TY - JOUR
AU - Clements, Christopher
AB - Twenty-five-year-old Mitchell Tarbell was out of breath, desperate, and fearing for his life. As he ran across farmers' fields with three federal police officers on his trail, gunshots punctuated the low hum rising from the nearby St. Regis River. It was after midnight on October 10, 1923, and Tarbell's decision to jump into the frigid water seemed less a choice than a necessity in the face of what felt like certain death at the hands of law enforcement. And, so, he leapt. During his pursuit, Tarbell had not removed the heavy sheepskin jacket he was wearing when Agents Frank Henry and Veeder T. Weller of the Ogdensburg (New York)–based U.S. Customs Patrol pulled over the truck in which Tarbell and his partner, both bootleggers, had been traveling. That night, Weller and Henry were joined in their chase by Seaman Thomas J. Firth, then a sailor on the Uss Chillicothe, a tugboat that patrolled the St. Lawrence River for liquor smugglers on behalf of the U.S. Treasury Department's Prohibition enforcement unit. When recounting the incident the next day, Agent Henry recalled hearing Tarbell cry for help once before drowning in the twelve-foot-deep waters.1 During the following days, two different versions of the events leading up to Tarbell's death emerged. Firth told police and reporters that he had fired “one or two shots … into the air in an attempt to frighten Tarbell.” Federal Prohibition officers were trained to fire a warning shot while attempting to detain a fleeing suspect, so Firth's admission would have come as little surprise to investigators. However, local newspapers reported that Firth had fired directly at Tarbell while he was running and during his attempted swim across the St. Regis River. Less than a year later, Firth, then serving as an inaugural agent with the U.S. Border Patrol, fired seven to ten shots at a “bootleg car containing a youth and a girl,” after they refused to stop on a crowded street in Ogdensburg. Eyewitnesses expressed outrage as there were at least fifty people within the pistol's range, and several residents subsequently filed a formal complaint against Firth's reckless discharge of his weapon.2 Tarbell and his traveling companion, who successfully evaded capture, were citizens of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation, a sovereign Indigenous territory that straddles the U.S.-Canada border, and where Tarbell's fatal encounter with law enforcement unfolded. As Mohawks, they were also citizens of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (also known as the Six Nations Confederacy), a centuries-old political alliance of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora Nations. That night, they attempted to transport fifty cases of Canadian beer downstate, likely to a small regional city such as Albany or Syracuse. Each case could have netted Tarbell and his partner between two and five times what they had originally paid, depending on the cases' destinations. Although risky because the war against bootlegging along the St. Lawrence River in northern New York was in full swing, these moneymaking schemes were common during the period. Beginning in 1921, scenes such as this police encounter with bootleggers had become increasingly familiar in the small river towns along the international border and on the reservation.3 Nearly a century after Tarbell's fatal encounter with police, on August 8, 2011, the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin chased the twenty-three-year-old Alaska Native Leroy Martinez through a housing complex in the city. Chauvin's fellow officer Terry Nutter shot Martinez in the torso after he had stopped running and, according to numerous eyewitness accounts, after he had thrown down his gun, raised his hands, and verbally agreed to comply with police. It would take nine years for substantive media coverage of that event to come out, a result of Officer Chauvin murdering the forty-six-year-old Black man George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds on May 25, 2020. The killing sparked nationwide protests demanding police reform or abolishment of the police entirely. Subsequent investigations into Chauvin's history revealed that more than a dozen official complaints had been filed against him, none resulting in disciplinary action. Chauvin was fired for his role in Floyd's death.4 By the time of Martinez's encounter with law enforcement, police were killing Black Americans and Native Americans at the same rate. Native men and women were, respectively, four and six times more likely to end up incarcerated than their white counterparts. These statistics ballooned to reflect even starker imbalances in states such as Montana and South Dakota, where Indigenous people are a greater percentage of the overall population. North of the border, in Canada, Native people faced imprisonment at rates eight to ten times the national average. There, First Nations women were the fastest-growing prison population. This essay seeks to understand why and precisely how this came to pass in one part of North America.5 Tarbell's murder by police, who felt free to move across Akwesasne's borders, reflected a broader and deeper struggle for reservation communities within the territory claimed by New York: to secure control of and effectively exercise civil and criminal jurisdiction in their own nations. Focusing on the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation, this article explores the period leading up to the passage of the 1948 Criminal Jurisdiction Act and the 1950 Civil Jurisdiction Act, which resulted in the formal recognition by the U.S. government of New York State criminal and civil jurisdiction over reservations in the state. Informally referred to as the “transfers,” these laws in the settler imagination shifted (transferred) jurisdiction over Indigenous peoples from the federal government to the state. Unsurprisingly, neither these statutes nor their authors entertained the idea that sovereign Indigenous governments could conceivably have jurisdiction over their own territories and citizenry. Instead, state and federal lawmakers spent decades constructing a narrative promoting a racialized understanding of Mohawk propensities for crime and perpetuated New York's ongoing colonial ambitions to exert greater influence over Akwesasne and its important geographic location straddling the St. Lawrence River.6 This history demonstrates the political utility of “law-and-order” rhetoric in twentieth-century iterations of settler colonialism and theorizes the relationship between Indigenous people and carceral state formation. In her 1998 book Inventing the Savage, Luana Ross argues that U.S. settler colonialism has historically relied on criminalizing Indigenous people and practices in stripping tribal nations of political sovereignty. “The mechanisms of Euro-American law,” Ross writes, “either are incapable of recognizing the cultural and legal separateness of Natives or are deliberately designed to destroy that independence.” Nearly twenty years later, Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark similarly argued that “juridical narratives,” which cast nineteenth-century Indigenous resistance to American and Canadian settlement as “criminal,” were a key aspect of empire building. “Framing Indigenous peoples as criminals,” Stark asserts, “enabled the U.S. and Canada to avert attention from their own illegality.”7 Patrick Wolfe's broadly influential characterization of settler colonialism as a “structure” rather than an “event” deeply informs my use of the concept here. Building on Wolfe, the historian Kelly Lytle Hernández asserts that, at the turn of the twentieth century, settler colonialism took shape as a force that “compel[led] social, cultural, and political compliance within the emerging settler order.” Impelling scholars of mass incarceration to take up a settler-colonial analysis, Hernández insists that such discussion joins “labor control and racial subjugation” as key concepts for understanding the growth of the U.S. carceral state. Settler colonialism's “logic of elimination,” Hernández remarks, again drawing on Wolfe, is dynamic, ongoing, and ubiquitous. Dan Berger broadly defines the twentieth-century U.S. carceral state as “the larger strategy of governance rooted in policing, surveillance, and incarceration.” Indigenous New Yorkers felt the state's looming carceral hand in aggressive policing and surveillance; that experience will be the focus of this essay. Incarceration, naturally, is also a part of the story but does not take center stage here.8 In addition to focusing overwhelmingly on the incarceration aspect of the carceral state, scholars typically imagine its development as characterized by growth and as a history rooted firmly in the postwar era. Federal appropriations for law enforcement, epitomized by a $400 million infusion into state and local policing infrastructure by the 1968 Safe Streets Act, swelled as part of a larger concern with law and order. As a result, police operations at all jurisdictions increased manpower and accumulated more lethal weaponry. Concurrently, jail and prison populations soared, facilitating a boom in prison construction and turning incarceration into a highly profitable private enterprise. While scholars continue to debate what precisely fueled this carceral expansion, all agree that Black and Brown people, African American men in particular, disproportionately experienced the devastating results of this process.9 The interpretation that the carceral state “grew,” especially during the second half of the twentieth century, is not incorrect. However, for Indigenous people, who currently face incarceration rates between four and six times higher than rates for their white counterparts and are murdered by police at the same rates as African Americans, this history of growth has relied on critical reductions in federal responsibilities to Native nations. The historian Elizabeth Hinton describes the larger phenomenon of carceral state expansion as a process characterized by federal intervention “in what had been a state and local matter for the previous two centuries of American history.” However, across Native America, the process of carceral state development saw the reverse: a concerted federal effort to shift criminal and civil jurisdiction over Indigenous people out of federal control and into the hands of states, counties, and municipalities. In other words, as it was experienced by Native peoples, the growth of the carceral state necessitated a self-conscious shrinking, or, more accurately, a significant restructuring of the settler state.10 This restructuring culminated with the passage of sweeping federal termination legislation in 1953 and constituted a new era of federal Indian policy that endured until the late 1960s. The little scholarship that addresses termination history understandably focuses on this federal push and the ways “terminated” tribal nations experienced renewed state erasure efforts. However, these broad federal laws were preceded by several additional statutes—also federal—that dealt with the relationships between tribal nations and individual states. First in Kansas, then in North Dakota, Iowa, New York, and California, state lawmakers worked with federal legislators to pass laws that granted those states various forms of criminal and civil jurisdiction over the Native nations within their borders. These state-level efforts generated momentum toward what would eventually be federal shirking of jurisdiction on a far wider scale: Public Law 280, which passed on August 15, 1953, mandated that six states—California, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon, Wisconsin, and Alaska (upon statehood)—undertake law enforcement responsibilities over Native people and reservations within their borders. The law also set up mechanisms through which other state legislatures could undertake tribal jurisdiction with the consent of tribal nations.11 Termination has always occupied an awkward position among the eras of U.S. Indian policy. Wedged between Indian commissioner John Collier's ethnographically informed paternalism of the 1930s and 1940s and the “self-determination era” beginning in the late 1960s, it suggests a kind of policy whiplash. While abrupt changes to the veneer of U.S. settler law are a defining characteristic of historiography on the topic, in reality, all of U.S. history could be deemed a “termination era” for Indigenous peoples. Still, in an effort to document nuance and historical change, scholars of modern Native American history typically identify 1953 as the start of “termination” policy. Public Law 280 and House Concurrent Resolution 108—the congressional declaration that triggered subsequent termination legislation—both passed in that year. Federal lawmakers presented explicit plans to dissolve reservation communities and, quite literally, terminate the existence of dozens of tribal nations. However, the 1948 and 1950 federal criminal and civil jurisdictional statutes for New York State that preceded these efforts dealt critical blows to Native American political sovereignty. In effect, the laws downgraded the already tenuous nation-to-nation relationship that tribal nations fought to maintain with the federal government, instead imagining these communities as municipalities, subject to state laws. This article will demonstrate that New York politicians, frequently with federal cooperation, spent decades maneuvering toward those midcentury laws. As a result, “termination,” as an era of broader Indian policy, stretches far deeper into the past and far beyond federal jurisdictional boundaries. And, although this essay considers this history only in New York, future historical studies will almost certainly reveal similarly deep histories of such efforts elsewhere.12 While obviously different from the more explicit forms of corporeal violence embraced by the U.S. settler state—via its military and vigilante citizens—in the previous century, legislative violence operated on the same eliminatory impulse that has defined settler colonialism across the world. And, importantly, this legislation legitimized new forms of bodily violence—namely, police aggression, surveillance, and mass incarceration—against Indigenous people. At the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation, where questions about policing and jurisdiction proved especially complex, state officials and Indigenous citizens produced a rich archive that illustrated two competing narratives of governance, crime, and Mohawk sovereignty.13 The remainder of this article unfolds as a series of vignettes demonstrating how competing notions of space, race, crime, law, jurisdiction, development, and sovereignty clashed repeatedly throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Importantly, in New York, lawmakers and officials who supported state assumption of jurisdiction over reservations relied on a law-and-order argument that associated race and crime similarly to the anti-Black version of that same discourse. In The First Civil Right, Naomi Murakawa asserts that “the race ‘problem’ of the civil rights movement from the 1940s onward was answered with pledges of carceral development.” Postwar race liberals and conservatives advocated for law-and-order solutions to quell racial tensions in society. For liberals, “law and order included more protective rules of criminal procedure, federally sponsored police professionalization, enforceable civil rights crimes, an organized criminal code, and predictable criminal sentencing.” Taken together, however, “liberal racial pity mirrored conservative racial contempt, and, as mirror images, ‘competing’ partisan frames locked linkages of blackness to criminality.” Indigenous people, while subject to iterations of racism, also found themselves linked to criminality. Settler colonialism's eliminatory logic joined the particular forms of racism deployed against Native Americans to inform carceral state development and demonstrate how police power came to work in service of colonialism in new ways.14 A deep epistemological divide separated how American and Canadian officials, on one hand, and most Mohawk residents, on the other, understood the geography and boundaries of Akwesasne in the twentieth century. From the perspective of two settler nation-states, Akwesasne was, in fact, two places: two adjacent reservations separated by the U.S.-Canada border, which ran east to west through the middle of the territory. North of the border, Canada recognized the reserve belonging to the Iroquois Indians of St. Regis. Similarly, New York State had deemed Akwesasne's southern half the St. Regis Indian Reservation and its inhabitants the St. Regis Indians.15 A centuries-long or perhaps millennia-long history of Indigenous movement between lands later separated by the border, however, told a different story of this place and its citizens. Akwesasne's existence as a reservation community predated several territorial distinctions—international, state, provincial, and county—that eventually cut borders across this Indigenous space. In 1899 Canada's Department of Indian Affairs recognized that, for Akwesasne Mohawks, the border posed only a “theoretical boundary … between the two countries” and “no barrier to constant intercourse.” Indeed, Mohawks freely traversed the border both by land and by water. They did so to work, to attend Catholic Church services, to participate in traditional longhouse ceremonies, to participate in Haudenosaunee Confederacy–level governance, to buy groceries, to visit family, to sell hay to farmers, to sell baskets to tourists, and to enjoy the multitude ways their territory provided life and livelihoods.16 Akwesasne also appealed to a much wider population. In 1926 a small-town New York paper described the reservation as “one of the most beautiful domains on the North American continent,” an observation that, the article's author assumed, “all Northern New York motorists who ha[d] been ferried across the St. Lawrence at this point well know.” More than a decade earlier, a piece in the Christian Science Monitor had described Akwesasne as replete with “beautiful … scenery.” “To the north of the reservation the Canadian woods stretch away to the horizon,” the author wrote. And “on the northeast and southwest are to be seen, dotted at this point with many islands, the beautiful blue waters of the St. Lawrence, while on the south from 40 to 60 miles away are the tall peaks of the Adirondack mountains, forming a purple and gray background in plain view on every clear day.” A 1918 history of Franklin County, New York, described Akwesasne as a place “of great natural attractiveness” boasting rich and fertile soil. “The islands comprising a part of the Canadian reservation are among the most attractive in the St. Lawrence,” the author observed, “and, indeed, it is true of both reservations that a finer location could hardly be imagined.”17 In 1930, standing before members of the various Jefferson County chambers of commerce who had assembled in Watertown, New York, to hear him speak, Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt offered another take on the region: “Where you now have scenery,” he assured them, “you are certain to come into a great industrial future. You are living in the greatest naturally endowed industrial region in the country.” Roosevelt's speech, which imagined the region transforming into a “second Pittsburgh,” came amid his short journey by boat down the St. Lawrence River. Along the way, he observed the lands and waters being evaluated by two New York State commissions concurrently assessing the viability of hydroelectric power and a high-level suspension bridge that would bring the “Province of Ontario and the midnorthern frontier counties of New York State into communication.” Indeed, hydroelectric power and expanded shipping capabilities on the river had long been a dream of many politicians and industry leaders on both sides of the international boundary. However, because any project, whether bridge, dam, or shipping channel, would require not only binational cooperation but also participation from New York, Ontario, and Quebec (Akwesasne was never directly considered by those planning the border's industrialization), not much in the way of development had occurred along the roughly one-hundred-mile stretch of river that the border paralleled.18 Akwesasne, then, as well as much of the region that Governor Roosevelt described as the state's “midnorthern frontier,” held great potential value as sites for tourism, industry, and infrastructure development. To open Haudenosaunee territories to this kind of development, state officials needed to extend their reach into these rural locales. For their boosters, these economic incentives required “law and order,” a state of affairs that New York's Native communities allegedly lacked. Further, the perceived lawlessness of Haudenosaunee people dovetailed with popular racial thinking of the day, which persistently framed Native people as outside modernity.19 “The reason for the progress of the negro, and the stagnant condition of the Indian is not hard to find,” declared James P. Lindsay at the 1915 New York State Constitutional Convention. A Niagara County lawyer and chairman of the New York State Committee on Indian Relations, Lindsay had much to say on the issue of what he called “the communal condition of the red man” in the state. At the moment of emancipation, Lindsay argued, “the American negro … [was] as incapable of self-government as the Indian.” In the ensuing fifty years, however, African Americans had “passed from slavery and dense ignorance to good citizenship and comparative intellectuality,” while Indigenous people had transformed from “intelligent, independent, and in a measure, self-governing individual[s]” to a group whose members “drifted along without an object and without hope as to [their] future.” The reason? Black folks “had the benefit of [the white man's] laws conferred upon [them], and w[ere] compelled to know and obey them.” Native people had been treated like children, “left to [their] own devices and government, in doubt as to [their] allegiance and rights under our laws.” “The present condition of the laws,” Lindsay concluded, “is fostering shiftlessness, immorality, and crime upon the reservations, and retarding the development of the Indian toward good citizenship.”20 Lindsay, who exalted the effects of “white … laws” on “the American negro,” omitted any consideration of the proliferation of new white laws that had unfolded in the American South over the previous three decades, locking African Americans into a violent system of Jim Crow segregation. Lindsay's reference to a “scale of civilization” also betrayed his adherence to biological racism in his conceptualization of the relationship between Native people and the state. Lindsay, of course, was not alone in his thinking. Prevailing racial ideas in the first half of the twentieth century persistently revealed a vanishing Indian population whose members occupied only three roles in a modernizing North America: (1) already or soon-to-be-dead symbols of noble savagery; (2) peoples capable of assimilation and whose participation in mainstream society (as politicians, soldiers, educators, wage workers, performers) could be framed as evidence of assimilationist success; or (3) criminal outliers whose insistence on autonomy and separateness threatened American territorial and juridical claims.21 In addition to the racist attitudes of the New York State Office of Indian Affairs personnel, Haudenosaunee communities also faced a complex and unusual jurisdictional situation. New York has always had an idiosyncratic relationship to the Indigenous nations within its borders. The state's first constitution, drafted in 1777, required state approval of any sale of Native land. Despite the immediate assumption of those duties by the burgeoning federal government, New York officials obstructed U.S.-led treaty negotiations, going so far as to arrest national Indian agents. Since the federal government had never held title to New York Native lands, the state often acted unilaterally, citing this peculiar status of its Indigenous inhabitants as precedent. In the closing decades of the eighteenth century, New York acquired Haudenosaunee land with tacit approval from federal authorities. Urged by this federal shirking of diplomatic responsibility, New York “assume[d] an expanding guardianship over its Indians” around the turn of the nineteenth century. In 1821 the state's Indigenous communities complained that their federal Indian agent was not adequately enforcing an 1813 state law banning the cutting of timber on tribal lands. As a result, the state legislature transferred that law's enforcement duties to the county district attorneys. By the 1830s, “state control over Indian affairs” was “generally unquestioned.” Part and parcel of late nineteenth-century Indian policy's assimilationist tide, the 1888 Whipple Report, authored by a New York state legislative committee, struck another blow to Native claims to nation status. Although the report never generated legislative action, it assumed, “without explicit consideration of a possible overriding federal authority,” that the state held the power to eliminate tribal land holdings.22 In 1915, delegates to New York's constitutional convention proposed the adoption of a section of the constitution that would abolish tribal peacemakers' courts and all other tribal agencies then exercising judicial functions. “Their jurisdiction,” Cuthbert Pound explained in a 1922 Columbia Law Review essay, would be “vested in the courts of the state” for all matters, excluding those that fell under federal jurisdiction. The constitutional amendment, however, was not adopted. In Pound's summation, New York did not possess jurisdiction over its Indigenous communities. Instead, “Congress does not act, the state … may not act[,] and the Indian nation cannot act effectively.” A 1924 story in the Malone (Ny) Farmer reached a similar conclusion: “There has never been much law observance on the St. Regis reservation, for lack of legal machinery to enforce it.” “Conditions there are often rather raw.”23 In this particular legal landscape state and federal lawmakers would wring their hands over a perceived lack of law and order in Indigenous territories. It is important to note that all of the confusion surrounding the issues of jurisdiction stemmed from the perceived legitimacy of settler claims to Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous lands in the state. In other words, the violent, multigenerational disruption of Native life brought on by settler colonialism sat at the center of this history. After all, New York's Indigenous communities remained sovereign nations with systems of governance and law that had functioned for centuries to maintain radically different systems of law and order than those that the state wished to impose. The Mohawk anthropologist Audra Simpson describes this geopolitical relationship: “Sovereignty may exist within sovereignty,” she writes. “One does not entirely negate the other, but they necessarily stand in terrific tension and pose serious jurisdictional and normative challenges to each other.” On the ground in the opening decades of the twentieth century, Pound identified the consequences of this tension: “The Indian nation [could] not act effectively.”24 Of course, like anywhere, crime occurred on the reservation, and Mohawks wanted a reliable system to ensure community safety. Denied their own courts, jails, and police, Mohawks had typically relied on local justices of the peace and county sheriffs to intervene when needed. In 1924 the New York State legislature transferred administrative control over reservations to the New York State Department of Education and, in that year, the state official A. C. Hill issued a report that spoke to this arrangement. “The local town courts have the necessary authority to enforce State laws,” he wrote, clearly unaware that Akwesasne's status as a sovereign territory meant that local courts technically had no authority over Mohawks. “They often refuse to act,” he went on, “both because the cost falls by law on the local community and because the cry of ‘no jurisdiction’ gives them an excuse for refusing to act.” A sort of law enforcement vacuum thus resulted at Akwesasne and on other reservations in the state.25 Rather than attempt to address these legal uncertainties with any form of good faith toward Haudenosaunee communities, New York legislators instead attempted to erase these ambiguities through increasingly bold assertions of police authority on Indigenous territories. In Grounded Authority: The Algonquins of Barriere Lake against the State, Shiri Pasternak explains that “settler-state logic is not a hegemonic logic ‘out there’ but a specific and active construction of authority through the limit-making practices of jurisdiction.” Jurisdiction, Pasternak notes, “is not a technicality of sovereignty,” but rather “the apparatus through which sovereignty is rendered meaningful, because it is through jurisdiction that settler sovereignty organizes and manages authority.” The legal anthropologist Justin Richland similarly argues that a focus on jurisdiction reveals sovereignty to be “an active undertaking and … one that is getting (re)constituted in the unfolding, unstable pragmatics of the present.” In New York, police, with state government support, repeatedly exercised authority on and around reservations to normalize eventual state claims to civil and criminal jurisdiction over those spaces.26 “Where the criminal law has placed its hand,” Frederic F. Van de Water observed in his sweeping 1922 history of the New York State Police (Nysp), “it is not unreasonable to hope that the less stern functions of the State will follow through.” Indeed, the 1917 creation of the New York State Police, along with the sweeping Prohibition laws that came after, propelled New York's assault on Haudenosaunee legal authority. In the eyes of its boosters, the Nysp would bring “modern” policing to all of upstate New York. “They have taught the dwellers in squalid Catskill mountain hamlets that incest is not the natural state of men and women,” Van de Water boasted. “They have ridden far into the fastnesses of the hills and brought down to the lowlands young men who had refused to register for the draft …. It is now for the State itself to follow the trail they have cut to the feeble little plague spots that mar its civilization.” And, if the newly minted state troopers symbolized the cutting edge of policing, the local police officer represented the outdated and ineffective. Van de Water variously described local police as “bungling,” “amateur,” “slip-shod,” and “uncertain.” “The amateur Constable for the township, the Sheriff for the county,” a piece in the New York Times similarly commented in 1917, “are a mostly futile majesty of the law, ancient forms against crime with all the modern conveniences.” Helpless in the face of the “skilled crook,” Van de Water concluded, while “the world had been changing,” the constable “had stood still.”27 Part of New York State's broader vision for its own modernity, then, included pacifying and delegitimizing the Indigenous nations—“feeble little plague spots”—within its borders. Van de Water devoted two chapters of his 1922 police history, Grey Riders, to the early relationship between state troopers and Haudenosaunee communities in the state. In his telling, the state's Native reservations resembled “miniature republics” where “peace officers of adjoining townships and counties exercise[d] no authority.” Referencing the U.S. Indian commissioner, whom he described as the “sole person overruling the dusky descendants of the Six Nations,” Van de Water explained that the federal government had little influence on reservation life and intervened “only in the case of peculiarly gaudy outrages.” In keeping with the tone of his nearly four-hundred-page account, gathered while riding along with early Nysp patrols, Van de Water regaled readers with celebratory stories of trooper violence against Native offenders—or “copper-hued wards of the Government,” as he called them—and drunken, pidgin-speaking “Indians.”28 In the first few violent years of its existence, the Nysp rapidly expanded, and, before long, became the agency most directly responsible for rooting out alcohol in the state. The historian Lisa McGirr notes that Prohibition enforcement targeted a variety of nonwhite and nonaffluent communities. “Mexicans, poor European immigrants, African-Americans, poor whites in the South, and the unlucky,” McGirr writes, “experienced the full brunt of Prohibition enforcement's deadly reality.” Like the groups with whom McGirr deals, Mohawk people living along the border, whether involved in the illicit alcohol trade or not, found themselves targeted by federal officers and state troopers, typically working in conjunction to enforce Prohibition laws.29 New York governor Nathan L. Miller, who took office in 1921 and campaigned on a promise to enforce Prohibition vigorously, helped usher in a series of state laws, including the National Prohibition Act, granting police expansive powers to search for alcohol without probable cause, let alone a search warrant. The Mullan-Gage Act granted police nearly unlimited powers and instituted severe penalties for alcohol-related offenses, then still considered misdemeanor crimes. According to the historian Allan S. Everest, who authored a comprehensive account of the Prohibition era along the northern border in Clinton County, New York, “this drastic act committed every city policeman, sheriff's department, and troop of State Police to root out rumrunning in all forms.” After the Democratic gubernatorial candidate Al Smith defeated Miller in his 1922 reelection bid, Smith began his term by quickly walking back the Mullan-Gage Act. Under Smith's leadership, in May 1923 the state legislature also passed the Cuvillier Bill, which should have decidedly shifted Prohibition enforcement duties onto federal officers. However, the state police continued to play a critical role in assisting federal officers and often independently enforcing federal Prohibition statutes.30 Most importantly, in the context of settler-indigenous relations in New York, Prohibition paved the way for cultural tropes and racialized myths regarding Native savagery and criminality to suddenly appear real, manifest, and enforceable. In November 1921, for example, the Chateaugay (Ny) Record and Franklin County (Ny) Democrat described the borderland area in and around Akwesasne as the “bootleggers metropolis,” rampant with an uncontrollable “criminal element” comprising “Indians, half breeds and mountain region natives.” That month, two Royal Canadian Mounted Police (Rcmp) officers took up a permanent post at the reservation town of St. Regis, Quebec, and Rcmp officers joined state troopers at a conference to encourage “positive cooperation” between their respective national governments toward ending liquor traffic along the border. The coordination between the two agencies, the Chateaugay (Ny) Record and Franklin County (Ny) Democrat reported, would bring about the “doom of the whiskey smugglers and ‘bad men’ of the north, who for months ha[d] held sway by a reign of terror which ha[d] made it unsafe for honest, law abiding people to travel at night and which ha[d] forced law enforcement officials to declare a relentless war against the lawless in a last desperate effort to stamp out crime.”31 This “relentless war” manifested in a number of ways. In 1921, with no legal precedent to enter the reservation's boundaries, state troopers joined border patrol officers, federal customs officials, and the district attorney to conduct “midnight raid[s] … on two road houses on the reservation.” As partygoers climbed out of second-story windows and fled in their cars, police arrested more than fifty-five individuals, all of whom received disorderly conduct charges issued by a local justice roused from his sleep. Mitchell Terrance, “the proprietor of the place,” faced “a federal charge of possessing and selling liquor.” By 1925, homes on the reservation “had been raided so often that the occupants were but little disturbed at the proceeding and lost but little sleep.” When John Jacobs escaped from jail on the reservation in December 1924, for example, a group comprising the local sheriff and deputy, elected chief for the American side, a bailiff from Dundee, Quebec, and state troopers searched “every house on the reservation that might have kept Jacobs in hiding.”32 The issue of excessive force and police targeting came to a head in the spring of 1929. On the night of April 7, two border patrolmen and a state trooper confronted sixty-year-old Margaret Curleyhead of Akwesasne at her home. The officers attempted to search her house without a warrant, but Curleyhead refused. The next day, however, they returned and arrested her for disorderly conduct. A local justice of the peace fined Curleyhead fifteen dollars, but she refused to pay. Instead, she appealed the local charge in the Franklin County Court. In an affidavit, Curleyhead insisted that police had neither “advised her of her rights” nor explained why they had arrested her. Upon hearing of Curleyhead's battle with law enforcement, the tribe's elected chiefs and tribal clerk drew up a resolution directed to District Attorney H. W. Main, calling his attention to “conditions … prevalent on the reservation for some time.” Specifically, they complained of border patrol officers, “at times in conjunction with state troopers, forcing entrance into homes on the reservation without search warrants.” A local newspaper reported that Mohawks were “highly indignant” after having “submitted tamely in many instances where authority was exceeded.”33 At the end of the decade, Warren K. Moorehead, a member of the U.S. Board of Indian Commissioners, visited Akwesasne to observe reservation conditions. His report offered an intimate snapshot of how Prohibition had affected Mohawk life nearly a decade into its implementation, and it confirmed the charges made by the elected chiefs that excessive policing had come to characterize life on the reservation. Moorehead described a trend of uneven law enforcement that targeted “a great many … Indians” and spared “those whites really responsible for the introduction of liquor.” According to the customs and Prohibition officials with whom he spoke, “the troubles of these Indians … w[as] due to the presence of undesirable whites and foreigners” who would “come down Saturday afternoons or Sundays, being impartial as to whether they visit Indians on the Canadian side, or our own territory.” It seemed that Mohawks' “troubles” were due to multiple police agencies persistently attempting to solidify state authority through coercion. Tellingly, the legal end to Prohibition did not signal an end to this behavior. Instead, the jurisdiction question remained unresolved throughout the 1930s. And, as they had for the previous decade, law enforcement agencies exploited the policing vacuum on the reservation, playing into and strengthening common narratives that sensationalized and racialized Indian lawlessness.34 Writing on what he refers to as “railroad colonialism,” Manu Karuka argues that, historically, infrastructure has “played a police function, materializing not through liberal universalism, but proliferating distinctions and comparison along the lines of community, nation, race, gender, caste, and respectability.” In the summer of 1934, private industry succeeded in opening the first vehicular bridge to traverse the St. Lawrence River in the four-hundred-mile stretch between Niagara Falls and Montreal. The Cornwall-Northern New York International Bridge Corporation did so by converting into automobile roads two railway bridges that crossed the north and south channels of the St. Lawrence River on either side of Cornwall Island. The idea began coming to fruition in the late 1920s when the New York and Ottawa Railway leased its rail bridges to the National Toll Bridge Company, a private corporation. Since the bridges already existed, the construction process required only that the railroad ties be “planked” over with wooden boards to allow for automobile traffic. In addition, the company would need to build approaches—roads that would lead to each side of the bridge—in Cornwall, Ontario, and in Rooseveltown, New York, a small town just west of Akwesasne. By the early 1930s, state and provincial officials had approved the leasing agreement between the railroad and the bridge company. Upon the roads' opening, a new upstate entity, the Toll Bridge Authority, would supervise the toll schedule.35 “Nothing but the interference of politicians,” Governor Roosevelt had asserted in 1930, would stand in the way of infrastructure growth along New York's northern border. In his rendering, politics—and politicians—represented an unsavory and misguided stratum of society. His rhetoric echoed that of state police boosters fifteen years prior, who cast “politics,” as well as the labor movement, as impediments to the kind of apolitical and modern agency they imagined the Nysp would be. Roosevelt's words appealed to the many New Yorkers who imagined infrastructure as a form of state building that transcended “politics” in service of a greater social good. In this respect, infrastructure and policing projects reproduced the same “join or die” logic that undergirded assimilation efforts stretching back to the very beginnings of American and Canadian settler colonialism. Throughout the Prohibition period, state and federal officials ignored Mohawk complaints of police brutality and racial discrimination. During bridge construction, state officials ignored Haudenosaunee opposition to the new bridges as well as the Cornwall-Northern New York International Bridge Corporation's failing to keep its promise to hire Indigenous workers.36 Upon the completion of the roads, suddenly open to vehicular traffic from across the region, Akwesasne appeared in more desperate need of a steady law enforcement presence than ever before. As would become clearer in the ensuing decades, police worked to “protect” the bridge corporation, which collected toll revenue, from Mohawks and other Indigenous people who insisted on their treaty rights to traverse the border unimpeded. Bubbling under the surface of those state narratives that criminalized Mohawks' existence, however, another story simmered. It illustrated the sustained resistance waged by Haudenosaunee people against the state's persistent encroachments and also helped explain New York's increasingly heavy-handed efforts to repress Indigenous life. “Brother,” the twelve life chiefs of Akwesasne began an 1899 letter to New York governor Theodore Roosevelt, “we have been informed that there is to be another election day on this reservation in the near future.” The chiefs wrote only weeks after Canadian federal police murdered Jake Ice, a Mohawk traditional chief, while unsuccessfully trying to force band council elections on the territory's northern side. Their letter asserted that the election was “greatly against the wishes of the tribe” and worried that it would bring about “the death of another member of our tribe.” Instead, they reminded the governor that elections would be taking place “all over the State,” and that Mohawks who wanted to participate could leave the reservation to participate at the risk of being “compelled to stay out.” In his history of Akwesasne, Mike Mitchell writes that in the first two decades of the twentieth century, after the eventual imposition of the band council on the northern part of the reserve, “the traditional council continued to be our government, but Canada would not recognize or deal with them.” In February 1900 the Toronto Globe reported on “rumors” of “impending trouble among the St. Regis Indians,” who continued to protest the elective government and insisted “upon being regarded as allies and not subjects of the Queen.” Twenty years later, the newspaper reported Mohawks making an identical claim to a parliamentary committee in Ottawa.37 In 1923, after more than a century without representation, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy Council welcomed four Cayuga chiefs during a ceremony at Onondaga. Although the leaders were admitted amid “a lot of debate and some dissension,” the event demonstrated the existence of a functional confederacy-level government. That same year, the Cayuga leader Deskaheh led a Haudenosaunee delegation to the League of Nations to formally argue for Six Nations independence from Canada. In a letter submitted to the league's London office, Deskaheh described Canada's “subjugation” of Iroquois people and chastised the failure of Great Britain—“the Imperial Government”—to protect its Indigenous allies. In the summer of 1927, representatives from Akwesasne, Tonawanda, Onondaga, and other North American reservations traveled to the Mohawk territory of Kahnawake to discuss future strategies for pressing Ottawa and Washington to fulfill treaty agreements.38 Curiously, those who most frequently commented on the state of Haudenosaunee life during this period—namely, reporters and Indian affairs officials—repeatedly identified the existence of traditional governance at Akwesasne and elsewhere while simultaneously lamenting that these same communities lacked the “machinery” to govern. Many of those who wrote about Haudenosaunee life in such terms, especially those formally working in Indian affairs, would have understood that such “machinery” was contingent on the existence of money. In particular, as long as the U.S. and Canadian federal governments insisted on solely funding Mohawk governments that an overwhelming majority of Mohawk citizens believed to be fraudulent and illegitimate, this problem could never be solved. Of course, racism explains much. A. C. Hill, chief of the New York State Special School Bureau, while contemplating this very problem made sure to characterize “the Iroquois” as “a primeval and prehistoric race.” Their insistence on maintaining their own forms of government could be attributed to the fact that Mohawks had “persistently resisted modern civilization” and “always feared the white race.” Hill went so far as to suggest the following: There is evidence, it might be added parenthetically, of some invisible force which exerts its influence whenever legislation is proposed for putting the Indian reservations under law and order. It appears that there are certain people and interests that do not wish to have the Indians of New York definitely put under the control of the State. Certainly, whenever efforts have been made to act in the matter, some power has blocked the way. Whether Hill truly believed what was, in actuality, persistent Haudenosaunee efforts to dictate the terms of their own existence, to be an “invisible force” guiding the path of history is unclear. In any case, Hill's comments help shed light on how, during this period of colonial reorganization, narratives that disregarded Indigenous alternatives to assimilationist policies remained powerful tactics for settlers.39 In the 1930s, Mohawks at Akwesasne intensified their push to unseat the chronically unpopular elective councils. In general, as was true in many Indigenous North American contexts, Native citizens often imagined these councils as puppet governments, necessary because of their ability to access state funding and services, but also prone to corruption and not necessarily working in the best interest of the community. In the Haudenosaunee context, where an intricate political confederacy continued to operate, most Mohawks and others preferred to vest this latter group with real governance powers. At Akwesasne, tribal citizens snubbed their elective council mainly by refusing to vote in tribal elections. This wholesale rejection of state-imposed councils gained strength when all of New York's Native communities voted to oppose Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier's Indian Reorganization Act (Ira) in 1934 and 1935. Though Collier's Ira has been lauded for dramatically shifting federal Indian law away from its decades-long focus on more violently assimilationist policies, at Akwesasne and in a significant minority of Native communities across the United States, federally mandated elected councils did not seem the best way toward sustainable, autonomous governance. Differing notions of how to govern may have split the Mohawk citizens of Akwesasne who decisively voted to oppose the Ira, but those citizens did agree that the U.S. government did not hold the solution.40 In rejecting Collier's Ira governments, New York's Indigenous communities refused to acquiesce to the new face of assimilation. In response, state and federal Indian affairs officials waged a three-sided campaign against these tribal nations, with the goal of achieving decisive legislation granting New York State authorities criminal and civil jurisdiction. This campaign spun a tale that focused on alcohol abuse on the reservation, a surge of “illegal immigration”—a term used to describe the lawful movement of Mohawks throughout their sovereign territory—and a Native community unable to govern itself because of homegrown dysfunction. Importantly, state officials manufactured the existence of a subset of Mohawks, typically referred to as “the better element of Indians.” In reality, this “better element” seemed to comprise a single Mohawk man, Moses White. An elected chief in the 1920s, White in the ensuing decades seemed to find his way into any major dispute on the reservation. He frequently corresponded with C. H. Berry and other Indian affairs personnel and typically affirmed or elaborated upon the need for a greater state presence at Akwesasne. In 1938 Berry filled what had been a vacancy of any full-time federal Indian affairs presence in a place where federal guardianship over Native people was “shadowy [and] uncertain.” In 1950 Mrs. M. K. Reynolds of Massena, New York, wrote a letter to Federal Bureau of Investigations (Fbi) director J. Edgar Hoover to viciously criticize White. She accused White of being an opportunist who profited from Mohawks appearing in state and county courts, presumably because he served as an interpreter. In less sensational accounts, White was accused of claiming to be a tribal representative without holding an elected or traditional governing position. White productively complicates this story. A minority of Akwesasne's citizens certainly shared his passionate support for full assimilation. However, the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that a majority of Mohawks, whatever form of community governance they preferred, shared a common baseline that demanded self-government, autonomy to make and enforce laws, and a refusal to treat the international border as applicable to their territory.41 In 1939 White reached out to Berry in hopes of acquiring a “steady federal police officer” to patrol Akwesasne. White described his community as one where liquor flowed freely—cases of beer were sold out of private homes and poolrooms; moonshine was readily available; and “two hundred cases of rubbing alcohol,” presumably for consumption, were sold each month by “the six stores in the village of Hogansburg.” Drinking had become such a problem that, according to White, members of both the traditional and elective councils were complicit in the sale and consumption of illicit substances. White accused the life chief Frank Terrance of converting a farmhouse into a “dancing place,” while using the building's kitchen as a makeshift bar. Two out of three elected chiefs, White alleged, were poker and pool enthusiasts who sold beer out of their respective homes. After receiving White's letter in October 1939, Berry quickly forwarded it along with a letter of his own to Assistant Commissioner of Indian Affairs William Zimmerman Jr. In his brief cover letter, Berry warned that “the better element of Indians” as well as “state representatives [we]re all greatly disturbed over the conditions” that Berry described. White's voice appeared as the sole representative of this “better element” of Mohawks.42 In early 1942 Christine Terrance of Hogansburg complained to the Department of Justice that the “condition of intoxication and all its attendant evils” had become intolerable. Importantly, Terrance instructed the recipient of her letter to consult the traditional life chief Loran Swamp to work out how to best aid the community. Berry and Fbi senior special officer George Brunskill visited Akwesasne in June 1944 and corroborated the existence of a “very bad liquor situation up there.” According to Berry, they “were asked by some of the better element of people, both Indians and Whites, to endeavor to bring about some action which would improve matters on the Reservation in this respect.” In 1945 Violet Lazore complained that dozens of individuals sold beer out of their homes and that drinking places just outside Akwesasne's boundaries posed a threat to law-abiding members of the community. Christine Terrance, whose previous letter had specifically asked that a federal investigator be sent to Akwesasne, blamed state law for the liquor problem, suggesting that it allowed white men to provide liquor to dealers living on the reservation. The moral depravity of Akwesasne Mohawks was not to blame for excessive drinking; a lack of jurisdictional clarity was.43 “These conditions are certainly not improving the morals and character of our Indians,” Constable E. F. Gillis, an officer of the St. Regis, Quebec, detachment of the Rcmp told E. L. Olsen, an Fbi agent in 1945. Mohawks from both sides of the border, he claimed, spent “all their time” drinking and participating in “drunken orgies” late into the night. Gillis claimed that, prior to that point, he had been able to maintain order “without going to extremes,” but the current situation had placed Mohawks “into a condition more degrading than ever.” When Agent Olsen forwarded these concerns to the Office of Indian Affairs, however, he promptly learned that the office had no control over the sale of liquor to “Canadian Indians.” A year later, in September 1946, after visiting Akwesasne and meeting with elective Chief Peter Ransom and the tribal clerk Louis Bero, Nora Anderson, the acting superintendent of the New York State Indian Agency, reported ongoing problems with liquor and concerns regarding the settlement of property disputes.44 In addition to racialized notions of heightened Indigenous susceptibility to alcoholism, official hand-wringing over the liquor issue also included concern over Mohawks' insistence on ignoring the international border. After a 1940 meeting with three Mohawks from the northern part of Akwesasne, John Simmons, an American diplomat in Ottawa, warned that “the three delegates … consider[ed] themselves as a single national group,” and “the international border … ha[d] no meaning in their minds. They would,” he continued, “take it as a normal and natural thing to have complete freedom of movement for their members as regards this part of the border.” In response, Assistant Secretary of the Interior Oscar Chapman worried that “any large migration of Canadian members of the St. Regis band of Indians would create a number of social, economic, and political problems … which would be difficult to solve and handle.” Chapman advised U.S. officials to discourage such migrations. In 1942 U.S. Indian Service chief counsel J. R. T. Reeves echoed Simmons's concerns. Reeves, who had given “prayerful consideration” to the situation at Akwesasne explained to the assistant commissioner of Indian affairs that “ordinarily, the International Boundary means nothing to the Indians.”45 In October 1939 White warned Berry that the traditional life chiefs were “trying to control the reservation.” By early 1942, Berry reported that tension between life chiefs and the “so-called educated or liberal group” had steadily increased since he began his post. In June, Reeves echoed Berry's concerns to John Collier: “The St. Regis Indians in New York,” he wrote, “for a long time, have been hopelessly split into two major factions; progressive and ‘recalcitrants,’ or so-called old-timers represented by ‘Life Chiefs.’” “Recalcitrants,” “old-timers,” a “rump organization” were the terms settler officials used to describe Haudenosaunee government.46 Ongoing confusion over jurisdiction also generated questions regarding policing. In September 1940 Berry reached out to Ralph Emmons, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York, to explore law enforcement options. Berry assured Emmons that the Buffalo and Syracuse district attorneys as well as the alcohol tax unit of the Treasury Department had promised him “full cooperation” and suggested that Emmons's federal office provide a temporary investigator to tackle the alcohol issue. In his reply, however, Emmons explained that not only did his office lack an investigative unit but it also was powerless to act because it had “been unable to get any agency to take the responsibility of investigating such [liquor] sales.” Emmons elaborated further: the Fbi had refused to investigate that “class of case” because it did not, the agency claimed, fall under its jurisdiction; the alcohol tax unit insisted that such matters were “not a part of their duties”; and the Department of the Interior claimed not to have a sufficient number of investigators to look into the problem. “We have quite often run up against the situation,” Emmons concluded, “that there seems to be no one in a position to say who shall investigate border-line matters, or, where there are insufficient investigators in the Department in charge of such matters.” In January 1941 Assistant Commissioner of Indian Affairs Zimmerman suggested that it would simply be “easier” for his office to relinquish jurisdiction over New York's reservations if it truly meant to address the “liquor issues” there.47 In 1942 the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed what Pound had concluded twenty years earlier: “The Indians [we]re not subject to state laws and the process of its courts.” According to one legal scholar, the Court's decision in United States v. Forness in 1942 “cast grave doubt on the state's assumption of a vaguely defined concurrent jurisdiction over Indians,” an assumption that had been allowed to stand amid a general policy of noninterference by federal officials. When the Court refused to review the decision, which had been a significant victory for Indigenous New Yorkers, state officials pushed hard to clarify the relationship of New York State to its Native communities. As part of the process, state representatives convened the Joint Legislative Committee on Indian Affairs in 1943. By 1945, the committee had drafted jurisdiction bills for congressional review and, in that same year, gained the support of the acting secretary of the interior, who wanted only to maintain federal power to abrogate treaty relationships and to preside over land issues.48 In November 1947 New York superintendent of Indian Affairs William Benge wrote a more detailed letter explaining the need for jurisdiction transfer at Akwesasne. “The situation with respect to lawlessness and lack of protection by individuals is perhaps worse on this reservation than on any other in the state,” he asserted. This, according to Benge, resulted from the elective council's near total lack of any “real authority.” Making matters worse, he observed, was the existence of a “‘rump’ organization calling itself the council of Life Chiefs,” asserting itself as the “true tribal governing body,” and insisting that the “St. Regis Indians [we]re a sovereign foreign nation.” Benge then, in his efforts to discredit traditional governance at Akwesasne, documented its significant and, for settler authorities, troubling presence. He also concluded his letter with a curious observation. Many Mohawks had become aware of the impending transfer, and nearly all of those with whom Benge spoke “expressed opposition to the enactment of such laws.” Their opposition arose from a “suspicion that this would be the first step toward taxation and land theft.” According to Benge, however, none of those concerns “appear[ed] to be valid.”49 In the final weeks of 1947, Akwesasne's traditional chiefs gathered to address the impending transfers. “The only hope for our people lies in the Six Nations Confederacy [and] in the hearts and minds of its people,” the life chiefs urged. “If we can work as [one, our] united voice will be strong enough to be heard in both Washington and Ottawa. The people should petition their chiefs to clasp hands with their brothers across the border.” In the following weeks, a delegation of elective and traditional chiefs from the neighboring Mohawk territory of Kahnawake similarly “urged a strong union of reservations under a single central government which would be the Mohawk Nation.” The Kahanwake delegation made their plea at the reserve town of St. Regis, where they were “well received,” and again in Hogansburg, New York, where “local chiefs” agreed to “take the matter under advisement.”50 These meetings reflected a widespread dissatisfaction among Mohawks on both sides of the border with their elective governments, which many blamed for taking a too conciliatory stance on settler interests. When the issue was put to a referendum on May 24, 1948, Akwesasne Mohawks voted 83–1 to dissolve their elective council in favor of traditional governance. In response, the council “renounce[d] all claim to authority” and deferred to the governing power of the “Six Nations Chiefs.” New York and the United States, however, refused to recognize the referendum because of the small number of votes, overlooking the low voter turnout rates that regularly plagued tribal elections. Officials also cited a technicality, explaining that only a federal observer could facilitate a legal referendum. In the wake of this demonstration of solidarity by the elective and traditional governments, the tribe's attorney, himself a New York State employee, quickly scheduled a June tribal council election. When he and two state police officers arrived at the council house, however, they found the doors padlocked and a group of clan mothers standing by to prevent the election. Although successful in delaying the day's proceedings, the clan mothers could not prevent the appointment of a new, more cooperative elective council in September. In a symbolic gesture nearly a year after the installation of the new council, another election, this time under police guard, was held in Hogansburg. Ten days after those dubious election proceedings, Maxwell Garrow reminded New York governor Thomas Dewey that “the Six Nation Government and the majority of … St. Regis Mohawks refuse[d] to recognize the … Elected System of government that the State of New York continually attempt[ed] to force upon” them. Shortly after, Benge affirmed that Mohawks continued to “[clamor] for some sort of change in their tribal government.”51 Despite strong opposition from individuals across New York's Haudenosaunee communities, in July 1948 Public Law 881 transferred criminal jurisdiction over reservation lands from the federal government to the state of New York. Using language reminiscent of other termination-era rhetoric that would justify wide-ranging attacks on Native political sovereignty across the country, New York's joint legislative committee pitched the jurisdiction transfer as a move with the best interests of Haudenosaunee people at heart. To stay on the path of federal noninterference would be “an affront to the intelligence and integrity of the average New York Indian,” all the while continuing to promote “shiftlessness and irresponsibility.” In the New York legislature, as in Washington, D.C., lawmakers associated termination policy with liberty and equality. Freed from the yoke of “domestic dependent” status, Native people would be able to strive as individuals for full admittance into the American polity.52 Despite emerging from a particularly confusing legal history, the New York jurisdiction transfers were part and parcel of federal termination efforts. The legislation steamrolled Haudenosaunee opposition, with lawmakers preferring to focus energy on easing into the new laws rather than on entertaining any real possibility of barring the transfer. As they had throughout the previous decade, politicians and Indian affairs personnel continued to cast Akwesasne as a lawless place, thus necessitating a clear assumption of jurisdiction by New York State. “Law and order conditions are in a bad way there under the present set-up,” wrote J. R. Venning, chief of the Law and Order Section of the Office of Indian Affairs, in June of 1948. “Tribal disciplinary action has completely broken down,” he warned, noting the total absence of a federal Indian affairs presence. New York attorney general Nathaniel L. Goldstein described the state's reservations as places that had, at times, “approached a condition of anarchy.”53 In 1949 the western New York–based Seneca Nation unsuccessfully demanded an end to the transfer proceedings via a twenty-five-year “non-aggression treaty.” In 1950 the Akwesasne Mohawk Paul C. Tarbell wrote to the Department of the Interior explaining that the lawlessness that federal and state politicians perceived was an exaggerated reaction to the tensions between the “State faction” and the “Indian faction.” According to his letter, only “a few” Mohawks supported the tribal government, while most looked to the traditional, confederacy-aligned council for governance. The two councils' disagreements led to difficulty in “settling civil and other questions.” Despite clear Mohawk voices offering alternative solutions, later in 1950 Congress voted to transfer civil jurisdiction. Shortly after the passage of Public Law 881 in 1948, Benge suggested in a letter to the commissioner of Indian affairs that “the general opinion of the Indians seem[ed] to be that application of the state criminal laws w[ould] result in protection without any loss of rights as Indians.” Benge, who did not cite a particular source to support his observation, stood as one of many voices seeking to foreclose further dispute of the highly contentious transfers.54 Most official conversations regarding the new laws focused on their implementation, with state and federal officials emphasizing that policing agencies should take care not to show excessive force while implementing settler law. In the weeks immediately after the passage of Public Law 881, Zimmerman suggested that Benge encourage county officials to “inspire contentment and satisfaction on the part of the Indians,” rather than resentment. “Suggest the various officers be extremely patient with them in introducing the new order of things,” he continued; the new law, after all, would be “quite a change.” If an officer made an arrest, he was to take great care “to explain procedure, reason, etc.” to the offender. Additionally, prosecuting attorneys would be responsible for “talk[ing] to the Indian and his friends,” and “endeavoring to show them the error of the wrong doing and the necessity and reasons for taking action, and even to assist … in presenting all facts favorable to him.” And, finally, Zimmerman thought it prudent that so-called “peace officers” “induce” New York's Haudenosaunee “to be law-abiding citizens” to prevent the “necessity for action” by police. If police and prosecutors displayed kindness, transparency, and patience, Zimmerman seemed to think, Mohawks and other New York Natives could be convinced that state and local jurisdiction would better protect their communities.55 In pursuit of this goal, Benge joined several county district attorneys, representatives from New York's Department of Social Welfare, a New York State Police captain, and others at an October 1948 meeting to discuss the nuts and bolts of the transfer. All attendees agreed that the assumption of jurisdiction by state and local law enforcement needed to occur “with the very minimum of friction.” That friction, it seemed, was most likely to be generated by “bringing the matter [of the transfers] to the attention of the Indians.” In prior conversations, state officials had suggested a series of reservation meetings where community members, tribal councilors, and state authorities would come together to discuss the transfers. Now that the legislation had already passed, however, participants worried that such on-reservation meetings might create “the impression that state and local representatives [would be] coming … in the role of victors in a contest.” Further, Benge and his colleagues worried that Haudenosaunee people would “attach such importance” to the meetings that the jurisdiction transfer “would be overemphasized and … perhaps convey the impression that some great and drastic change was to take place.”56 After much consideration, Benge, the district attorneys, and other officials decided that “the most practical and desirable method” of communicating the criminal jurisdiction transfer would be via a letter from the New York attorney general's office. The document would summarize the new law, affirm that state and local police and courts would now enforce criminal laws on reservations, and assure “that the Indians may expect the same amount of protection and justice as any other residents of the state.” The letter would be sent to all elected tribal officials, to “influential Indians who [we]re not connected with tribal governments,” and to all local and state law enforcement agencies. “It was thought,” Benge concluded in his letter to the commissioner of Indian affairs in Washington, that “by … minimizing the importance … of the transfer of jurisdiction, it c[ould] be accomplished with the least friction and provide less opportunity for erroneous impressions among the Indians.”57 “I am an Indian Six Nation St. Regis Clan Mother,” began Christine Terrance in her January 10, 1943, letter to former New York governor and sitting U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt. She wrote Roosevelt after losing a five-year-long inheritance dispute that dragged on from 1937 to 1942. She and her relatives had dealt with much. On April 1, 1942, state troopers and county sheriff's deputies evicted Terrance from her deceased father-in-law's farm. They moved her clothes and belongings to a new home where they “piled [the furniture] on the ground” because she would not allow them to enter that house. The officers threatened Terrance, who had already spent time in jail during the dispute, and her supporters with burglary charges if they attempted to reenter the now-padlocked farmhouse. Years earlier, Terrance had appeared in the county surrogate's court in Malone, New York, where the Hon. Cornelius J. Carey issued an injunction against Christine and her husband, John Terrance, ordering them to stop selling hay and wood from John's father's farm. That day, Judge Carey also issued a show-cause order to Christine's daughter, Hattie Terrance Edwards, and Hattie's husband, James Edwards, demanding that they provide legal justification for their presence on the property. In October 1940 Judge Carey issued Christine, Hattie, and James yet another show-cause order and found each in contempt of court when they failed to reply. The state demanded the payment of fines and court fees. In December Franklin County undersheriff Harold Ketcham dragged Hattie to jail for contempt. The following fall, Franklin County sheriff's deputies incarcerated Christine, also in the county jail.58 The issue was bigger than Christine Terrance's family dispute. “I am not the only one the state law has done,” she asserted. “This Joe Garrow and his wife too. State law put them on the road…. And Mrs. Symore in the coldest day in the winter the state law put her on the road.” In Garrow's case, the three elected chiefs had ruled on a will left by Garrow's father, a decision that ultimately required Joe and his wife to abandon Joe's father's farm. For the sixty-eight-year-old Symore, who had been born on the northern side of Akwesasne, the elected chiefs turned to the state courts to have her ejected from her property on the southern side. According to Moses White, the chiefs decided that she needed to leave, “as she was a Canadian.” Symore initially refused but eventually departed for Canada voluntarily a few days before sheriff's deputies came to remove her furniture from her home. “The state law doesn't want to listen to the chiefs of our reservation,” Terrance concluded. “There isn't no trouble at all if the state law would keep out.”59 Perhaps more than any of the stories documented in this essay, Christine Terrance's letter reveals a carceral apparatus in New York that did so much more than imprison. It wore people down, through overpolicing, harassment, surveillance, violence, evictions, property seizure, fines, and fees. The 1953 passage of federal laws that simultaneously attempted to terminate tribal status for dozens of Indigenous nations and unilaterally grant jurisdiction over their citizens to states marked the end, or perhaps the middle, of a much longer effort that tied race to criminality in a familiar but still largely untold story in the twentieth-century United States. Notes The Author thanks the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University for research support. For feedback on drafts, he thanks Walter Johnson, Ju Yon Kim, Ned Blackhawk, Kelly Lytle Hernández, Destin Jenkins, and Tejasvi Nagaraja. Footnotes 1 On the Uss Chillicothe, see “They Sing a Song o' Rum but May Soon Be Chasing Booties in the Dry Navee,” Ogdensburg (Ny) Republican-Journal, June 28, 1924, p. 5. “Special Agent F. Henry Almost Loses Life in Attempt to Save Indian Bootleg from Drowning,” ibid., Oct. 11, 1923, p. 5; “Bootleg Drowns after Mad Leap to Evade Arrest,” Chateaugay (Ny) Record and Franklin County (Ny) Democrat, Oct. 10, 1923, p. 5. 2 “Special Agent F. Henry Almost Loses Life in Attempt to Save Indian Bootleg from Drowning.” Allan S. Everest, Rum across the Border: The Prohibition Era in Northern New York (Syracuse, 1978), 78–79. “Indian Drowns Escaping Law,” Ogdensburg (Ny) Advance and St. Lawrence (Ny) Weekly Democrat, Oct. 11, 1923, p. 5. “Border Patrolman Fires Fusillade at Fleeing Car Containing Man and Girl,” Ogdensburg (Ny) Republican-Journal, June 27, 1924, p. 5. 3 The historical literature on the Haudenosaunee Confederacy is vast and covers the period before the twentieth century. Influential works include Lewis Henry Morgan, League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851; New York, 1993); Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York, 1969); Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill, 1992); William N. Fenton, The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy (Lincoln, 1998); Mary Druke Becker, “‘We Are an Independent Nation’: A History of Iroquois Sovereignty,” Buffalo Law Review, 46 (Fall 1998), 981–99; Laurence Hauptman, Conspiracy of Interests: Iroquois Dispossession and the Rise of New York State (Syracuse, 2001); Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York, 2006); and Eric Hinderaker, The Two Hendricks: Unraveling a Mohawk Mystery (Cambridge, Mass., 2010). In the last decade, scholars have begun reinterpreting early Haudenosaunee history with an eye to Native power and have followed a broader trend in Native American historiography. See Edward Countryman, “Toward a Different Iroquois History,” William and Mary Quarterly, 69 (April 2012), 347–60. 4 Katie Herchenroeder, “Police Brutality in Minneapolis Long before George Floyd, Vice News, July 24, 2020, https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj4wqq/another-story-derek-chauvin-police-brutality-minneapolis-before-george-floyd. 5 For U.S. statistics on Indigenous incarceration and murder, see Jake Flanagin, “Native Americans Are the Unseen Victims of a Broken U.S. Justice System,” Quartz, April 27, 2015, https://qz.com/392342/native-americans-are-the-unseen-victims-of-a-broken-us-justice-system/; and Jon Marcus, “Bringing Native American Stories to a National Audience,” Nieman Reports, Feb. 11, 2016, http://niemanreports.org/articles/bringing-native-american-stories-to-a-national-audience/. For Canadian statistics, see Robert Nichols, “The Colonialism of Incarceration,” Radical Philosophy Review, 17 (no. 2, 2014), 435–55. 6 Criminal Jurisdiction Act, 62 Stat. 1224 (1948); Civil Jurisdiction Act, 64 Stat. 845 (1950). 7 Luana Ross, Inventing the Savage: The Social Construction of Native American Criminality (Austin, 1998), 29. Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, “Criminal Empire: The Making of the Savage in a Lawless Land,” Theory & Event, 19 (no. 4, 2016), 14. 8 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research, 8 (Dec. 2006), 387–409. Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (Chapel Hill, 2017), 48, 9. Dan Berger, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill, 2015), 10. 9 Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, Mass., 2016), 2–3. Safe Streets Act, 82 Stat. 197 (1968). On carceral expansion, see Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley, 2007); Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York, 2014); Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime; and Jordan T. Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State (Berkeley, 2016). 10 Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, 6. 11 Susan Hood, “Termination of the Klamath Indian Tribe of Oregon,” Ethnohistory, 19 (Fall 1972), 379–92; Eric R. Biggs and Charles F. Wilkinson, “The Evolution of the Termination Policy,” American Indian Law Review, 5 (no. 1, 1977), 139–87; Nicholas C. Peroff, Menominee Drums: Tribal Termination and Restoration, 1954–1974 (Norman, 1982); Donald L. Fixico, Termination and Relocation: Federal Indian Policy, 1945–1960 (Albuquerque, 1986). Public Law 280, Pub. L. No. 83–280 (1953). 12 Public Law 280, Pub. L. No. 83–280 (1953); “House Concurrent Resolution 108,” Aug. 1, 1953, in Documents of United States Indian Policy, ed. Francis Paul Prucha (Lincoln, 2000), 234. Criminal Jurisdiction Act, 62 Stat. 1224 (1948); Civil Jurisdiction Act, 64 Stat. 845 (1950). 13 Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” 14 Murakawa, First Civil Right, 3, 12, 13. 15 Akwesasne took shape as a community in the 1750s, when French-allied Mohawks settled the area under the patronage of the Jesuit St. John Francis Regis. Aren Akweks [Ray Fadden], History of the St. Regis Akwesasne Mohawk (Hogansburg, 1947), 12. 16 Most literature on the Haudenosaunee Confederacy dates its founding to the fourteenth or fifteenth century. Others argue that the alliance formed earlier. Louellyn White suggests that the confederacy may have formed as early as 1142. Theresa McCarthy dates its founding to “thousands of years ago.” See Louellyn White, Free to Be Mohawk: Indigenous Education at the Akwesasne Freedom School (Norman, 2015), 33; and Theresa McCarthy, In Divided Unity: Haudenosaunee Reclamation at Grand River (Tucson, 2016), xv. Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the Year Ended June 30, 1899, p. xvii, Indian Affairs Annual Reports, 1864–1990, Aboriginal Heritage Collection (Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa). 17 “Our Man about Town—Interesting Local History of the St. Regis Reservation,” Malone (Ny) Farmer, March 31, 1926, p. 6. “St. Regis Indian Reservation in Two Countries,” Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 10, 1914, p. 15. Frederick J. Seaver, Historical Sketches of Franklin County and Its Several Towns with Many Short Biographies (Albany, 1918), 3, 577. 18 “Governor Predicts Speed in Developing St. Lawrence Power,” New York Times, Aug. 30, 1930, p. 1. The Aluminum Company of America stood as the one exception to a deindustrialized border and established a plant in 1903 on the Grasse River in Massena, New York, adjacent to the reservation. Elizabeth Hoover, “Local Food Production and Community Illness Narratives: Responses to Environmental Contamination and Health Studies in the Mohawk Community of Akwesasne (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 2010), 53–54. 19 Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, 1998); Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence, 2004); Paige Sylvia Raibmon, Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast (Durham, N.C., 2005); Jean M. O'Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis, 2010); Benjamin Balthaser, “‘Travels of an American Indian into the Hinterlands of Soviet Russia’: Rethinking Indigenous Modernity and the Popular Front in the Work of Archie Phinney and D'Arcy McNickle,” American Quarterly, 66 (June 2014), 385–416. 20 James P. Lindsay, “Report at Constitutional Convention,” reprinted in “Lawmakers Seek Justice for Indians,” New York Times, Aug. 8, 1915, p. 23. 21 ibid. 22 Gerald Gunther, “Governmental Power and New York Indian Lands—A Reassessment of a Persistent Problem of Federal-State Relations,” Buffalo Law Review, 8 (Fall 1958), 4, 7. On the 1813 law and its lack of enforcement, see ibid. For the Whipple Report, see Report of Special Committee to Investigate the Indian Problem of the State of New York: Appointed by the Assembly of 1888, Transmitted to the Legislature February 1, 1889 (Albany, 1889). Gunther, “Governmental Power and New York Indian Lands,” 11. 23 Cuthbert Pound, “Nationals without a Nation: The New York State Tribal Indians,” Columbia Law Review, 22 (Feb. 1922), 98, 101. “Local Department,” Malone (Ny) Farmer, July 30, 1924, p. 2. 24 Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, N.C., 2014), 10. Pound, “Nationals without a Nation,” 101. 25 A. C. Hill, “New York State Indians Grow Restless, New York Times, Aug. 10, 1924, p. 7. 26 Shiri Pasternak, Grounded Authority: The Algonquins of Barriere Lake against the State (Minneapolis, 2017), 72, 3. Justin B. Richland, “Jurisdiction: Grounding Law in Language,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 42 (Oct. 2013), 213. On the relationship between law, language, and jurisdiction, see Peter Fitzpatrick, The Mythology of Modern Law (New York, 1992). 27 Frederic F. Van de Water, Grey Riders: The Story of The New York State Troopers (New York, 1922), 237–38. On bringing “modern” policing to upstate New York, see Christopher Thale, “The Informal World of Police Patrol: New York City in the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of Urban History, 33 (Jan. 2007), 187. Van de Water, Grey Riders, 64, 237–38, 152, 15. “Pass the State Police Bill,” New York Times, March 31, 1917, p. 10. Van de Water, Grey Riders, 33. 28 Van de Water, Grey Riders, 263, 274. 29 Lisa McGirr, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (New York, 2016), 71. 30 David J. Hanson, “Prohibition Era Dry Laws in New York State: Discover the Story,” n.d., Alcohol Problems and Solutions, https://www.alcoholproblemsandsolutions.org/Controversies/Prohibition-Era-Dry-Laws-in-New-York-State.html. National Prohibition Act, 41 Stat. 305, 308 (1919). On the Mullan-Gage Act, see Everest, Rum across the Border, 10. On the Cuvillier Bill, see ibid. 31 “Canada and U.S. to War on Booze,” Chateaugay (Ny) Record and Franklin County (Ny) Democrat, Nov. 25, 1921, p. 8. 32 “Local Department,” 2; “Muller Convicted and Sentenced,” Malone (Ny) Farmer, Dec. 10, 1924, p. 1. “Personal Paragraphs,” Fort Covington (Ny) Sun, Jan. 1, 1925, p. 5. 33 “Indian Woman Appeals from Fine,” Malone (Ny) Farmer, April 24, 1929, p. 2. “Officers' Acts Arouse Indians,” Chateaugay (Ny) Record and Franklin County (Ny) Democrat, April 26, 1929, p. 4. 34 Warren K. Moorehead, “Conditions on St. Regis Reservation, New York,” Oct. 1, 1929, pp. 1–5, folder 16, box 7, “Hugh Lenox Scott Papers Accumulated While Serving on Board of Indian Commissioners February 25, 1919–July 25, 1933,” Ms 4525 (National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Museum Support Center, Suitland, Md.). “Indian Shows a True Brotherly Affection,” Massena (Ny) Observer, Feb. 20, 1930, p. 1. 35 Manu Karuka, Empire's Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (Berkeley, 2019), 40. “St. Lawrence Span to Be Opened Today; United States Joins Canada in Exercises,” New York Times, June 30, 1934, p. 16. For a more expansive treatment of the bridge construction process, see Christopher Clements, “Between Affect and History: Sovereignty and Ordinary Life at Akwesasne, 1929–1942,” History & Theory, 54 (Dec. 2015), 105–24. On leasing rail bridges, see Kallen M. Martin, “‘Life along the Line’: Places of Memory among the Mohawks of Akwesasne” (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 2010), 12. “New Canada Bridge Open Next Summer,” New York Times, Nov. 19, 1932, p. 17. 36 “Governor Predicts Speed in Developing St. Lawrence Power.” 37 “Indians Write to Roosevelt: Iroquois Chieftains Have No Use for Elections in the St. Regis Reserve,” New York Times, May 27, 1899, p. 2. Mike Mitchell, “Akwesasne: An Unbroken Assertion of Sovereignty,” in Drumbeat: Anger and Renewal in Indian Country, ed. Boyce Richardson (Toronto, 1989), 119. “Airing of Grievances,” Toronto Globe, Feb. 3, 1900. “Indians Allies, Not Subjects,” ibid., April 8, 1920. 38 “Iroquois Admit Cayugas to Council,” New York Times, Dec. 10, 1923, p. 25. “Indians Go to the League: Canadian Iroquois to Present Claim for Independence,” ibid., Sept. 1, 1923, p. 16. “Iroquois Open Great Powwow Near Montreal to Draft Plan to Regain Their Ancient Glory,” ibid., June 28, 1927, p. 27. 39 “State Police to Control Indians,” Salamanca (Ny) Inquirer, Nov. 27, 1925. Hill, “New York State Indians Grow Restless,” 7. On narrative alternatives and politics, see Maureen Konkle, Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827–1863 (Chapel Hill, 2004). 40 On the Indian Reorganization Act, see Thomas Biolsi, Organizing the Lakota: The Political Economy of the New Deal on Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations (Tucson, 1992). On the creation of the elective council, see Hoover, “Local Food Production and Community Illness Narratives.” In a June 8, 1935, election, Akwesasne voted 237–46 to reject the Indian Reorganization Act. Given the typically low voter turnout for tribal elections, the fact that 35% of Akwesasne's 800 voting members participated in this election was a powerful assertion of local autonomy. See U.S. Government, “Indian Tribes, Bands and Communities Which Voted to Accept or Reject the Terms of the Indian Reorganization Act, the Dates When Elections Were Held, and the Votes Cast,” p. 6, folder 5, box 1, Central Classified Files, 1940–1957, New York, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Rg 75 (National Archives, Washington, D.C.). For the Haudenosaunee context, see Laurence M. Hauptman, The Iroquois Struggle for Survival (Syracuse, 1986). Douglas M. George-Kanentiio, Iroquois on Fire: A Voice from the Mohawk Nation (Westport, 2006). 41 C. H. Berry to William Zimmerman Jr., Oct. 14, 1939, folder 62, box 3, Central Classified Files, 1940–1957, New York, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Zimmerman to Harold Ickes, May 31, 1939, ibid. [Mrs.] M. K. Reynolds to J. Edgar Hoover, Feb. 21, 1950, folder 38, box 6, ibid. 42 Moses J. White to Berry, Oct. 13, 1939, folder 6, box 1, ibid. Berry to Zimmerman, Oct. 14, 1939, ibid. 43 Christine Terrance to C. C. Daniels, Feb. 16, 1942, folder 25, box 5, ibid. Berry to Commissioner of Indian Affairs [John Collier], Aug. 1, 1944, folder 62, box 3, ibid. Violet Lazore to Berry, Feb. 9, 1945, folder 31, box 5, ibid. 44 E. L. Olsen to Department of the Interior, July 4, 1945, folder 32, ibid. Nora M. Anderson to D. E. Murphy (Director, U.S. Indian Service, Minneapolis District Office), Sept. 30, 1946, folder 20, box 4, ibid. 45 John Simmons to Cordell Hull, July 22, 1940, folder 18, box 5, ibid. Oscar Chapman to Hull, Aug. 14, 1940, ibid. J. R. T. Reeves to Zimmerman, Aug. 28, 1942, folder 62, box 3, ibid. 46 White to Berry, Oct. 13, 1939, folder 6, box 1, ibid. Reeves to John Collier, June 1, 1942, folder 20, box 14, ibid. 47 Ralph Emmons to Berry, Sept. 20, 1940, folder 26, box 5, ibid. Zimmerman to Berry, Jan. 17, 1941, ibid. 48 Gunther, “Governmental Power and New York Indian Lands,” 14. United States v. Forness was a test case brought by the United States on behalf of the Seneca, who sought to cancel a federally authorized lease for nonpayment of rent by its white owners. United States v. Forness, 125 F.2d 928 (2d Cir. 1942). 49 William B. Benge to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Nov. 5, 1947, folder 12, box 1, Central Classified Files, 1940–1957, New York, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. 50 “Life Chief Meeting,” Ka-Weh-Ras!, Dec. 12, 1947, in Too Many Chiefs, Not Enough Indians: The History of the Three Chief System and the Constitution of the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe, by Darren Bonaparte, http://www.wampumchronicles.com/toomanychiefs0.html. “Delegates from Caughnawaga,” Ka-Weh-Ras!, Jan. 24, 1948, ibid. 51 “Referendum,” Ka-Weh-Ras!, May 29, 1948, ibid. Getting few, if any, votes in council elections was normal. In 1942 an elective council member won his office with only seventeen votes. See “The 1948 Referendum,” ibid. Maxwell Garrow to Thomas Dewey, June 23, 1949, folder 3, box 5, Central Classified Files, 1940–1957, New York, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Benge to Zimmerman, Oct. 18, 1948, folder 15, box 1, ibid. 52 On Public Law 881, see “July 2, 1948 [S. 1683] [Public Law 881] 62 Stat. 1224,” in Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, vol. VI: Laws (Washington, 1971), chap. 809, https://web.archive.org/web/20151002165546/http://digital.library.okstate.edu/kappler/vol6/html_files/v6p0427b.html. Lafayette Kennedy (Seneca) to Zimmerman, May 12, 1948, folder 13, box 1, Central Classified Files, 1940–1957, New York, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs; Harley Pierce (Seneca) to Harry S. Truman, March 17, 1948, ibid. Leighton T. Wade (Counsel for Joint Legislative Committee on Indian Affairs) to Collier, Jan. 25, 1944, folder 5, ibid. 53 J. R. Venning, “Memorandum,” June 23, 1948, folder 12, box 1, Central Classified Files, 1940–1957, New York, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Nathaniel L. Goldstein to Hon. William H. Mackenzie, Oct. 19, 1948, folder 13, ibid. 54 “Indians Disagree on State Control,” New York Times, June 12, 1949, p. 20. Paul C. Tarbell to Department of the Interior, May 22, 1950, folder 3, box 5, Central Classified Files, 1940–1957, New York, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Benge to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Sept. 7, 1948, folder 12, box 1, ibid. 55 “July 2, 1948 [S. 1683] [Public Law 881] 62 Stat. 1224,” in Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, vol. VI: Laws (Washington, 1971), chap. 809, https://web.archive.org/web/20151002165546/http://digital.library.okstate.edu/kappler/vol6/html_files/v6p0427b.html. Zimmerman to Benge, July 25, 1948, folder 12, box 1, Central Classified Files, 1940–1957, New York, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. 56 Benge to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Oct. 26, 1948, folder 13, box 1, Central Classified Files, 1940–1957, New York, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. 57 ibid. 58 Christine Terrance to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jan. 10, 1943, folder 20, box 14, ibid. On the role that clan mothers play within confederacy government, see Elizabeth Hoover, The River Is in Us: Fighting Toxins in a Mohawk Community (Minneapolis, 2017), xiv. White to Berry, April 10, 1942, folder 20, box 14, Central Classified Files, 1940–1957, New York, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. “New Angle in Indian Dispute,” Watertown (Ny) Daily Times, Dec. 19, 1940. Frank A. Terrance to Daniels, Oct. 8, 1941, folder 20, box 14, Central Classified Files, 1940–1957, New York, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. 59 Christine Terrance to Roosevelt, Jan. 10, 1943, folder 20, box 14, Central Classified Files, 1940–1957, New York, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. White to Berry, April 10, 1943, ibid. Christine Terrance to Roosevelt, Jan. 10, 1943, ibid. © The Author 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. 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TI - “There isn't no trouble at all if the state law would keep out”: Indigenous People and New York's Carceral State
JO - Journal of American History
DO - 10.1093/jahist/jaab123
DA - 2021-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/there-isn-t-no-trouble-at-all-if-the-state-law-would-keep-out-2VV3U7OaYn
SP - 296
EP - 319
VL - 108
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
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