The Onondagas, echoing other Iroquois land claims, say the state deals were made in defiance of specific federal protection. They also maintain that the interpreter on those deals, Ephraim Webster, was an unpredictable flimflam man who married an Onondaga woman, dumped her after the land deals to return to white culture and a white wife, then in death denied his Onondaga son any part of family land that had been a direct gift from the Onondagas. Still, Derrick has reason to be nervous about local response to the claim. She is an Onondaga because her lineage was determined by her mother. But her father was an Oneida, one of the founders of the Indian Village at the State Fairgrounds.
Derrick is painfully aware of the tension surrounding the Oneida land claim.
A few weeks ago, a hate group sent out an anonymous warning, threatening to murder Oneida Indians beginning on Thanksgiving Day. I can't understand. But people all over the world are going crazy. She is optimistic, she said, that reaction in Syracuse will be different. The city and the Onondaga Nation have co-existed quietly since the 1800s.