Opinion: Seneca Nation struggling to overcome history of tragedy

Monday, January 31, 2011  

"The Seneca Nation of Indians has embarked on a campaign to tell its side of the story over taxation, casinos, sovereignty and treaty rights and obligations. The nation’s new president, Rob Porter, has even set out on a goodwill tour of local and state political and business leaders.

The Senecas are trying to explain that the rights they claim are guaranteed in treaties and that those treaties are inviolate and protected by the “supremacy” clause of the U. S. Constitution. They could also point out how their exemption from state taxes came in exchange for millions of acres of land—an exemption that was really no different than the tax breaks and subsidies grant- ed developers for building condos on the waterfront, rehabilitating buildings, keeping businesses downtown or luring businesses from one town to another.

However, there is far more to their story than broken treaties and promises—a story that the government and the American public would like to dismiss or forget. The determination of the Senecas to jealously and zealously protect their sovereignty and independence must be understood against the backdrop of the injustices they and all Indians have endured for 400 years. The story unfolding in Western New York is merely the latest chapter in the long, often sordid, and always tragic history of Indian and white relations.

Indians have been driven off their lands, herded onto reservations, deprived of their ability to sustain themselves and their way of life, stripped of their languages and cultures, denied their right to practice their religions and, when they resisted, subjected to warfare that in any other instance would be considered genocide."

Get the Story:
Keith R. Burich: Senecas' long, tragic history (The Buffalo News 1/30)