Form the Casinos in a Circle

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 15, 1999 | by John Elvin

The Justice Department has teamed with the Oneida Indian Nation in a lawsuit against 20,000 landowners to recover 270,000 acres of ancestral land in central New York. The U.S. Supreme Court decided 13 years ago that the land had been taken from the Indians through coercive and illegal treaties in the early days of settlement. The new lawsuit seeks to implement that decision. Oneidas now living in Wisconsin and Canada have joined the lawsuit, which seeks return of the land or "compensation."

Not long ago the Oneida reservation consisted of 32 remote acres blighted with abandoned trailers that had been donated by the federal government. Then the Oneidas opened a casino resort called Turning Stone, which has become a huge success that generates hundreds of millions of tax-free dollars for them each year.

Threatened landowners in the hard-scrabble, isolated farming area almost are literally up in arms. Their fury is directed at the now-wealthy Oneidas, the state and federal governments and their elected representatives. At stormy meetings, citizens have demanded that their legislators recite the Pledge of Allegiance to to show where their loyalties lie. Most recently, angry protesters circled the popular casino in a role-reversed replay of the movie version of an Indian raid on a wagon train.

The Oneida situation is reflected, one way or another, across the country as Indians invest some of their huge tax-free casino profits in shoring up sovereignty rights guaranteed by the Constitution but often ignored when Native Americans were too poor and disorganized for court battles.

Localities and states, deprived of revenue and authority by the Indians' independent status, are testing sovereignty rights, particularly as new-found casino wealth has spawned a strategy of buying back vast tracts of land and prime sites and thus removing them from tax rolls. The localities and states were advised by President Clinton in a recent executive order that Indian matters are the domain of the federal government.

Actually, since treaties are involved, resolution of major issues that concern the ever-more politically savvy and wealthy reservation Indians is a congressional responsibility.