Governmental Power and New York Indian Lands—A Reassessment of a Persistent Problem of Federal-State Relations
Year: 1958
Type: article
Abstract: t] 'tNDIANS ON THE Warpath Here"'-so, in a headline more likely to amuse . 1 than to terrorize, a New York City tabloid recently characterized a federal court action by the Tuscarora Indians to invalidate, for lack of federal consent, the New York Power Authority's appropriation of reservation lands for construction of the Niagara River Power Project. 2 Through reports such as these, many learned for the first time that Indian tribes indeed still reside in New York-remnants of the once mighty Iroquois Confederacy, some 7,000 strong, on seven reservations of over 85,000 acres.3 More significantly, the recent flurry of claims relating to New York Indians indicates that the problem of delineating federal and state authority over reservation lands, long a source of confusion and dispute, has not lost its capacity to generate controversy.The broad bases for the traditional opposing positions, if not the resulting complications, may be simply stated.Assertions of an overriding federal power with respect to tribal lands rest in the first instance on the federal Constitution itself: 4 the authorization of congressional regulation of "commerce with the Indian tribes" and the national treaty-making power, which extends to agreements *This article is based in part on a study conducted during June, 1957, in connection with the work of the Inter-Law School Committee on Constitutional Simplification, which the author served as Director of Research.The Committee was created in 1957 at the behest of The Temporary State Commission on the Constitutional Convention.The views of the Committee on the subject-matter of this article appear in.its final report.
Source: eYLS (Yale Law School)
Author: Gunther, Gerald
Institution: Columbia University
Language: English
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7028477090