New York Faces Painful History as It Marks the Erie Canal's Bicentennial.

Last edited Sun Sep 28, 2025, 10:42 PM - Edit history (1)

the 200th anniversary of the Erie Canal approaches on Oct. 26, organizers are seeking to temper the celebration with an acknowledgment of the waterway’s displacement of Native American communities.

'On an October morning in 1825, Gov. DeWitt Clinton of New York stood at the head of a flotilla of dignitaries at the inauguration of the Erie Canal, the 360-mile artificial waterway that stretches from Lake Erie’s eastern shore in Buffalo to Albany on the Hudson River.

The boat carrying Governor Clinton was called the Seneca Chief, a reference to the Indigenous nation that, together with the rest of the Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois) Confederacy, had dominated western and central New York for centuries.

Farther back in the procession was another boat, called Noah’s Ark, which unlike the Seneca Chief, actually carried members of the tribe. They shared the vessel with eagles, deer and a bear, as part of a dehumanizing sideshow.
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This fall, as New York marks the Oct. 26 bicentennial, or 200th anniversary, of the Erie Canal, which helped open up regions west of New York for the young United States, organizers are attempting to balance celebration with reflection on some of the painful history that accompanied the achievement.

In the decades before the canal opened, Haudenosaunee nations lost vast expanses of territory, largely through treaties and sales now considered fraudulent. Many of the canal’s leading proponents profited directly from transactions that separated Indigenous people from their land.

“We as Haudenosaunee people were right in the way, all across the state,” said Melissa Parker Leonard, who traces her Seneca heritage back to the 18th century and runs an advocacy organization called 7th Gen Cultural Resources. “When the canal opened, it was like the last step to really remove us,” she added.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/28/nyregion/erie-canal-bicentennial.html