way of thinking would be lost for good.
To Dorothy, being Onondaga is about living on land that's never belonged to
anyone except her people, land where she's watching her own grandchildren grow
up. It is about the cornhusk dolls she makes each summer to sell at the
state fair. It is about the feeling she gets "when you leave the offramp and you
breathe that sigh of relief that now you're home."
And it is about the words, in her own tongue, that describe each of those
things.
One court ruling, then, is not enough to ruin her day. If Dorothy worries,
it's because she sees bigger things at risk.
Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Post-Standard. His columns appear Mondays,
Wednesdays and Fridays. Call him at 470-6015 or e-mail him at
_citynews@syracuse.com_ (mailto:citynews@syracuse.com) .

__________________
Don't worry that it's not good enough for anyone else to hear... just sing, sing a song.