Tadodaho Sidney Hill with Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar (right) and Jamon Paskernin (2012, White House Tribal Nations Conference).

At Chancellor Nancy Cantor’s Convocation for New Students at Syracuse University on August 23, the Thanksgiving Address was offered by Tadodaho Sidney Hill in his language—an English translation was provided on the electronic message board in the Carrier Dome, the huge athletic stadium on campus. The Tadodaho is the Spiritual Leader of the Haudenosaunee or Six Nations/Iroquois Confederacy, which includes the Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, Mohawk, Seneca, and Tuscarora peoples. The ancestral lands cover 4,000 square miles in central and northern New York. The is the territory where novelist James Fenimore Cooper set his Leatherstocking Tales (1827-1841 publications with stories set from 1740 to 1804).

In his address to students, faculty, staff, and families, Tadodaho Sidney Hill stressed the need to strive for peace and harmony in society and in our relationship to the Earth and Sky. His presence on the stage and voice in the Dome were powerful reminders of the human roots of our continent stretching back thousands of years. I was impressed at how warmly he was embraced by the Syracuse community. The heritage of native peoples is much more pronounced in that region than in our own, something we may want to think about more in the Merrimack Valley.

As Tadodaho since 2002, Sidney Hill is the most important Native American chief in the state of New York. He is of the Onondaga Nation, whose land and people are found in the area south of the city of Syracuse, N.Y. Among his other responsibilities, through 2012 he was one of the many bloggers gathered under the Huffington Post masthead.

Here is a sample of one of the Tadodaho’s blog posts for HuffPo.

Hat tip to Wikipedia for certain facts in the post.