"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."

Get the Story:
Sean Kirst: Claims come and go, clan mother keeps values (The Syracuse Post-Standard 7/15)

Relevant Links:
Onondaga Nation - http://www.onondaganation.org

Related Stories:
Onondaga Nation pushes for cleanup of lake (04/26)
Onondaga Nation not worried about internal spats (03/21)
Onondaga Nation makes history with land claim (3/14)
Onondaga Nation names state, companies in land claim (3/11)