1.6 2. North American Indian Land Claims In New York State

• Jurisdiction: New York

2. North American Indian Land Claims in New York State

There are 10 Indian reservations in New York:

Allegany (Cattaraugus County);

Cattaraugus (Erie County, Cattaraugus County, Chautauqua County);

Cayuga Nation of New York (Seneca County);

Oil Springs (Cattaraugus County, Allegany County);

Oneida Indian Nation (Madison County);

Onondaga (Onondaga County);

Poospatuck (Suffolk County);

St. Regis Mohawk (Franklin County);

Shinnecock (Suffolk County);

Seneca Nation of Indians (Chautauqua County);

Tonawanda (Genesee County, Erie County, Niagara County); and

Tuscarora (Niagara County).

Even though the Nonintercourse Act required that all land purchases from Indians be approved by the federal government, New York allegedly went forward with its prior practice of pursuing state land cessions without federal approval, which resulted in several claims of and litigation by various Indian tribes. Many parts of New York State had serious marketability-of-title problems resulting from these claims and litigations. Most title transactions used a form of title insurance that insured possession of the land while excluding the marketability issues raised by the Indian claims. It is believed that the Indian land claims that were brought in New York have (as of the revision to this chapter in September 2019) been disposed of by the courts and no longer impact the marketability of title. Following is a discussion of some of the cases involving Indian land claims in New York.

In 1980, the Cayuga Indian Nation of New York (together with the Seneca-Cayuga Tribe of Oklahoma and the United States of America, as plaintiff-intervenors) commenced an action against the State of New York, Cayuga County and other defendants to reclaim 64,015 acres of land ceded to New York State by treaties in 1795 and 1807. In 1991, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York held that the treaties were invalid because they had not been ratified by the federal government,¹⁹ and in 2001 the court awarded damages of $247,911,999.42.²⁰ The Second Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the District Court’s judgment. Relying in part on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation,²¹ discussed hereinafter, it held that the plaintiff’s possessory land claim and the damage remedy were barred by laches and dismissed the plaintiff’s claims.²²

In 1977, in Oneida Indian Nation v. County of Oneida,²³ the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York held that a transfer that resulted from the 1795 land cession treaty was void because it lacked federal approval. The court noted that the enactment of the Nonintercourse Act established a fiduciary relationship in which the United States was a trustee for the North American Indians, and, as such, the federal government was required to protect the Indian land tenure claims. The court concluded that the defenses of adverse possession, statute of limitations, laches and estoppel by sale interposed by the state of New York were unavailable. Since the federal government was a trustee for the Indians, and those defenses would not lie against the sovereign, the court concluded that they did not lie against the sovereign’s ward. Moreover, the court held that state law could not ratify a transaction that lacked an expressly required federal approval.

However, in 1981, in Oneida Indian Nation v. New York, the District Court, Northern District of New York, held that the Indian nations had failed to state a claim upon which relief could be granted in seeking to challenge the validity of the two land cession treaties...