Tonawanda Seneca Nation to US Stream Data Centers: NO Project Double Reed!
Nya:weh Seg:nö', Mr. Michael Lahoud, Co-Managing Partner of STREAM Data Centers:
On behalf of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, Council of Chiefs, I extend greetings to you and your associates and give thanks that all are enjoying good health.
The Nation requests that you immediately abandon your proposal to build western New York's largest data center in our ancestral territory, next to our treaty-confirmed Reservation Territory at the proposed Science, Technology, and Advanced Manufacturing Park (“STAMP”).
As you may know, the Tonawanda Seneca Nation is a member nation of the Haudenosaunee (or Six Nations Confederacy) and has used and occupied its sovereign territory since time immemorial. Our treaty-confirmed 7,500 acre Reservation Territory, protected by the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua, 1797 Treaty of Big Tree, and 1857 Treaty with the United States, is all that remains of the millions of acres we held two centuries ago. Our ancestors fought and died to protect this land, and it is ours forever. We will never leave it and we will do everything we can to protect it.
We do not want you as a neighbor. We do not want a hulking data center that will degrade our quality of life and threaten our treaty-protected lands and natural resources. We do not want the stormwater runoff from structures the size of sixteen football fields, and we do not want the animals we rely on for ceremonies and subsistence to be displaced by the noise such a facility would bring. We do not want hulking warehouses - some sixty feet, when rooftop chillers and noise mitigation are added -- towering over our landscape. We do not want tens of thousands of gallons of diesel fuel stored in tanks just upstream from our Reservation Territory.
Our neighbors do not want you here, either. They and their families came here, to our ancestral territory, because of its natural beauty and quiet way of life. They know, as we do, that the costs your facility would impose on us and our environment could never justify the paltry benefits you would bring just a few jobs, with profits flowing mainly to developers, not ordinary people.
We do not want you here. We urge you to abandon this poorly conceived project and to leave us, the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, alone.
Da:h ne❜hoh, Chief Roger Hill, Council of Chiefs Tonawanda Seneca Nation
