Leslie Logan
Special to ICT
Native people have been forced to leave their earth lodges and walk to strange new lands where they’ve had to live in tents or ramshackle wood homes. We have lived in rundown government housing and double-wide and single-wide trailers. Too often, we have been unable to afford to buy a well-built home – the proverbial “American Dream.”
I am Seneca. The lands our ancestors called home, the soil that massaged our feet and that we shared with animal and plant relatives, stretched beyond our horizons. Although we had long-term settlements in the woodlands of the Northeast, we made adjustments, sometimes moving and changing with the seasons and our needs. Our homelands were vast regions spanning millions of acres that those early stumblers upon the eastern seaboard deemed undisturbed.
As one of the original five nations of Haudenosaunee – people of the Longhouse; formerly referred to as the Iroquois Confederacy – the Seneca were the “Keepers of the Western Door” safeguarding the western front of the Confederacy in what is now called New York State. Historians have called the Seneca the largest and most powerful of the five nations.
The Seneca or Onödowá’ga:’ the People of the Great Hill, as we call ourselves, were spread throughout a swath of lands across what is now 14 counties in central and western New York, western Pennsylvania, a portion of southern Ontario, Canada, and throughout the Ohio and Allegheny river systems. General George Washington’s scorched-earth military campaign under generals James Clinton and John Sullivan in 1779 ensured the Seneca were run out of the Finger Lakes region. The Seneca fled westward and were later removed from the Genesee Valley, defrauded by land companies, illegal takings, and federal treaties; thus moving further westward to the present-day Buffalo-Niagara frontier.
Today, the people of the Seneca Nation have been reduced to little more than 52,000 acres across three territories: Cattaraugus, Allegany, and Oil Spring—the latter being a small one-square mile tract of land on Cuba Lake that houses a Seneca Nation business, but no residents. The Seneca Nation is comprised of just over 8,400 citizens, approximately half of whom live on the Cattaraugus and Allegany territories, and off-territory in Western New York.
While the population of Seneca citizens increases, the land available upon which we can live, grow, and prosper is static and limited. Not only is it increasingly difficult, if not next to impossible, to acquire land on territory these days, it is difficult for your average tribal citizen to obtain the substantial lending needed to purchase or build a home on territory.
There are underlying social and economic problems that impact home ownership for Native people. The poverty rate, approaching 30 percent on tribal lands, results in an inability to qualify for home mortgages. This typically means high incidences of poor credit, non-existent credit, and blemished credit histories.
According to the National Low Income Housing Council, nearly half of home loan applications to Native Americans on reservations are denied.
In addition, because reservation lands are held in trust by the federal government, they cannot be sold or used as collateral for mortgage loans and cannot be seized by a lender if the borrower defaults on the mortgage. Lending is enabled largely if tribally backed mortgage programs are in place in the event of foreclosure.
Federal housing programs offered through the Seneca Nation are largely responsible for creating a pathway to home ownership for many Seneca people. Without these programs, few people would be able to access home mortgages.
In the Fall of 2022, a New York Times reporter was covering the gaming compact dispute that had been raging between the Seneca Nation and New York State since 2016. The Seneca Nation’s 14-year compact had expired but came with an automatic seven-year renewal. The compact was silent on whether revenue share would continue in the renewal period. A dispute ensued after the Seneca claimed they were no longer obligated to pay; the state maintained that revenue share automatically continued at a 25 percent share of the “net slot drop” during the extended period. In 2019, two arbiters of a three-member arbitration panel determined in favor of the state, awarding more than $200 million dollars to New York coffers that the Seneca had held in escrow. The dispute continued for three more years as the tally grew and the Senecas refused to pay, maintaining their position.
In March 2022, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul froze the Seneca Nation’s bank accounts, paralyzing the tribe’s economy. Seneca Nation officials, unable to make payroll for 3,400 employees, eventually forked over more than half a billion dollars in revenue-share back payments to the state.
The New York Times reporter proposed a story centered on what the Senecas could have done with half a billion dollars, had they prevailed. In short, the answer was “a lot.”
The Seneca Nation reportedly pulls in approximately $370 million in revenues annually, but those funds supplement federal funding for health, education and social services, as well as individual distribution payments to its citizens. Substantial unmet needs remain within the community covering a range of social issues.
A half a billion dollars could have been used to further improve health services, provide better mental health care, create rehabilitation and recovery facilities, fortify Seneca language preservation efforts, improve educational and professional development opportunities, support elder and assisted-living centers and programming, help to improve existing housing structures, and build needed housing.
Citizens on territory with decent housing have typically been those at the ends of the financial spectrum – those that are either financially able to afford to build or purchase prefab homes on their own or low-income earners who qualify for federal housing programs. To compound matters, the Seneca Nation is highly political, where job security is often weaponized as part of election campaigns, making employment longevity an uncertain proposition. Inability to maintain employment impacts ability to secure lending and make good on mortgage payments.
I shared with the reporter the many needs and ways in which the Nation could have invested half a billion dollars into the community instead of fattening the state – which has historically taken so much from the Seneca. Housing was at the top of the list.
I am one of the lucky ones: I own property on the territory and a home; not all Senecas are so fortunate. However, for 14 years my house has been an old, run-down mobile home pushing 30 years that I fondly refer to as my “dumpy double-wide.”
I have never heard anyone boast about living in a double-wide. Country singers glorify them crooning about a “Double Wide Dream” and a “Double Wide Paradise,” but along with the redneck references, these ballads are a nod to a lower socioeconomic class in rural America. Living in a double-wide is neither a dream nor paradise; it isn’t often a choice, it’s the only option available given economic circumstances.
When I moved into the one I purchased, I told a friend that double-wides these days are different – some have vaulted ceilings and fireplaces with more room than you imagine, and they are much nicer than they used to be. I told her mine, however, wasn’t one of those.
Fourteen years ago, I was able to purchase my double-wide and the nearly two acres it sat on. When I bought the double-wide, it had been occupied by two families previously and was already in rough shape. It hadn’t been lived in for a bit. Mice had become emboldened and raced around the floors under our feet in broad daylight. While we got them under control, mold had taken over in closets. The moon roofs leaked, leaving ugly stains on the ceilings and the paint puckered and peeled off. Several windows were warped and rotted – so much so that moss grew in the front picture window and the window in my bedroom wouldn’t latch and close properly. The kitchen sink would clog and wouldn’t drain and cabinet drawers were altogether broken and missing front facings; the cheap, flimsy kitchen shelves were either cracked or bowed under the weight of canned goods.
Every year as the temperatures warmed, we had to lug heavy, awkward air-conditioning units in from the garage and struggled to align them in windows. They never fit properly and I had to jerry-rig cardboard and duct tape to the window frames and stake rakes and other implements under them to keep them upright and in place. The floor in my bedroom got soft and sunk where an a/c unit had perspired and dripped. The structure was highly energy inefficient and expensive to heat.
The place was a rezzed-out eyesore inside and out. But it was mine. It was the only home we had to live in, and I made it as homey as I could.
When I shared with the reporter the housing needs in the community and explained the state of my own house, he asked to come see it and take photographs for his story. My house was embarrassing but a case in point, so I begrudgingly agreed to let him come and take his porn-poverty pictures, even if it meant I too would be exposed and exploited.
Meanwhile, I lived next door to the Seneca Nation president at the time who had built a brand new house with an in-ground pool and a very tall white fence around his property. The widespread economic disparities between the haves and have nots among Seneca people were on view from the road standing at the end of my dirt driveway.
I grew up on the Tonawanda territory midway between Rochester and Buffalo, New York. My father was Tonawanda Seneca. He and my mother started a family young. I was the middle child with two brothers then; my mother was 16 when she had my older brother. Their first house was a tiny two-room house with no running water. We lived there until I was four. My strongest memory of it was the grass that my father failed to mow in the backyard that grew taller than me – that and the darkness of the small bedroom that apparently all five of us slept in.
My parents split and I went to live with my grandparents until the sixth grade. Their small three-bedroom house seemed palatial by comparison and had running water. For a time, there were eight of us living under that roof, but being a young child I have no memory of it being cramped. Towering maples provided cooling shade in summer. The lawn seemed to go on forever and the lacrosse box, “Logan Field,” was an extension of my grandparents’ property. In winter, the swampy pond across the road was our ice rink. Thorny thickets of wild black raspberries – or blackcaps, as we call them – grew on the perimeter of the woods and we picked wild strawberries in Dixie cups from the surrounding fields.
My grandfather, Beeman Logan Sr., was the snipe clan sachem chief and an old-school medicine man. People came from near and far seeking healing practices, medicinal teas and balms. He piled us in the back of the station wagon to embark on the cross-country Unity Caravan of 1972 – a national Native effort that mobilized hundreds of tribal citizens in defense of sovereignty and treaty rights. He also hosted a massive encampment of traditional people from across Indian Country for a White Roots of Peace gathering at Tonawanda. Campers, tents and parked cars seemed to take up every conceivable spot on my grandparents’ land.
My grandfather held summer youth camps where his aim was to teach us everything we needed to know about our culture and what it meant to be Indian. We would spend the entire summer outdoors: in the woods, in the fields, camped out by a fire, sleeping in tents. I remember the late morning suffocating heat of summer stealing air in our tent. We’d crawl out panting and gasping for air, staggering toward the relief of the shaded cool of the house.
My grandmother Arlene Logan was the bear clan mother. She was like a rockstar – everyone seemed to know her and people would immediately light up when they would see her coming. There was always lots of laughter and affectionate ribbing. Being around her felt like being enveloped in the comfort and warmth of your favorite soft blanket. We traveled with my grandparents to Third Mesa, Hupa, Neah Bay, the Dakotas, and the traditional Longhouse communities in New York and Canada. As a little kid, all of those places felt like close-knit communities, extensions of home, whether it was because of her or because those were times when our community came together and developed strong bonds given shared values and causes.
We have a big, extended family with loads of cousins, but even those not related to her called her Gram. As a child I was content to hang at her hem, lurk under the kitchen table while she got caught up with visitors, and simply be in proximity to her. Into adulthood I always felt so fortunate to claim her as my Gram, to be part of her entourage, and benefit from the extended light of her glow.
My grandparents’ place to me was the epitome of home. But it wasn’t just their home, it was the place and all that it contained, a seeming vastness of space brimming with life, meaning, convictions, traditional values and practices. My grandparents’ homestead at Tonawanda was where I felt I most belonged and loved.
Given my own sense of attachment to Tonawanda, I sought to pass on my connection to my children. Many Native people have a practice of burying a child’s umbilical cord and placenta in places of significance. When my son was born, we buried his cord at the Logan Field lacrosse box and we buried my daughter’s cord at the spot where a garden had always been planted – next to a withering, musty-smelling, dilapidated shack that had been my great-grandfather’s house.
We plant our children’s umbilical cords in places to which we hope they will always remain rooted and return; we seek to ground them to the places we hold dear, instill continuity, and nurture bonds that will provide ongoing engagement with community and culture.
When I was about 11, my father and my aunt got into an argument over my brother and me. We had been grounded for having biked all the way across the reservation to our cousin’s house and not returned in time for dinner or before dark. My father had come to take us somewhere and balked at the punishment my aunt had invoked. The row led to my father moving us out of my grandparents’ place and in with him and his girlfriend. They lived in a two-floor, small, four-room log cabin without running water. I remember the narrow and worn wooden steps that led upstairs. It was the ’70s and there was a curtain of beads that separated the tiny bedroom my brother and I shared from my father’s room.
Every other night, we packed duffle bags with towels and shampoo and a fresh change of clothes and drove to the community building to take showers. Sometimes on Sunday nights, we went to my gram’s and grampa’s house to shower, taking turns one after another, which gave us a chance to visit and watch the “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.”
Nothing about the way in which we had to accommodate the lack of running water or living space occurred to me as outside the norms of mainstream society in 1975. The log cabin was tiny and had to have posed privacy challenges I was unaware of. The next year we moved into a bigger place immediately behind the longhouse known as Jesse Cornplanter’s house. It was a two-story with eight rooms tucked under the shade of a canopy of maples. It lacked insulation, had an old wood stove and a well that we drew water from with a tin pail hooked to a long tree limb; no running water. We poured the buckets of water in a clean aluminum trash can lined with a garbage bag and scooped water out of it for drinking, cooking and washing. I used to tell people that in the front yard was the longhouse, in the backyard, an outhouse.
My father bought the place. I have no idea how much he paid for it. My brother and I would get our own rooms and we would have our very own house. We moved in with a bunch of old furniture mostly obtained from Goodwill and flea markets. Once settled, I sat by myself in the corner of the living room in an old second-hand recliner and cried happy tears. My father came in after a time and noticed me all quiet and wet-faced. He stopped and asked me what was wrong. I shrugged a little embarrassed smile and meekly said I’m happy we have a house. He threw his head back and the long braid that ran down the middle of his spine swerved like the snake that was tattooed above his belly button. He gave a little knowing snort and left me to my 12-year-old emotions.
Even at 12, I had a sense of the enormity of having a home – even if it lacked the luxuries of a flushing toilet and running taps.
We continued to shower at the “building” or at my gram’s house, which was now just a walk across the field away. We heated the house primarily by wood, and in winter, by morning when the fire was reduced to embers even though my father fed it before leaving for work, the house was frigid. There was a gas stove, but it was always on low. In winter my bed was piled thick with scratchy, wool blankets so heavy it was hard to roll over.
I developed an aversion to cold that I carry to this day, and I use a down comforter that is light as air to keep me warm on frosty nights.
In the summer before the 10th grade, my father and brother spent days digging the lines that would hold the pipes for indoor plumbing. In 1980, we finally got running water and joined the rest of society with the modern conveniences taken for granted by the majority of people in the 20th Century.
Since graduating from college, I have lived in: Washington, D.C., twice; Ithaca, New York, twice; Tempe, Arizona; Venice, California; State College, Pennsylvania; Fredericksburg, Virginia; the suburbs and the city of Buffalo twice; Akwesasne, New York; and the Cattaraugus territory – the place I now call home.
In Akwesasne alone, my late husband and I lived in six different places, and they all came with stories and names we gave them for the challenges they presented and the memories they cemented.
There was the cat pee house – a house known for having been a speakeasy prior to the arrival of sanctioned gaming at the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe. The previous renters had cats, and the cat pee smell was indelibly soaked into the carpets. We pulled up the carpets, removed them and scrubbed the floors, to no avail.
Then there was the skunk house – a house occupied by a family of skunks beneath floorboards we could not access. The potent aroma of skunk permeated the house, our clothing, the kids’ backpacks that they carried to school, everything. We put out cages and trapped skunk after skunk – gnarly old grandpa skunks, momma skunks, and baby skunks. We had a pool going as to how many we would ultimately trap and release. I lost count of how many there were, but it was more than 10. We just learned to live with our skunk family and learned to accept the scent we trailed around on their behalf.
There was a house “down Saint” (St. Regis on the Canadian side) that had kitchen cabinets that were too narrow to hold plates. There was the gas station house that had previously been a gas station and thus completely surrounded by pavement. There was the cute apartment right on the water where the kids etched their name in wet cement.
And at Cattaraugus there was the dumpy double-wide. We were able to purchase the property largely in part because Brad, my Mohawk ironworker partner, had fallen three stories off the iron years prior and nearly lost his life. He received a settlement and we used some of that money to buy the house. But we never intended to live in the double-wide for long. We looked around and settled on a floor plan and blueprint for a prefab manufactured home – different and more solid than a double-wide that we anticipated would hold up well and last. We taped the blueprint to the fridge and expected to begin to dig a foundation and put up the house.
Instead, Brad was diagnosed with terminal cancer, the high-speed, unswerving, inexorable kind that stopped us in our tracks. It took him down faster and sooner than the oncologists estimated. We never got to build the house. The blueprint is still magnetized to the fridge at the double-wide to this day.
People who know me, my kids, and Brad know this part of the story as I have chronicled our journey and his heartbreaking 9/11 connection in ICT. In 2001, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 that took down the Twin Towers, Brad worked for roughly 100 days removing the steel rubble. Eight years later, we lost him to esophageal cancer, attributed to his time at the site. Two months before his imminent death, we met with the firm representing 9/11 victims. The attorneys offered a settlement of less than $20,000 to my husband who was about to lose his life. We walked away. Over the course of the next dozen years, there were two more offers, but they never amounted to much; I stopped responding to them.
Three years ago, we were contacted once again by the attorneys with a new settlement offer. In November 2023, nearly 14 years after Brad’s loss and 22 years after 9/11, we finally got a settlement – a settlement I never thought would materialize. This was monumental because we would finally be able to afford a real house.
Amazingly, just five short months after obtaining our settlement, we got the keys to a brand-new, energy efficient, three-bedroom house on the Cattaraugus territory. It never would have happened without the Seneca Nation’s home mortgage program, federal funding from the American Rescue Plan Act, and the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund settlement.
It also would have never happened if I hadn’t been plain lucky and won the draw on the housing lottery. The Nation built seven houses: two three-bedrooms, three four-bedrooms, and two five-bedrooms. I am told “a significant number” of families applied and had to qualify for lending and only so many families were approved. But there more families wanting and needing the only seven homes available. A lottery was held for the seven houses, and I won the opportunity to purchase the three-bedroom home I sought.
I was pessimistic and never really allowed myself to believe I would get one of the houses, but I had to try. There were lots of steps, paperwork, fits, and starts, stops, and fake-outs along the way.
At one point, I thought I won the lottery only to discover that I was only scheduled for a tour and was still “in the running.” When I discovered that I did win the lottery, it was a bit anticlimactic since I received an urgent confusing text informing me that I had to turn around a letter of commitment within hours. The situation remained unclear since the message contained no congratulatory statement about winning the lottery. Several texts and emails later, the confirmation came.
The day I finally closed on the property and obtained the keys was surreal. At 60, I would finally own a house, a nice house – with running water.
I have been fortunate to have always been housed. I have been fortunate to have a strong sense of place and a deep connection to the communities to which I am rooted. These are two vitally important, yet different, things.
Over the course of my lifetime, I have encountered housing challenges and endured housing hardships, but I always had a roof over my head. I have had houses and places, spaces and dwellings, that have left an indelible mark on me. It is said only through suffering and hardship are we able to appreciate great achievements and success. I marvel at the well-built structure, the central a/c, the sink that drains properly, and all the storage space. After all we’ve been through, I vow to not take these things for granted. My life’s journey through less than ideal housing has made me tremendously grateful for the place that I now call home.
What strikes me most is that I am one of the fortunate ones. There are plenty more Senecas and Native people throughout Indian Country who still live in substandard housing, cramped quarters, and have no hope of qualifying for a home mortgage, given their economic circumstances. It is my hope that tribes and federal housing programs continue to make gains, expand programs, and create more affordable housing opportunities to put Native people on housing comparable to the rest of the housing privileged who take their well-insulated, spacious homes with manicured lawns, paved driveways, and running water for granted.
It is a travesty and an ironic twist that the immense stretches of land Native people once called home, the places to which they were tied, where they buried their babies’ cords and ancestors’ bodies, are no longer ours. Our lands are so finite that they cannot accommodate enough homes to house our grandchildren today or the generations tomorrow. Home ownership for Native people, and other economically disadvantaged people, is too often an unreachable dream, making attaining a good home when one is able to – like myself at the age of 60 – a major achievement.
Our stories are worth telling. Our stories are worth sharing. Our stories are worth your support. Contribute $5 or $10 today to help ICT carry out its critical mission. Sign up for ICT’s free newsletter.