I agree Sam… It is probably sparked by your governors insistance on taxing their sales and Albanys balancing the budget using the tax from the Seneca sales… Money that has not, will not be collected if this goes their way and I think it will. One thing about the Senecas, they are determined to upset the applecart in your playground in Albany…

Spending money we don’t have is just so typical of a society that operates on credit and debt, I think Albany leads the way.

Although John said the move was unrelated to the escalating cigarette tax dispute, Buffalo-area Assemblyman Sam Hoyt suggested it was ”not at all coincidence.”

Seneca Nation says that Thruway fight is only the beginning

IRVING, N.Y. (AP) - Seneca Indian Richard Nephew considers himself a product of the reservation land where his grandfather hunted deer out his back door and grew corn and beans before New York paved over part of it in the 1950s.

”I grew up eating those vegetables and eating the deer meat that my grandfather gathered there,” Nephew said April 19 on the reservation at the western edge of New York, where his family still lives.

He remembers his grandfather’s sorrow and anger over losing the land when the New York State Thruway came through, he said: feelings he took to his grave.

The family may have gotten a small payment when the Seneca Nation agreed to accept $75,000 to let Interstate 90 onto its land, Nephew said. But the amount - he does not know what it was - could not make up for his grandfather’s loss, he said.

”He always felt that we had a bad deal,” said Nephew, now a Seneca tribal councilor.

He and today’s other leaders of the 8,000-member tribe have lately come to feel the same way, and in mid-April took a surprising step that they said would begin to right a decades-old wrong.

With the Senecas and New York’s new governor already at odds over the state’s plans to collect sales tax on cigarettes sold by reservation retailers to non-Indian customers, the tribal council rescinded the 1954 agreement that authorized the Thruway right of way across 300 acres of the Cattaraugus reservation.

The move effectively turned the state and a three-mile stretch of thoroughfare into trespassers on Seneca land.

The Indian nation wants to negotiate with the state for compensation, maybe a yearly payment, for use of the land a few miles in from the Lake Erie shore. And they are looking at other roads and rights of way for which they may have been shortchanged, Seneca President Maurice John said.

”This is only the beginning,” John said April 19 after sending a letter to Gov. Eliot Spitzer informing him of the council’s action.

Although John said the move was unrelated to the escalating cigarette tax dispute, Buffalo-area Assemblyman Sam Hoyt suggested it was ”not at all coincidence.”

”It’s an attempt by the Seneca Nation to try to leverage the Thruway issue to get a more favorable outcome with regard to their negotiations with Gov. Spitzer on the tobacco tax issue,” Hoyt said. ”I don’t fault them. In fact, it’s pretty creative.”