As the New York State Attorney General's Office begins to determine what will happen to Wells College's properties, an online petition is suggesting they be returned to their previous occupants.
on calls for the Aurora properties to be given back to the Cayuga Nation, specifically its traditional Council of Chiefs. The indigenous nation was displaced from the area by the destructive 1779 Sullivan-Clinton campaign during the Revolutionary War. Wells was founded there in 1868.
In an email to Ë®¹ûÅÉAV, petition organizer and Howland Farm Museum owner Jodi Baldwin called it a humanitarian effort, one she hopes all of Cayuga County will support.
"Do you want Cayuga County to face 250 years of ongoing colonialism and erasure of a people and choose to end it? Or do you want Cayuga County to continue on a path which causes us all to suffer by allowing great trauma to fester which prevents us from reaching our true collective potential?" she said. "This is a humanitarian cause as important as the abolition and suffragist movements, periods of reform which were grounded in our region and bring us great pride as part of our historic legacy of choosing the path of righteousness."
As of Friday the petition had 546 signatures, with a next goal of 1,000. The petition is addressed to Attorney General Letitia James, whose office is handling the assets of the college due to its closure at the end of the spring semester. Wells owns about 25 properties, namely its 300-acre campus, according to Cayuga County property records.Â
The Council of Chiefs opposes the Cayuga Nation's federally recognized representative, Clint Halftown, and his council. Anticipating concerns about giving the Wells properties to the Council of Chiefs due to Halftown's leadership, Baldwin said she has started calling for the Department of the Interior to rescind its recognition of Halftown as the nation's representative.
Along with being an effort to right a historic wrong, the petition, if successful, could help bring an end to the internal power struggle the nation has faced for the last decade-plus, Baldwin said.
