Shinnecocks’ Recognition Slow, Inevitable

By Jennifer Landes

(10/18/2007)    It may seem like a long time since the Shinnecock Indian Nation’s application for federal recognition was deemed complete in 2003. It may seem like a much longer time since it was first presented to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, back in 1978. But it is far longer since tribe members were first acknowledged to be under federal jurisdiction, it appears — as early as 1914, they have found.

    Lance Gumbs, a tribal trustee, said that the Shinnecocks’ research has unearthed Department of Interior documents that include the tribe in lists, dating from 1914 up through the 1950s, of those under federal jurisdiction.    

    Furthermore, he said, the Shinnecocks are also included in the “Handbook of Federal Indian Law,” compiled by Felix Cohen for the Department of Interior in 1945.

    The Shinnecocks have detailed these lists and reports, among other submissions, in an amended complaint against the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which has refused to put them on a list of recognized tribes after a federal district court declared them so in 2005. The amended complaint was filed on Oct. 12.

    Mr. Gumbs said the findings were a result of an ongoing process that began in 1978, when the Shinnecocks filed their first land claim with the Department of the Interior. “They were going all over the country looking for research to make sure the claim was the strongest it could be.” Back then, he said, tribes were recognized with only “a hundred or so pages of documentation, based on state recognition. . . . Now they require a 100,000 pages.”

    “Some of the information found in the 1970s talked about internal memos, which we got ahold of, and those made reference to other memos. We’ve been playing cat and mouse with the Department of Interior with FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests to see what happened in 1978 and 1979.”

    When the 1978 land claim was filed, Mr. Gumbs said, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is an office within the department, said it would not process it, but would instead use the documents presented as the basis for a petition for federal recognition. But the application was never processed, and the department never sent the tribe a “technical assistance letter” to notify it of the application’s deficiencies and how to fix them. “They broke the new rules and regulations right there. . . . They never sent anything saying they needed more information.”

    According to Mr. Gumbs, the internal memos the Shinnecocks’ researchers found from the 1970s say “we should be processed as a tribe, but for whatever reason they didn’t do it.” Eventually they found the references in those memos to earlier reports and documents, which were the ones cited from 1914 onward.

    According to Mr. Gumbs, the other tribes on the old lists “never had to apply to be on the federal list when it changed” in the 1970s and then again in the 1980s. “We were left off the list and had to apply to be reinstated.”

    Mr. Gumbs is willing to go as far as to say it is racism that kept them off the lists in the 1970s. He referenced a Newsday article from 1979 which, he said, reported that the department was not going to process the documents because the tribe had intermarried with blacks and whites. It wasn’t the white intermarriage that mattered, he said, but the marriages with blacks that kept them from moving ahead.

    “We have all of this documentation, and we’re clearly starting to discover that the decisions made about us were based on race issues. It’s why we were kept off the list. Racism played a part. Many tribes out there intermarried with whites; that was okay. Any with black intermarriage were looked down upon up and down the East Coast.”

    Mr. Gumbs said he believes it played a “big part in our federal recognition. They failed to follow their own guidelines in dealing with us.” He quoted the 1994 Tribal List Act, which allows for recognition through the bureau’s federal acknowledgment process, through Congress, and by federal district court, which they achieved in 2005.

    Mr. Gumbs noted that congressional recognition of several regional tribes, including the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation and the Narragansetts, took place as recently as the 1980s and 1990s, and both made it onto the bureau’s list.

    Mark Tilden, an attorney from the Native American Rights Fund who is representing the tribe, has asked for clarification on the matter.

    According to Mr. Gumbs, interpreting the law is not the department’s duty. It is “to protect Indian tribes and get them services. There are federal services out there that are phenomenal that we haven’t gotten, money for the fire department and for any roads that service the nation, like Montauk Highway and Hill Street. It’s a tremendous benefit for the tribe and the community host to be a federally recognized tribe.”