Judge hopes decision will relieve tensions
Sept. 26, 2000

By R. PATRICK CORBETT
Observer-Dispatch

SYRACUSE — Landowners in Oneida and Madison counties are out of the Oneida Indian Nation land claim.

New York state is in.

And the Oneida Indians and the U.S. Justice Department have been accused by a federal judge of not showing good faith in trying to bring the 20,000 landowners into the 30-year-old legal case.

* Senior U.S. District Court Judge Neal P. McCurn rejected the Oneida Nation’s and Justice Department’s December 1998 motion to add the landowners as defendants in the claim case. But he agreed to their request to make the state a party to the lawsuit.
McCurn also excluded the state Thruway Authority, Niagara Mohawk Power Corp. and Oneida Valley National Bank as potential defendants.

* McCurn wrote in his 66-page order he hopes his decision will ease the tensions that have gripped the dispute in recent months.

“This case is far from ordinary,” the judge wrote. “If the court takes a wait-and-see approach, then because this litigation could span another decade, approximately 20,000 innocent landowners would needlessly be kept in a state of legal limbo. The court cannot countenance such a result.”

* McCurn said evicting current property owners would not be an option as the case proceeds.

While the Oneida Nation has significant claims over the land it lost, “it is unfathomable to this court that the remedy for such harms, if proven, should be the eviction of numerous private landowners more than 200 years” later.

* Landowners and their attorneys welcomed the ruling, but said only a full settlement of the claim will remove the cloud of uncertainty over property in the claim area.

But, “it is a good beginning,” said John Benjamin Carroll, lawyer for Madison Oneida Landowners Inc.

* The Oneidas of New York, Wisconsin and Canada claim New York State wrongfully took 250,000 acres of their territory in Oneida and Madison counties in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and they have asked the court for reparations.

* McCurn has not set a trial date for the Oneida claim. A similar case involving Cayuga Indian Nation land in the Finger Lakes region is being fought out in his Syracuse court. He has said previously the Oneida’s case likely won’t be resolved for several years.