As long as the moon shall rise, as long as the rivers flow,
As long as the sun will shine, as long as the grass shall grow.

The ancient history of the Allegheny is not well-known. The Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in southwestern Pennsylvania offered one of the first challenges to the idea that the Clovis came to North America first. Settlement there has been traced to 30,000 years ago (though this has been disputed by others who’ve never visited the site, on account for the “nearby” coal deposits that could change the dating, which are actually several miles away, too far to do any such thing). Meadowcroft offered shelter to passing groups all the way into the historic period, where things become somewhat clearer. It was about this time that the Onödowága’ (”People of the Great Hill,” better known to us as the Seneca), the “Keepers of the Western Door” of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) began moving south into the forest and settling it.

The Historic period witnessed the greatest population surges of Native peoples beginning with the expansion of the Seneca Iroquois out of their Genessee Valley homeland into the upper Allegheny River drainage. They established numerous villages along the Allegheny River including Buckaloons, Conewango, and Tidioute. Then between 1700 and 1780, these sites (and others) apparently supported a large population of emigrant natives pushed westward by European pressure in eastern Pennsylvania and were continually inhabited through the French and Indian War and the American Revolution.¹

The Seneca were the most populous of the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee, boasting the ability to raise 10,000 warriors in the seventeenth century. They were horticulturalists, and their villages in the Allegheny took the same approach.

These native groups were semisedentary horticulturists practicing swidden agriculture, whereby forests were cleared and burned to create open areas in which sunflower (Helianthus annuus), maize (Zeas mays), squash (Curcubita pepo), and beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) were cultivated. By AD 1500, settlements were large, palisaded villages with longhouses and garden plots capable of supporting up to 250–300 people. Based on archaeological reconstructions, the prehistoric landscape resembled a mosaic pattern of (i) active croplands near palisaded settlements, (ii) abandoned clearings with early-successional taxa, and (iii) open-forest stands dominated by fire-adapted species such as oak and hickory.²

The Senecas’ first contact with Europeans came with Dutch fur-trappers. With their holdings down the banks of the Allegheny, the Seneca found themselves caught between Britain’s colonies to the east, and New France to the north and west. Neither respected the claims of the Seneca or other Native groups to their lands, but the French were primarily a mercantile empire of fur-trappers and traders, while British colonialists came to settle, tear down the forests, and farm wheat. The French were often trading partners, while the British colonists more often sought the eradication of their “savage” neighbors. Many Native groups saw the French as a group they could live with more easily than the British, so when the French & Indian War began, the Seneca, like many others, sided with the French, though the Haudenosaunee League sided with the British. The French defeated limited Seneca expansion, and pushed them back towards the area that would become the Pennsylvania-New York border. Meanwhile, in exchange for the aid of most of the League, Britain issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763, restricting colonial settlement to east of the Appalachians.

The colonists generally ignored that rule, and continued to push westwards and wage an unofficial war on the Natives, so that when the colonies revolted against Britain, most Native groups allied with Britain against the colonists.

After the U.S. Revolution, Cornplanter was a chief
He told the tribe these men they could trust; that was his true belief.
He went down to Independence Hall and there was a treaty signed
That promised peace with the U.S.A. and Indian rights combined
George Washington gave his signature, the Government gave its hand;
They said that now and forever more that this was Indian land

When the “Thirteen Fires” began their rebellion against Britain, Guyasuta tried to urge the Seneca to remain neutral. Guyasuta had served as a scout for a 22-year old major in the Ohio country named George Washington, but later helped defeat Braddock’s attempt to seize the French position at Fort Duquesne (in modern-day downtown Pittsburgh, where several streets and neighborhoods still bear the name “Braddock”), and was one of the leaders of Pontiac’s Rebellion (in fact, some even call it the Pontiac-Guyasuta War).

Along with the renowned sachem, he brought his sister’s son by a Dutchman named John O’Bail. Eventually, he would be known as Gaiänt’wakê, or in English, Cornplanter. Together, they tried to keep the Seneca neutral in the coming war, but the other sachems had grown increasingly impatient with the ill treatment they suffered at the hands of the colonists, and hoped that by aiding Britain, they might help the royal government rein in its coloists, and stop their encroachment on their lands. Guyasuta and Cornplanter eventually consented. The reputation of the Seneca sachems as war chiefs swayed the rest of the Confederacy, and the Haudenosaunee threw their allegiance to the British.

Cornplanter’s Seneca joined the Mohawk of Joseph Brant and the Loyalist rangers of Lt. Col. John Butler, raiding rebel positions and supply lines after the battle of Saratoga. When the rebels attacked them at Wyoming Valley on 3 July 1778, they were routed. The Loyalists and Haudenosaunee hunted down the fleeing rebels, tortured, and killed them.

In retribution, Col. Thomas Hartley burned the Seneca town of Tioga. Walter Butler—John Butler’s son—went with Cornplanter and 300 Seneca to attack Cherry Valley. The couldn’t take the fort, but the Senecas began to attack the outlying village, killing some thirty civilians. There, the Senecas captured Cornplanter’s father, the Dutchman John O’Bail. Cornplanter had been raised by his mother, in a chiefly family of the Seneca, but as a young man he’d gone to seek out his father. Recognizing him, Cornplanter apologized and released him, giving him the choice of living with the Seneca, or returning to his white family. O’Bail chose the latter.

The anger over the Wyoming Valley and Cherry Valley massacres led General George Washington to commission Major General John Sullivan to invade the Haudenosaunee and burn their villages in retribution.

Orders of George Washington to General John Sullivan, at Head-Quarters May 31, 1779

The Expedition you are appointed to command is to be directed against the hostile tribes of the Six Nations of Indians, with their associates and adherents. The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements, and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.

I would recommend, that some post in the center of the Indian Country, should be occupied with all expedition, with a sufficient quantity of provisions whence parties should be detached to lay waste all the settlements around, with instructions to do it in the most effectual manner, that the country may not be merely overrun, but destroyed.

But you will not by any means listen to any overture of peace before the total ruinment of their settlements is effected. Our future security will be in their inability to injure us and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire them.

The Sullivan Expedition was a scorched earth campaign that wiped out 40 villages and huge swaths of Haudenosaunee gardens. At the same time, Colonel Daniel Brodhead marched north from Fort Pitt (the renamed Fort Duquesne once the British succeeded in capturing it, later giving its name to Pittsburgh), up the Allegheny River, destroying the Seneca villages along its banks. With most of the Seneca’s forces off to the east, Brodhead met with little resistance. The plan was to meet up with Sullivan’s forces at the Seneca village of Geneseo to attack Fort Niagra, but Brodhead turned back after destroying villages near modern-day Salamanca, New York, just over the Pennsylvania border.

The Sullivan Expedition devastated the Haudenosaunee. In the winter that followed—what they called “the winter of the deep snow”—many froze or starved to death. Cornplanter fought a desperate fight alongside Brant and Butler to buy time for refugrees, Native and European alike, to escape. There is debate over whether or not this is why the Haudenosaunee called George Washington “Town Destroyer.” Washington was disappointed at the lack of any major confrontation and the failure to take Fort Niagra. As one officer noted, “The nests are destroyed, but the birds are still on the wing.” The Haudenosaunee continued to raid rebel positions until the end of the war.

But Cornplanter saw that the expedition had done severe, long-lasting damage. The colonial rebellion had led to an imperial war around the globe, so when the French fleet joined the battle at Yorktown, Britain was forced to give up the colonies. Cornplanter negotiated with the new government, and signed the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1784. When the new country began punitive Indian Wars in Ohio and Indiana, Cornplanter was instrumental in maintaining the neutrality of the Haudenosaunee. He tried to negotiate with the Shawnee on behalf of the United States, and led a movement of assimilation. He was especially impressed by the Quakers. Pennsylvania had been formed as a colony by William Penn, the son of a friend of the king, who was given “Penn’s Woods” and turned it into a sanctuary for Quakers. Uniquely among the original colonies, Pennsylvania’s Quaker heritage led to a traditional of trying to deal honestly with Native peoples, though that changed as that tradition was diluted. By Cornplanter’s time, it had gone almost completely.

In 1790, Cornplanter complained to Washington about the mistreatment of his people. In 1794, fifty sachems and war chiefs signed the Canandaigua Treaty with Washington, including Cornplanter and his half-brother, Handsome Lake, establishing a permanent peace between the Haudenosaunee and the United States. Article three stated:

Now, the United States acknowledge all the land within the aforementioned boundaries, to be the property of the Seneca nation; and the United States will never claim the same, nor disturb that Seneca nation, nor any of the Six Nations, or their Indian friends residing thereon and united with them, in the free use and enjoyment thereof: but it shall remain theirs, until they choose to sell the same to the people of the United States, who have the right to purchase.

Part of that included the 1,500 acres of the Cornplanter Tract provided by Pennsylvania in 1796, along the western shores of the Allegheny River, to belong to Cornplanter and his heirs “forever.” By 1798, four hundred Seneca lived on the tract, including Cornplanter himself and his half-brother by his Seneca mother, Handsome Lake. In 1821, Warren County tried to force Cornplanter to pay taxes on the land, but Cornplanter insisted that the land had been granted to him by the U.S. government—Pennsylvania eventually agreed.

It was on the tract that Handsome Lake began to recieve his three visions in 1799. Handsome Lake had fought with his uncle Guyasuta in Pontiac’s Rebellion, and in the Revolution alongside Cornplanter. He had struggled with alcoholism all his life, and an apparently near-fatal illness just before the visions began. Handsome Lake came to be regarded as a prophet; the “Longhouse Religion” he preached wove in elements of Quakerism, while appealing to traditional ways and adapting them to the new reservation setting. It condemned the abuse of alcohol, and called for the continuation of Native ceremonies.

By this time, Cornplanter had grown disgusted with the mistreatment his people suffered at the hands of the country he’d submitted to. He renounced his former position of assimilation, and joined his half-brother’s cultural defiance. He burned his military uniform, broke his sword, and destroyed his medals. When he died in 1836 at the age of 86, he requested that he be buried on his tract, a tract now made sacred for the Gai-Wiio (”Good message”) that his half-brother had begun there, without any marker.

On the Seneca reservation there is much sadness now.
Washington’s treaty has been broken, and there is no hope, no how.
Across the Allegheny River they’re throwing up a dam.
It will flood the Indian country—a proud day for Uncle Sam.
It has broke the ancient treaty with a politician’s grin.
It will drown the Indians graveyards—Cornplanter can you swim?
The earth is mother to the the Senecas; they’re trampling sacred ground.
Change the mint green earth to black mud flats as honor hobbles down.

Already we’ve mentioned Fort Duquesne, which became Fort Pitt. Guyasuta distinguished himself stopping the British under Braddock from taking Fort Duquesne; as the British Fort Pitt, it served as the staging point of Brodhead’s march up the Allegheny. This point is made such a recurring character in history by its geographical virtues. The Allegheny runs from the north, draining western New York and northwestern Pennsylvania, the site of the world’s first oil boom, where Edwin Drake drilled the first commercial oil well in the United States. The Monongahela flows north, up from the mountains of West Virginia and its enormous coal mines. They combine at this point to form the Ohio, one of the main rivers that feed into the Mississippi, and out into the Gulf of Mexico. So here, the Allegheny and Monongahela feed in some of the most important resources of the past centuries, and feed them into one of the best water travel routes in North America. It was a site perfect for the Industrial Revolution, and after the British siezed Fort Duquesne during the French & Indian War and renamed it for the British Secretary of State, William Pitt the Elder, the town of Pittsburgh that grew up around it reaped the benefit. During the Civil War, the Allegheny was deforested for bark to make tannin for leather, shipped down the Allegheny River to Pittsburgh, where they processed it to provide the majority of the leather for the Union Army. Later, it became the “Steel City,” fueled with coal from West Virgina where mining denuded what would later be protected by the Monongahela National Forest. Pittsburgh, sitting on three rivers, always had a certain potential for flooding. With the forests at the headwaters of the two rivers that fed it destroyed, that flooding became even worse.

Today, Pittsburgh does not suffer floods like it used to. Today, the city is protected by a series of locks and dams that regulate the water level. Part of that system is the Kinzua Dam, nearly 200 miles north of Pittsburgh. Kinzua still bears a Seneca name, given to let anglers know that it was a good place to fish. Even today, its 500,000 cubic yards of concrete, reaching 179 feet high, constitute one of the biggest dams in the United States east of the Mississippi. It controls drainage over a watershed of 2,180 square miles—twice the size of Rhode Island, and it provides hydroelectric power to the immediate region. It also created Pennsylvaia’s deepest lake, the Allegheny Reservoir, fluctuating between 21,180 and 12,080 acres—a lake that put Cornplanter’s Grant underwater, wiped out Pennsylvania’s last reservation, and forced the relocation of some 700 Seneca to the Allegany Reservation in New York, around Salamanca, in one of the great injustices of the United States government against Native peoples in the twentieth century, breaking the oldest active treaty the United States had, signed by the “Father of Our Country” himself.

In 1939 and 1940, the Army Corps of Engineers sent surveyors to the Cornplanter Tract. The Seneca had not been told of what they were planning, and assumed the surveyors’ purposes were benign. World War II interrupted the effort, but in the 1950’s, the Corps returned.

The engineers made their surveys and left, and in 1956 the Senecas were startled to learn that Congress had appropriated funds for plans for Kinzua Dam. Hearings had been held in Washington, and the engineers had testified, but the Indians had neither been invited to the hearings nor been informed that they were occurring. Now thoroughly alarmed, the Senecas and their tribal attorney moved quickly on two fronts. First they sought an injunction to keep the engineers off their land. Next, recognizing the need for flood control, they hired two eminent private engineers, Dr. Arthur E. Morgan, a former chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and Barton M. Jones, who had built the T.V.A.’s Norris Dam, to make an independent study of the need for Kinzua Dam and, if possible, to propose an alternative dam site that would not involve the flooding of their lands.

The cat was now out of the bag. Newspapers began to publicize the Senecas’ plight, and angry congressmen claimed that the engineers had misled them, that they had not been informed about the treaty. But if the engineers were chagrined, they failed to show it. Ignoring their critics, they got federal courts, early in 1957, to uphold their right to continue to make surveys on the reservation. And that same year, when Morgan and Jones presented an alternative plan for diverting Allegheny flood waters into Lake Erie at what they claimed was a cheaper cost than the Kinzua project, and without inundating reservation land, the engineers testified successfully against it in Congress (with “explicit misstatements and misrepresentations,” according to Dr. Morgan) and won another one million dollar appropriation to complete the planning and begin the construction of Kinzua Dam.

The Indians had friends, in and out of Congress, but not enough of them. Dr. Morgan produced still another alternative proposal—a dam site that would not involve any Indian lands—but a study sponsored by the engineers concluded that Dr. Morgan’s dam would cost more money and take longer to build. Morgan and the Senecas did not agree, and sought an independent comparison, but the engineers prevailed on the Senate to turn aside this request. Treaty or no treaty, the engineers were not going to risk a reversal of their plan, which now, it was revealed, would necessitate the condemnation of slightly more than 10,000 acres of the Indians’ habitable land (leaving them only 2,300 on which they could live); the moving of 134 families, or about 700 people, more than one third of the population of the reservation; the relocation of about 3,000 Seneca graves; and the inundation of the Cornplanter grant in Pennsylvania.³

The Seneca engaged in a massive legal battle, aided by the Society of Friends (the Quakers), among others. The case brought significant public attention, including a song by Peter La Farge titled “As Long as the Grass Shall Grow,” made famous by Johnny Cash when he performed it as the first track on his 1964 album, Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian. One Seneca woman called the cemetary “our Arlington.” Congressman John Saylor of Pennsylvania berated a Corps witness before Congress: “Apparently you have become so calloused and so crass that the breaking of the oldest treaty that the United States has is a matter of little concern to you. … the Corps of Engineers has never intended to do anything whatsoever with regard to the Seneca Indians, and they have intended from the very beginning to treat this as just any other dam and leave the Indians only their recourse in the courts.” Saylor’s rhetoric would prove to be painfully true. The Seneca pointed to the treaty, but the Corps cited eminent domain. The Supreme Court sided with the Corps, ruling that since the United States signed the treaty, they can also break it.

The Seneca and their legal allies appealed to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, only to be refused. They offered viable alternatives, but the Corps would not even consider them. Even the site of a relocated cemetary that would have been closer to the old tract was rejected—the Corps said it was absolutely vital to the project. It was needed for a “recreation area.”

Officially, Cornplanter’s remains were removed, along with others buried there, to a cemetary on the opposite side of the river, where a stone monument now marks the grave of the Seneca sachem who finally put his trust in the faithfulness of the colonists, and asked to be buried without any marker. But the Senecas are not so sure.

To the Senccas, the new body of water behind Kinzua Dam is known today as Lake Perfidy. And many a bitter Seneca tells his children and grandchildren that no one knows for sure whose bones lie beneath the transplanted monument above the lake: the way the moving took place, the remains could be those of another Indian from the old cemetery. The great Cornplanter, perhaps, now rests beneath the waters of the reservoir.⁴

The Cornplanter Seneca were removed to the Allegany Reservation around Salamanca, just over the border in New York, where the northern reaches of the Allegheny Reservoir sometimes reach. They originally hoped to create a theme park called “Iroquoia” to help their economy, along the northern shores of the reservoir, a kind of Native American Williamsburg where tourists could see life as it was lived by Haudenosaunee before they were settled onto reservations. But the Reservoir is very fickle, and it’s the northern reaches that see the most variation. Sometimes the waters reach that far north, but more often, they simply leave mud flats. While the southern areas closer to the dam, near where the Cornplanter Tract once stood, have seen a significant influx of tourist money, the northern reaches where the Seneca were resettled have very little potential for the same.

The Iroquios Indians used to rule from Canada way south,
But no one fears the Indians now and smiles the liar’s mouth.
The Senecas hired an expert to figure another site,
But the great good army engineers said that he had no right.
Although he showed them another plan and showed them another way
They laughed in his face and said, “No deal! Kinuza dam is here to stay!”
Congress turned the Indians down brushed off the Indians plea,
So the Senecas have renamed the dam—they call it Lake Perfidy.

Dams generally have profoundly negative ecological impacts. They alter flow regimes, cut off fish breeding populations, remove sediment, and starve rivers. They decimate not only riparian ecologies, but whole watersheds, and all the ecologies those rivers drain. Few things are as unequivocally disastrous for a local ecology than a dam. Kinzua caused the relocation of the region’s Native Homo sapiens population, but other species have suffered, too.

The Army Corps of Engineers claims that the dam actually helps fish populations: “the oxygen rich tailwaters of the dam has added to the fish population.”⁵ The Allegheny is certainly an important ecology for many species of fish.

The Allegheny River drainage in southwestern New York supports a diverse fish fauna that includes reports of 95 species. Of these, nine species are classified as endangered, threatened, or of special concern in New York; this number represents 38% of the listed species in the state. Thirteen of the 95 species are reported only from the Allegheny River drainage and have not been found in other New York drainages. Eleven species are introduced, and four may have migrated into the drainage recently. Individual waters with high species richness, 46-67 species, include the Allegheny River, French Creek, Olean Creek, and Chautauqua Lake. The ichthyofauna of the Allegheny River drainage is important because of the number of rare fish species present in the drainage when compared to other New York drainages.⁶

But the case of the gilt darter does not suggest that Kinzua stands out as a radical departure from the usual role dams play as “ecological catastrophe.”

The gilt darter has declined in numbers throughout its range. This fish is quite intolerant of slow water and silt, and given this information, recent declines in New York’s Allegheny River populations are being attributed to siltation of the river. Since the Kinzua dam in northern Pennsylvania prevents any upstream movement of that state’s gilt darter populations, New York’s population is now isolated from its historically broader genetic base.⁷

Few extensive studies have been conducted, but what work has been done shows that the Kinzua Dam is having typical—that is, disastrous—effects on its ecology. Like most dams, Kinzua regulates water flow, destroying the sometimes-shallow and sometimes-wide fluctuations seen in wild rivers, a pattern that fosters biodiversity.

The federally-listed clubshell and northern riffleshell mussels are thought to exist in only eight to ten small isolated populations throughout their formerly extensive geographic ranges; some of the largest of these populations are found in the upper Allegheny River. The preferred habitats of both species are associated with shallow water, typically the coarse sand and gravel deposits found in runs or just downstream of rifles. As filter feeders in these sites, mussel populations are thus sensitive to siltation, both due to suffocation associated with the infilling of finer texture sediments and to the deleterious effects of pollutants attached to sediments. Further, these species are dependent on parasitizing host fish during larval stages, and their dispersal to new sites is a function of host fish migration, which may often be disrupted by dams. Changes in the flow regime introduced by Kinzua Dam are consistent with these factors contributing to mussel declines, including likely alterations in availability of coarse sediment and shallow water habitat.⁸

Information on Kinzua’s ecological effects is typically difficult to come by, but what quickly emerges is that Kinzua has had an effect on the Allegheny similar to the effect most dams have: that of an ecological disaster. The Allegheny provides some of the greatest riparian biodiversity in New York or Pennsylvania, an ecosystem that is quickly dying because of Lake Perfidy.

Washington, Adams and Kennedy now hear their pledges ring—
The treaties are safe, we’ll keep our word, but what is that gurgling?
It’s the back water from Perfidy Lake—it’s rising all the time
Over the homes and over the fields and over the promises fine.
No boats will sail on Lake Perfidy; in winter it will fill,
In summer it will be a swamp and all the fish will kill.
But the Government of the U.S.A. has corrected George’s vow;
The father of our country must be wrong. What’s an Indian anyhow?

The dam was completed in 1965, and over forty years later, the Seneca remain bitter over their treatment, and with good reason—particularly since it hasn’t stopped. Maurice John is currently the president of the Seneca Nation of Indians, a position that switches regularly between the Cattaraugus and Allegany reservations. John comes from the Allegany reservation, but he comes originally from the Cornplanter Tract. He was a teenager when the Army Corps “relocated” him and his family.

My father had to watch while the government pulled down trees and set them on fire. Our homes were destroyed. The bones of our ancestors were taken from the ground and thrown into boxes. I think about all that every day.

The Kinzua Dam is important, but only because it serves as a reminder. It can’t help me to solve any government situation, but it can make us strong.⁹

Gov. Eliot Spitzer claims that the Seneca owe $200 million in taxes from cigarette sales to non-Seneca, essentially another claim against the Senecas’ sovereignty. A lawsuit is now aimed to stop the building of the Buffalo Creek casino, during which a judge has attempted to subpoena Seneca records to see how they spend their casino profits.

To us, it can seem trivial: cigarettes and gambling. Is this what the People of the Great Hill have been reduced to? But for a people betrayed and hunted as they have been, their hope now is to make a living with the only thing they have left—their sovereignty. Tax-free cigarettes and legal gambling are ways they can do that. These lawsuits are about more than state taxes or stopping petty vices like smoking or gambling; for the Seneca, they strike at the only thing left after Kinzua’s betrayal, their sovereignty. President John prays that a settlement can be made, but fears the worst.

As president, I’m doing everything I can to prevent violence from happening. But as we sit here today, I can’t guarantee that won’t happen. I can’t control every Seneca, just as Eliot Spitzer can’t control every state trooper. We are a warrior society. We’ve always fought oppression. It’s in our DNA. You can’t expect us to sit back and let New York State take our livelihood away. … I worry about my people. There are more troopers than there are natives.

In recent years, despite the condemnations of their chiefs, groups like the Mohawk Warrior Society have dared the governments of the United States and Canada in more recent betrayals—often with tragic results. At Oka and Caledonia, angry Haudenosaunee tried to face down the treacherous governments of the First World. Neither incident ended well.

Cornplanter earned a place in Seneca history because he first distinguished himself in war against the colonists, and later found the still-greater courage it took to trust them. He gave up war to plant crops—to become Cornplanter—and to try to sow peace between his people and the new-comers. His half-brother became one of the greatest Haudenosaunee religious figures since the Great Peacemaker by weaving together traditional Haudenosaunee religion and the faith of the Quakers. The Cornplanter Tract was where all those strings came together; Cornplanter’s trust made manifest in the United States’ oldest treaty, signed by Washington himself; the site where Handsome Lake recieved his visions, and where the Cold Spring Longhouse stood.

Today, it is drowned beneath Lake Perfidy. The Kinzua Dam roars almost as loudly as Cornplanter might have. The irony runs deep—no ordinary Seneca site, but the very sacred ground where the Seneca nation placed its faith in Europeans, now lies drowned beneath the waters of their greatest lies. The Cornplanter Tract was sacred ground, a testament to the vision that two people might find peace and trust in one another. Lake Perfidy is a monument now to Cornplanter’s naïveté in that courageous trust, and a reminder that no matter how sacred the vow, the State will never hesitate to break it.

As long as the moon shall rise…
Look up.
As long as the rivers flow…
Are you thirsty?
As long as the sun will shine…
My brother, are you warm?
As long as the grass shall grow…