Ruling aside, Ilitch tribal partner plans to build Southampton casino

Ruling aside, tribe plans to build casino

BY JOHN MORENO GONZALES
Newsday Staff Writer

December 5, 2006, 10:47 PM EST

As the Shinnecock Nation absorbed the blow of a federal judge's decision to reject their claim to 3,600 acres of prime East End real estate, the tribe continued Tuesday to seek the legal right to build a casino on the smaller Westwood parcel it already owns.

U.S. District Court Judge Thomas C. Platt released a 13-page finding this week that rejected a claim by the Shinnecocks for lands including the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club and the former Southampton College campus.

The claim was made with much fanfare in 2005, when tribal members tapped sacred drums and burnt sage over a stack of legal documents before walking them up the federal courthouse steps. Generations of Shinnecocks held that the expanse was wrongfully taken from them in 1859 by power brokers bent on extending the Long Island Rail Road's Montauk line.

But Platt wrote that the Shinnecocks failed to meet a U.S. Supreme Court standard in which American Indians must show that any lands they seek have been in continuous historical dispute. That standard applies, Platt wrote, particularly if the area has undergone dramatic changes over the years.

"Over 140 years passed between the alleged wrongful dispossession and the attempt to regain possession," wrote the judge.

The Shinnecock Board of Trustees released a sharply worded statement Tuesday promising to appeal Platt's ruling in the 2005 case, and to press on with the Westwood case now being tried in U.S. District Court in Central Islip.

"The nation will be asking the court to revisit this decision because the town's dishonesty and misconduct should prevent it from hiding behind a technical defense," said the statement.

In the current matter before Judge Joseph P. Bianco, the Town of Southampton is seeking to block a Shinnecock effort to exempt itself from town zoning laws and possibly build a casino on 79 acres in the Hampton Bays known as the Westwood property. The Shinnecocks own the land today, but they must prove so-called "aboriginal title" to it in order for it to be officially recognized as part of the main Southampton reservation to the east, and a place where gaming would be permitted under federal law.

On his second day of testimony, James Patrick Lynch, a freelance historian hired by the Town of Southampton to disprove historical use of the parcel by the Shinnecocks, was cross-examined by the Shinnecock's attorney, Christopher Lunding of Manhattan.

Lunding sought to find holes in two voluminous reports produced by Lynch, using the historian's own footnotes to show he had omitted historical accounts that showed the Shinnecocks had family dwellings and houses of worship in and around the property since at least the 1800s. Lunding confronted Lynch with the summary of a 1922 trial in which the Shinnecocks challenged a claim to the property in a case against then-landowner William Hubbard.

According to the 1922 summary Lunding placed on an overhead projector, "four families of said tribe resided on said tract."

Copyright 2006 Newsday Inc.
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-lishin1206,0,432693,print.story?coll=ny-longisland-homepage