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Posted:11/20/2006 10:49 PM |
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Onondagas scour past to bolster claim
Monday, November 20, 2006
By Mike McAndrew
Staff writer
Think of it as "CSI: Onondaga Nation," but with a scholarly bent.
A handful of historians quietly spent the past year digging through centuries-old records to try to salvage the Onondaga Nation's land claim suit.
The Onondagas sent the researchers on a frenzied search in 2005 after the city of Sherrill won a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a case against the Oneida Indian Nation of New York.
In addition to places like the National Archives in Washington, D.C., the historians pored through files at lesser-known spots, like the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.
On Thursday, the Onondaga Nation revealed the findings, filing hundreds of pages of affidavits and exhibits with the U.S. District Court in Syracuse.
The Onondagas hope the historical exhibits will persuade District Judge Lawrence Kahn not to dismiss their suit against New York.
The state asked Kahn in August to dismiss the Onondagas' case because it contended the Onondagas waited too long to sue.
The state contends a precedent was set in 2005 by a federal appeals court that dismissed the Cayuga Indian Nation of New York's land claim, saying that the Cayugas had taken too long to sue. The attorney general's office says the Onondagas' suit is "possessory," like the Cayugas'.
Syracuse lawyer Joseph Heath, the Onondagas' lawyer, said their historians found records that prove Onondaga leaders continuously protested to federal and state officials that New York had fraudulently bought their land, but laws and court decisions made it impossible for Indian nations to get their day in court for nearly two centuries.
Included in the filings Thursday are transcripts of complaints Onondaga chiefs made to New York's first governor, George Clinton, after the state bought from the Onondagas in 1788 a
40-mile-wide swath of land stretching from Pennsylvania to Canada from the Onondagas.
There are census records from 1785 and 1789 that indicate Clinton negotiated the land deal with leaders who represented 9 percent of the nearly 755 Onondagas alive after the Revolutionary War.
There's a copy of a letter President Thomas Jefferson's secretary of war gave to the Haudenosaunee's prophet, Handsome Lake, in 1802 that guaranteed the federal government would help the Onondagas fight off illegal purchases of their land.
The Onondagas' researchers discovered that the state had appointed early settler Medad Curtis - one of the first town of Onondaga supervisors - as the Onondagas' lawyer in 1806, but they found no record of Curtis bringing suits on the Onondagas' behalf.
University of Oklahoma Native American studies professor Lindsay Robertson compiled records of many judicial decisions that prevented American Indian tribes and their members from suing in the nation's courts.
It wasn't until 1974, when the Supreme Court ruled the Oneida Indian Nation of New York could sue, that the courts became a viable option, according to Robertson.
"The Onondaga Nation deserves a full trial on the issue of delay because there's been no delay," said Tim Coulter, another lawyer for the Onondaga.
The Cayugas sued New York in 1980. After going to trial, the Cayugas and the Seneca-Cayuga Tribe of Oklahoma won a $247.9 million judgment against the state in 2001. But the 2nd Circuit tossed out the case, ruling the Cayugas had waited too long to sue for damages that would be too disruptive to award.
Just months before the Cayuga decision, the Onondagas sued for title to about 4,000 square miles of New York, including the cities of Syracuse, Oswego, Fulton, Watertown, Cortland and Binghamton.
About 875,000 people live in the claim area.
Tadodaho Sid Hill, the spiritual leader of the Onondaga, said in an affidavit that the Onondaga Nation's suit was crafted to be healing and non-disruptive. Unlike the Cayuga and the Oneida Indian Nation of New York, the Onondagas did not name any individual landowners as defendants and did not seek to eject any property owners.
"We have observed an almost complete absence of the severe tension that has occurred elsewhere in the state in reaction to other Nations' suits," Hill said in the papers.
The state attorney general's office has until Dec. 15 to respond to the Onondagas' filings.
Mike McAndrew can be reached at mmcandrew@syracuse.com and 470-3016.
© 2006 The Post-Standard. Used with permission.
http://www.syracuse.com/news/poststandard/index.ssf?/base/news-7/1164015644279730.xml&coll=1
Katie Nadeau
Community Organizer
315.475.2559
315.475.2465 (fax)
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