Blackbear

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FROM: THE SYRACUSE POST-STANDARD NEWSPAPER - AP NEWSFLASH SECTION
_http://www.syracuse.com/newsflash/regional/index.ssf?/base/news-15/1136843049
66970.xml&storylist=ny_
(http://www.syracuse.com/newsflash/re...l&storylist=ny)
Tuscarora's court fight over $25 fine ends in Supreme Court
1/9/2006, 4:38 p.m. ET
By CAROLYN THOMPSON
The Associated Press
BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) - A Tuscarora Indian who fought a $25 fine all the way to
the U.S. Supreme Court said Monday his case was more about land management
and New York's relationship with its Indian tribes than the ticket he got while
ice fishing in 2003.
The nation's highest court without comment Monday refused to review Neil
Patterson Jr.'s case, letting stand a state Court of Appeals ruling and ending a
legal challenge built around a 1794 treaty.
"It really had very little to do with the actual incident itself," Patterson
said of the legal odyssey that began in tiny Wilson Town Court and wound up
in Washington.
Patterson, environmental program director for the Tuscarora tribe, said he
wasn't surprised when various state courts ruled against him. New York, fearing
it would lose ground in land claim cases, has long been reluctant to
recognize tribal rights granted by treaties with the federal government, he said.
"We were hoping the federal court would take notice," he said, "and try to
work out an agreement between New York state and the Indian nations."
The court fight began after a state conservation officer ticketed Patterson
for not having his name and address on his gear while ice fishing at
Wilson-Tuscarora State Park, outside of the tribe's 5,700-acre Niagara County
reservation, in February 2003.
Patterson argued the Treaty of Canandaigua guaranteed the Tuscarora and the
other five nations of the Iroquois Confederacy use and enjoyment of lands
encompassed within the treaty free from state interference. State regulations
would only apply to tribal members, he said, if necessary to protect a
particular species of fish.
The argument was rejected at each level of the state court system, from the
Niagara County town of Wilson to the state's highest court, the Court of
Appeals.
In its ruling in June, the Court of Appeals justices sided with the state in
writing that the Tuscaroras lost their rights under the Treaty of Canandaigua
when the Seneca Indian Nation sold the land three years later in the Treaty
of Big Tree. The Tuscaroras had use of the land only as guests or tenants of
the Senecas.
The state cited a U.S. Supreme Court decision which said the Treaty of Big
Tree had undone the effects of the earlier treaty.
Assistant Solicitor General Andrew Bing, who argued for the state, said the
earlier Supreme Court ruling, which gave the government the right to take over
land for a power project in the 1950s, had already addressed Patterson's
arguments. "There was no point for the court to revisit that question," Bing
said Monday.
But Patterson said that usage rights and possession were two different
things, and that tribes did not necessarily give up their rights to use land when
it changed hands.
At stake, he said, was the future of the land itself.
"What we're really talking about is co-management of aboriginal areas in New
York State ... It's really not even the right of individuals to go out and
hunt and fish," he said, "as much as it is about our responsibility to maintain
cultural relationships with the land as well as restoring and protecting
that same landscape."

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