Chief
Oren Lyons was born to a traditional Native American family and grew up on the
Onandoga and Seneca reservations in upstate New York. As a young man he was an
All-American lacrosse player, graduated from Syracuse University College of Fine
Arts and went on to become a very successful commercial artist in New York City.
Never forgetting the traditional ways in which he was schooled by his family,
he returned to the Onandoga reservation in 1970 and took up his responsibility
as "Faith Keeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onandoga Nation". Since then, he has
addressed the United Nations and other gatherings of leaders around the world,
concentrating on world peace and the Earth's environmental problems. He organized
a delegation from the Iroquois Confederacy to attend the U.N. Conference on the
environment in Rio in 1992, and is in demand as a speaker in many countries. He
is now a professor of Native American Studies at the State University of New York
in Buffalo.
Bio
© Larry Auld
