Buffalo, NY (WBEN) A native podcast host says a congressional act late in the 20th century might torpedo Buffalo's efforts to stop the Seneca One Stop project on Miami Street.
John Kane of Let's Talk Native says this is not a land grab by the Senecas, and not a determination by the Interior Department. He says it goes back to an act of Congress. "In 1990, there was an act of Congress called the Salamanca Lease Settlement Act, and it was an attempt to remediate essentially and settle the the lopsided lease for the city of Salamanca, which was a 99-year lease from the Seneca Nation," explains Kane. He says there were some payments made to offset some of the inequity, and there were provisions in the settlement act that allowed individual Senecas to repurchase lands within the city of Salamanca. "They'd take it off the tax rolls and stuff like that. But the very end of that was the land acquisitions clause, and what this was a streamlined process that avoided what people know as the fee to trust process, where land is placed in trust for the use and enjoyment of Native people into federal land trust. No, this was an actual Congress that authorized Senecas to reacquire lands that was that were previously theirs. Do it in a essentially a 30-day process that had a very shortened review process that allows them to not just acquire the land, but take the land back into original title."
That, says Kane, includes the land that Buffalo Creek Casino is on, and the land in dispute right now. "(That) is land that is not part of the city, within the city limits because it's surrounded by it, but it is technically land that is titled in original title to the to the Seneca Nation, and all the Interior Department did was confirm that the land went through the process. They didn't make the determination this was now Seneca Land," says Kane.
He admits there is politics at play here. "We not only had this terrible history with Kathy Hochul extorting half a billion dollars out of Seneca gaming, which really left a bad case in the mouth of many Seneca people on the party in general. Now you've got a Democratic mayor who is trying to position himself against us. You had a previous Democratic mayor in Niagara Falls that was spouting all kinds of racist stuff towards the Seneca nation. But what gets missed in all this, and I realize that they're trying to use language from from other cases, and from what I understand, they're trying to cite the City of Sarah versus Oneida case that Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the opinion on." says Kane.
Kane says Ginsburg was wrong. "Not only did she cite the racist doctrine of Christian discovery in in her footnotes on this case, but what she cited was a case out I think young consume case where she said the court had ruled that once sovereignty was lost, regardless of how it was lost or native sovereignty over land or jurisdiction was lost over land, it could not be reestablished. Now, this was a case that was already 100 years old when she relied on, and she called it. This was considered what she called the doctrine of impossibility. It's impossible for Native people to reclaim lost land, is what she was saying. However, this is only a few years after the Salamanca Lease Settlement Act was was passed by Congress, so she ignored the fact that you had a case literally less than a couple 100 miles down the road, only a few years prior, where the Congress had acknowledged, yes, Native people can reacquire land, and there's Santa Fe in particular, and that's what this parcel is over."
Buffalo is seeking a cease and desist on the Seneca One Stop project.
1990 law allows Senecas to reclaim land once theirs
1990 law allows Senecas to reclaim land once theirs
