The Cultural Landscape of Onondaga Lake
Our goal in this website is to introduce you to some of the plants and animals historically present at Onondaga Lake, including those that were part of the cultural landscape. You’ll discover that Onondaga Lake, far from being a hazardous morass, was a rich and productive ecosystem, a storehouse of food and materials. Its unique plant communities also made it a magnet for prominent botanists during the early 1800s. Many of these plants can still be found in the Onondaga area. Once you know them, you may want to grow them; they are parts of our biological and historical heritage, as well as valuable landscape plants.
Not so long ago, Onondaga Lake was surrounded by a diversity of wetland and upland habitats. At the time Europeans first arrived, cedar swamps and red maple swamps filled the low ground surrounding the lake, punctuated by openings where
inland salt marshes grew around saline springs. Wild rice, bulrush, cattail, and arrowhead extended into the shallow lake waters to form emergent wetlands. Around the lake grew orchids and feather mosses; coffee tree and toothache tree; buttonbush, buttonwood, and butternut; walking fern and royal fern, all within walking distance of one another. Sugar maple, basswood, chestnut, oak, and black cherry covered surrounding hills.
Native people relied on local plants to provide food, medicine, shelter, firewood, and dyes. Rather than drain the swamps or clear forests to cultivate land, they found materials they needed in the natural communities around them. They certainly extracted materials from these places via hunting, trapping, fishing, and gathering; but they had no incentive to drain and fill the wetlands, any more than we would tear down Wegman’s or Home Depot. Further, they not only took materials from these sites, but gave back, engaging in some tending and propagule dispersal in order to enhance production. It was an economic system in which people, forests, wetlands, meadows survived and thrived over millennia. Wealth lay in leaving landscapes relatively intact, not in razing or filling them for single-commodity production, or “improving” the land by draining or straightening.
Many plants in this book were used by native people but also, in some cases, by the Euro-American immigrants who settled here. In finding cultural information about plant use, I have cast a wide net, including native peoples from across North America as well as immigrant culture. My goal is to include plants important to human cultures generally. Moreover, we may never know the full suite of plant use by native people here. Disease epidemics (smallpox) swept through Haudenosaunee homelands in 1640-1650 (Richter 1991). Wars, acculturation, and alcohol also caused cultural disruption hundreds of years before ethnographic studies were conducted in the late 19th century. Explorers, diplomats, and missionaries, the people who left written records, were generally men who spoke to men, and this dynamic alone creates a one-sided view of these cultures (especially important in the realm of plants, where women often held great knowledge). Nonetheless we can find valuable evidence in journals of explorers and missionaries. Combining their works with existing ethnographic data, archaeology, and oral history [??maybe], we have put together this website.
The Onondaga people are not a thing of the past, and not mere “history,” though they have a long history with this place we call Onondaga. People have lived in this area for about 9,000 years, since the end of the last Ice Age. The Onondagas and their culture have survived despite both historical and ongoing threats and assaults to both. Today the Onondaga are deeply engaged in the process of Onondaga Lake cleanup and land healing. In fact, another purpose of this booklet is to learn about the way people once lived with the natural communities around Onondaga Lake, with an eye towards the kind of relationship we would like to have with the lake now. Imagine, for example, wading into wetlands near the Lake’s Fairground access to feel with your toes for Sagittaria tubers you’re collecting to roast for supper. Edible tubers from Onondaga Lake sediments? After two centuries of reckless chemical dumping it sounds impossible, maybe; but in 200, 500, 1000 years, if we put our minds together as one, such dreams could happen.
I’ve organized the website by habitat types, beginning with wetlands. Immigrant cultures shunned the wetlands and drained or filled them as soon as they could—with some good reason, given the specter of serious illness that hung over these habitats. Malaria, aka fall fever or ague, was an ever-present danger. De Witt Clinton (1849) described entering the Seneca River corridor near Onondaga Lake as though “entering the valley of the shadow” of death, and further observed that the “uninclosed burying ground [at Salina] indicates great mortality.” But were natural wetlands the source of malarial infections? Or were the majority of vector insects produced in disturbed sites of human creation (such as drainage ditches, mill ponds, etc.)? I won’t try to answer that question here, but see the entry for “Red Mill Pond” (in the section, Index to Place) for more details.
Subsistence and the Onondaga landscape
Before Euro-American invaders arrived, the economic relationship with the lake was one of subsistence. “Subsistence” might bring to mind eking out a meager living by scratching out roots and berries, and snaring the occasional rabbit. In fact, subsistence cultures have their own forms of wealth. In these economies, wealth does not come from harvest or extraction of commodity products for global markets. Rather, it comes from healthy, biodiverse landscapes and good working relationships with the beings in those landscapes. Reciprocity is crucial:
The ethic of reciprocity embodies the idea that the land provides for the people and the people, in turn, must care for the land. A landscape is seen as whole and healthy when it can provide enough to share with the people. The goal of restoring subsistence raises the standards for ecological integrity. It is not sufficient to restore a fish population and then issue an advisory against eating those fish due to contamination. (Kimmerer 2011 p. 260)
Subsistence cultures can be more healthy and have more leisure time than capitalist ones. [get some data to back up this statement.]
In a subsistence economy, people learn to rely almost wholly on local food, water, and other materials to support their livelihood. To us, it would seem great deprivation to live without the flow of goods from around the globe; we would be helpless and lost. People here, however, knew how to draw what they needed from the surrounding forest. The extent of their skill and knowledge with respect to this technology is suggested by this passage from the Jesuit Relations of 1656 (Thwaites 1899 vol 43, chapter 4):
We landed, and our Ship Carpenters found everywhere material enough wherewith to build a vessel in less than a day,--that is, our Savages had no difficulty in procuring what was needed to make the gondolas which carried our baggage and ourselves. The Architects of this country build their Houses, Palaces, and Ships much more rapidly than those of Europe; and, if one be not lodged there so sumptuously, still one often dwells there in greater comfort and gladness.
In other words, they (possibly Huron or Iroquois guides) easily fabricated canoes from materials at hand in the very forest through which they travelled. I remember Jeanne Shenandoah once saying, “Everything we need is right around us,” including medicines, food, as well as materials to construct houses and boats. Her statement is not metaphorical, but represents a profound expression of “localism,” informed over many generations (Dan Wildcat’s term, “indigenuity” might fit here). Many people talk these days about developing local economies, including “locavore” diets. We have models for this way of life in the subsistence ways of the indigenous people who lived here for millennia and continue to be part of our communities.
A better term for what we call “subsistence” might be “wealth” (Deur and Turner 2005). Not in the sense of Wall Street numbers, but something closer to the land which is our home. Referring to the abundant resources available in Pacific Northwest ecosystems, the authors points out:
If creation is complete there is no need for development. In this view, in the midst of abundance, “subsistence” is not an appropriate descriptor. . . . [W]ealth is not created by human development but by what the Creator has created, and humans merely then tend, nurture, and respectfully, thankfully, take what is needed. Where people seek balance and harmony as a way of life, the earth and its resources become equal partners in an endless cycle of respectful life. The word “subsistence” makes sense only from a Western worldview, which demands that humans dominate the environment and profit from it.
The abundance of North America was featured in the journals of many early explorers, missionaries and settlers from New England (Cronan 1983) to Florida. In central New York it was the French who wrote about the millions of pigeons (passenger), the prodigious numbers of salmon and eel, the wealth of standing timber and furbearers such as beaver (Thwaites 1899).
This “wealth” in subsistence cultures takes the form of ecological capital—what environmental historian William Cronan (1983) referred to as the “ecological cornucopia” of goods and materials. For anyone today seeking models of sustainability, these indigenous cultures found ways to live at the overlap where eco-nomy and eco-logy not only intersect, but overlap.
Ecological capital is stored in ecological communities. An ecological community is a variable assemblage of interacting plant and animal populations that share a common environment (Edinger et al. 2002). Such places represent recurring patterns of plant presence across the landscape. Of course, “communities” is just a convenient way for the human mind to divide up the landscape into pieces it can take in and recognize. I’ve divided the plant communities into wetland and upland habitats. These broader categories are introduced in general terms, followed by the plant communities that fit under each of these headings. I hope you enjoy this website and learn something about the history and nature of this place we call Onondaga or “Syracuse,” as you peruse the text and pictures.