Montaukett Indian Recognition Passed for a Fifth Time by State Legislature With Hope Hochul Will Reverse Dark History

Both houses of the New York State Legislature have once again unanimously approved a bill that would bestow official state recognition to the Montaukett Indian Nation.

It is the fifth time the legislature has approved the measure, only to see it vetoed the four previous times by the governor — three times by Andrew Cuomo and once, last fall, by Governor Kathy Hochul.

The sponsors of the legislation, Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. and Senator Anthony Palumbo, say they hope that the way the bill has been presented this time will win over the governor and her advisors to signing the legislation.

“What we did this time was focus the legislative intent as being more about reinstating something that was wrongly taken away, as opposed to giving them a new recognition,” Thiele said shortly after the bill was approved without a single dissenting vote. “We’re not starting from scratch here. They had the recognition and it was taken away, and it was wrong, and we should have righted that wrong a long, long time ago.”

The Montauketts had been recognized for decades by the U.S. government and New York State as an official native tribe, until 1910. That year, a court ruling in a lawsuit sided against a Montaukett leader, Wyandank Pharoah, and in favor of a notoriously underhanded developer Arthur Benson, who had purchased 11,000 acres of Montaukett pasture lands in a deal with nonnative farmers that the tribe said the sellers had no right to execute, and drove the remaining members of the tribe out of Montauk.

The judge in the case declared that the Montauketts had ceased to exist and had no standing from which to claim ancestral lands in Montauk — using the fact that they no longer lived on their ancestral lands as one of the points of evidence against their constitution.

Palumbo said that the broad support among state lawmakers is remarkable and that the governor’s office needs to reverse its misguided stance on the ancient tribe’s official status.

“The Montaukett recognition legislation has now overwhelmingly passed in both houses of the State Legislature the past two years, and with strong bipartisan support,” Palumbo said in a statement on Tuesday evening. “I urge the governor to sign this legislation into law and reinstate the nation’s status, that they should have never lost. The Montauketts once ruled from the end of Long Island to Hempstead and enjoyed federal recognition for years prior to the Pharoah case. Now is the time to correct this injustice and provide the Montaukett Indian Nation with the status they deserve under law.”

State recognition would avail the approximately 1,500 people who still identify themselves as Montauketts with some access to government education and health care programs, but Montauketts have long said that the proud symbolism of their recognition being restored is far more valuable to them.

Thiele said there have been some recent glimmers of hope that Hochul’s office is seeking inroads to better relationships with the state’s Native American communities.

Last month, the governor used the budget process to approve a bill that granted legal protections to ancient, unmarked Native American burial sites when they are discovered on private lands during development. Previously, state law had allowed such work to continue and had often led to the destruction of ancient graves and sacred burial sites.

Hochul had vetoed similar legislation just months before doing an about-face in the budget negotiations.

“The governor had previously vetoed the unmarked burial grounds bill and we were able to work with her and get that signed, so we see that as a positive step forward,” Thiele said. “I look at this as another opportunity to improve relations between the governor and the state’s Native American community.”