In 1974, the United States Supreme Court Oneida Indian Nation of New York v. County of Oneida decision opened the federal courts to Native American land claims against states and many Native Nations have since used the United States legal system to file land claims. In the wake of the now landmark 2005 United States Supreme Court decision City of Sherrill v. The Oneida Indian Nation of New York, Native Nations have found it nearly impossible to seek redress through the courts and many have turned to the fee-to-trust process as a means of regaining land. Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s when the Oneida Indian Nation and Cayuga Indian Nation successfully filed their land claims, non-Native communities—affected by 50 years of economic decline—organized and systematically challenged the exercise of Haudenosaunee sovereignty in Central New York State. Specifically, since its inception in 1980 the Cayuga Nation’s land claim has been met with local opposition in the form of organized grassroots anti-Indian sovereignty movements—most notably Upstate Citizens for Equality (UCE). This dissertation draws from ethnographic research of UCE and analyzes varying interpretations of law, policy, race, and class that inform non-Native understandings and attitudes towards Haudenosaunee sovereignty. Social norms of public discourse discourage direct conversations of race and class and, as a result, such discourses must take other normative forms; in UCE land claim and fee-to-trust discourse, linguistic frames of property (and property rights), patriotism, equality, and assimilation are used to challenge Indigenous sovereignty while also serving to resist labels of racism/anti-Indianism. This analysis also includes UCE’s use of litigation and legal discourse to formulate—and in turn perpetuate—(mis)understandings of Indigenous land rights, identity, and sovereignty.
Read
