Montaukett Chief Robert Pharaoh’s accepting a proclamation last week from East Hampton Town Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez may have marked the beginning of a centuries-delayed rapprochement between the tribe and the town. In a public statement made during a town board meeting at the Montauk Library, Ms. Burke-Gonzalez sought to reverse a 1910 court ruling that the Montauketts had ceased to exist as an organized entity. The plaintiff in the 1910 suit, Arthur Benson, a Brooklyn developer, is remembered as the villain in this story, but historical records show that the first European colonists had pushed native people of Long Island to the margins from the start.
In the late 19th century, Benson, who owned much of Montauk, offered plots of land in Freetown to the Montauketts to entice them to vacate their traditional tribal lands — but with a promise made by an intermediary that they could return whenever they wished. But as soon as the last Montaukett people moved off their land, Benson sent workers to tear down their houses under the direction of a town assessor. The Montauketts sued in state court, but an evidently racist judge sided with Benson. The courts subsequently denied the Montauketts’ appeals. As a historian of Long Island’s native people put it, “The Montauk were a poor community of farmers, handymen, and domestics facing the giant engine of a new industrial age. . . .”
The town’s work to exclude the Montauketts from the English economy began early. Among the first laws passed by the East Hampton trustees were measures designed to reduce the rights and freedoms of the native people. In one ordinance, the selling of gunpowder to the Indians was prohibited. In another, the Montauketts were ordered to fill in their underground grain storage pits, lest the colonists’ livestock fall in — supposedly. Without the right to store food in the way they always had, the Montaketts would become more dependent on the English townspeople for supplies. Account books held at the East Hampton Library show that over time, the Montauketts increasingly were compelled to buy their provisions from the white founding families.
Later on, the English strictly limited the number of livestock the Montauketts could keep. Tellingly, the East Hampton trustees rejected advice from the colonial authorities to designate the remaining Montaukett lands as an official reservation and appoint an agent as liaison to the tribe — an act that would have helped them preserve a bit of self-rule and maintain their old ways.
In 1719, the town fathers prohibited any Native Americans who were not members of the Montaukett tribe from living at Montauk or using land there — which the historian John Strong described as a “devastating edict” for a community that had always depended on marriages with neighboring bands to maintain its population.
The effect of East Hampton Town’s recent proclamation may not amount to much. Despite unanimous support in the New York Legislature, bills seeking state recognition for the tribe have died on several governors’ desks, the opposition, we suspect, coming from back channel interests fearful of the chaos that a Montaukett land claim might bring on. But fear of what might happen is no reason not to right the historic wrong by which the tribe was dispossessed of its land. Gov. Kathy Hochul should pay attention to the voice of the people and reverse her office’s longstanding opposition.