American Indian Culture and Research Journal

At the October 1910 session of the New York State Supreme Court, sitting in Riverhead, New York, Judge Abel Blackmar announced his ”findings of fact” and ”conclusions of law” in the case of Wyandank Pharaoh, chief of the Montauk tribe of Indians, plaintiff, versus Jane Benson and the estate of the late Arthur Benson, defendants. The Montauk people in the crowded courtroom sat in stunned silence as the judge announced that the Montauk tribe no longer existed. The tribe, he said, ”has disintegrated. . . .They have no internal government, and they lived a shiftless life of hunting, fishing and cultivating the ground and often leaving Montauk for long periods to work in some menial capacity for whites.” The tribe, continued the judge, had been in decline for decades, and the purchase of their residence rights by Arthur Benson and his family merely gave the ”final death blow.” There is a tragic historical irony in Judge Blackmar’s ruling. During the first century after the establishment of the European settlements in North America, the Native American people were forced to give up their hunting grounds, language, religion, political and economic systems and accept a role as domestics or unskilled laborers in expanding settler communities. The ”good” Indians were those who became Christians and adopted the outward appearances of submission to the dominant culture. The Indians lost their land, they were told, because the whites knew better how to use it and make it productive. Now, two-and-one half centuries later, the judge was telling the descendants of those “good Montauk” that, because they had abandoned their culture, they had lost the right to their last small piece of land. The one consistency is that, in both cases, the Montauk lost their land.