The Onondaga filed suit seeking stewardship and healing, not property

Evidence

The Onondaga people wish to bring about a healing between themselves and all others who live in this region that has been the homeland of the Onondaga Nation since the dawn of time. The Nation and its people have a unique spiritual, cultural, and historic relationship with the land, which is embodied in Gayanashagowa, the Great Law of Peace. This relationship goes far beyond federal and state legal concerns of ownership, possession, or other legal rights. The people are one with the land and consider themselves stewards of it. It is the duty of the Nation’s leaders to work for a healing of this land, to protect it, and to pass it on to future generations. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 1170

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distills what stewardship-relation to land means in formal legal language, in contrast to ownership—a core bridging concept for Legal Systems.
• XREF: Parallels the ‘right of the land to be whole’ language that appears in Earth rights scholarship and in ch13’s animacy-grammar argument about legal standing for other species. — connects to: Land dispossession tied Onondaga hands but never broke their stewardship covenant — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 1165; The Onondaga framed their suit as seeking justice for all creation — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 1178
• SEED: The passage itself is quotable legal text — usable as epigraph or exhition in the reader’s integrative piece contrasting commons/stewardship and property framings.

Broader Connections

• The Onondaga framed their suit as seeking justice for all creation #corroborates (0.90) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 1178