Shinnecocks waiting to be recognized

[Okwes]

Shinnecocks waiting to be recognized
BY JOHN MORENO GONZALES
Newsday Staff Writer

Long before federal court cases and a casino controversy, the Shinnecock Indians began what is now 30 years of research into the history of each family on their reservation, and they may have another 15 years of heavy genealogical lifting ahead of them.

Since 1978, it has been one of the hoops the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs insists the tribe must jump through toward its goal of federal recognition, a necessary step before having the right to build an East End casino. But because of a near half-century backlog at the bureau, the Shinnecocks may have to wait as long as the year 2014 to learn if they are a sovereign people in the eyes of the government.




Beginning the same year the BIA instituted the federal recognition process still in use today, the tribe has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and some emotional currency on the effort to trace Shinnecock family trees, tribal leaders say.

"It's a process that is extremely costly, extremely time-consuming and personally burdensome," said Marguerite A. Smith, a chairwoman of the Shinnecock Reservation's recognition committee. "People are offended that they should have to justify their very being."

Quality of life in the balance

More than just the casino effort is at stake, tribal leaders emphasized. Opportunities for better educational and housing assistance programs also would come with BIA recognition.

"We want to provide a better education for the children, better health care, better homes," said tribal chairman Lance Gumbs in a recent interview. "It has never only been about a casino."

The Shinnecocks, numbering 1,300, remain on the "ready waiting for active" list of American Indian tribes who have petitioned for recognition. The understaffed BIA says it could get to the tribe's case by 2009, then it typically takes another five years to make a decision.

There is no certainty the Shinnecocks will receive a favorable ruling.

"You have to wait until it plays out and see where the chips fall," said Gary Garrison, a BIA spokesman. "Everybody eventually gets through the process. But there has been more who have been denied federal recognition than have been given."

The nation began the process in 1978 when the BIA told them if it wanted sovereignty it must use the newly instituted method, Smith said. But the Reagan administration's institution of Indian gaming in 1988 has made the process a political minefield, experts said. Its public hearings are akin to amped-up town hall meetings, experts say, with hundreds of millions of dollars of gambling proceeds on the line and power plays clouding the more fundamental question of whether a tribe has met historical criteria for recognition.

"The Shinnecocks are at a disadvantage," said Donald A. Grinde Jr., a professor and chairman of American Studies at the University of Buffalo who has closely watched the process for the Seneca Indians upstate. "There are more than a few people in the Hamptons [opposed to a casino] who have some pull in New York State and the federal government."

In a bid to obtain recognition sooner, attorneys representing the Shinnecocks filed court petitions based on the Tribe List Act of 1994, which says federal courts have the authority to recognize an American Indian tribe. In November 2005, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Platt recognized the Shinnecocks as a sovereign nation, but the BIA countered two months later that it was not compelled to recognize Platt's ruling.

The bureau argues that judicial recognition is unfair to other tribes because it allows some to leapfrog others.

"The federal courts kind of have a knee-jerk reaction and want recognition to happen sooner," Garrison said. "You're going to play round robin with the whole list."

More hurdles

For now, the Shinnecocks are ninth on the ready waiting active list, meaning the applications of eight tribes will be reviewed before theirs is even considered. In addition to the recognition issues, the tribe faces a Town of Southampton effort to block construction in Hampton Bays on a parcel of Shinnecock-owned land known as the Westwoods. The Shinnecocks broke ground on the site after Platt's ruling, but were forced to halt by the town's federal lawsuit.

The nonjury trial before Judge Joseph Bianco is scheduled to resume on Wednesday, with the Shinnecocks attempting to counter the town's claims that the tribe has no legal right to build on the land because it historically has not been a part of the larger reservation to the east.

Faced with those hurdles, Shinnecocks continue to build the proof needed to navigate a federal recognition process that in itself could end up being a tale spanning 50 years.

BIA spokesman Garrison, himself a Choctaw Indian, said he realized the bureau was asking much of Indian tribes to retrace their history for the same federal government that once displaced them.

"We understand it's a slow process for the tribes," Garrison said. "After all, the resources of the federal government were once aligned against them to break them up."

[blackcrowheart]

Shinnecocks' recognition swamped in litigation Email this page Print this page
Posted: February 12, 2007
by: Gale Courey Toensing / Indian Country Today


SHINNEcock, N.Y. - Long before the Shinnecock Indian Nation became embroiled in its lawsuits and controversy over casino plans, it was one of the first Indian nations in the country to file for federal acknowledgement in 1978 under what were then the BIA's newly established regulations.

Back then, the tribe was No. 4 on the petitioners' list to be reviewed for federal recognition. Twenty-nine years later - after a series of Kafkaesque legal roadblocks, anti-casino opposition from some of the local rich and famous homeowners with political clout in New York state, and an Office of Federal Acknowledgement that is perennially overworked, understaffed and underfunded - the Shinnecocks are No. 9 on the ''active ready-and-waiting'' list. Eight other petitions will be considered before theirs.

If the tribe has to wait another dozen years, it will have spent 40 years in the wilderness of non-recognition, tribal Chairman Lance Gumbs said.

''That's what they're telling us - that it will take another 12 years. I feel like Moses. I've sat on recognition committees over the past 30 years with so many people who have passed on and will not ever see this tribe take its rightful place,'' Gumbs said.

Recognition could come sooner, however, through a court action the tribe has filed against the Department of the Interior. In 2005, a federal judge bypassed the BIA recognition process and ruled that the state-recognized Shinnecock Indians are indeed a federal tribe.

Interior refused to accept the judge's ruling and insisted that the tribe must go through the OFA process. The tribe's lawsuit is based on the Tribe List Act of 1994, which says a tribe can be recognized by the BIA, through an act of Congress or through a district court.

''It's a matter of law. It's not a matter of interpretation, which is what the BIA is doing right now,'' Gumbs said.

Oral arguments in the case are scheduled for May.

The tribe has submitted a 15,000-page petition, but the federal recognition process is especially difficult for Eastern tribes, Gumbs said, whose contemporary descendants of pre-literate indigenous peoples are disqualified if they can't find documentary evidence proving their existence for every year since European contact - documents produced and kept by the government.

There is a missing document that plays directly into the tribe's land claim lawsuit for 3,600 acres in the wealthy East End area of Long Island.

Southampton maintains all of the historical documents dealing with the tribe's existence, but ''there's a particular document which is missing from 1859, which talks about the land transaction when they illegally took the 3,600 acres and gave us this little piece here; and how mysterious is that? That the only town record of this land transaction is missing?'' Gumbs said.

The land claim is based on a 1703 lease between Southampton and the tribe, a coastal people of the Algonquin language group. The lawsuit charges that a group of powerful investors conspired to break the lease in 1859, sending the state Legislature a fraudulent petition from a number of Shinnecock tribesmen. Although other tribal members protested immediately, the Legislature approved the sale of 3,600 acres, leaving the tribe with the 800- and 88-acre parcels of reservation lands it holds.

In December 2006, Judge Thomas Platt rejected the tribe's land claim based on the precedent-setting City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York, in which the U.S. Supreme Court said the Oneidas had waited too long to bring land claims forward.

''He validated the fact that, yes, we do have a claim; but again using Sherrill, which seems to be the new Indian killer, he said the disruption would be too much. Sherrill talks about disruption, but it also says there should be remedies - maybe not getting the land back, but there should be monetary remedies; so we're going back and readdressed our complaint to address monetary remedies instead of actual land re-acquisitions,'' Gumbs said.

Oral arguments continue in a third lawsuit filed by the town and state to block the tribe from building a 65,000-square-foot facility that could be used for gaming on its 88-acre parcel known as the Westwood lands. The town is now claiming that the tribe is subject to local zoning laws.

''The town and state acknowledge that we own the land and that we've never paid any taxes on it in the history of taxation in New York. We've always been here; we've always had our land base. We've always maintained our tribal government. Our community is an Indian community. We have an Indian health center, a family preservation center, an Indian education program. Our Presbyterian church is one of the oldest in the country right here on the reservation. But now they're trying to say it's not aboriginal territory because we supposedly sold it in the 1600s,'' Gumps said.

The town hired freelance researcher James Lynch of Connecticut to disprove the tribe's land rights. Lynch, the darling of national anti-Indian sovereignty groups, was a featured speaker at a One Nation United convention in Washington in the fall of 2006.

Lynch testified that the Shinnecocks gave up the Westwood property as part of a 1659 restitution agreement for arson committed by a few tribal members.

Using footnotes in Lynch's own reports, the tribe's attorney, Christopher Lunding of Manhattan, showed that the researcher had selected passages from historical documents to support his arguments, but left out entire passages that supported the tribe's claims.

''When your job is to be a hired gun to find anything you can to undermine an Indian tribe, of course you're going to sit there and say stuff like that. What was most striking to me was he readily admitted this is what he does. He said he's never found any Indian claims that are worthy,'' Gumps said.

Lynch said in an e-mail that he could not comment because the issue is still in litigation.