Last month, the New York State Assembly unanimously passed a bill sponsored by Assemblyman Tommy John Schiavoni to reinstate and acknowledge the Montaukett Indian Nation. Yes, even in these polarized times, it unanimously passed.
It now goes to the State Senate, which, like the Assembly, has overwhelmingly passed the bill seven times. Yes, seven times. But Governor Kathy Hochul vetoed it four times, and her predecessor, Governor Andrew Cuomo, also a Democrat, vetoed it three times.
“The people of the Montaukett Indian Nation are a rich part of the Long Island community,” declared a statement issued by Schiavoni’s office following passage of his 2026 measure on March 9. But, “After several attempts to advance legislation which would recognize and acknowledge the Montauketts, New York State has continued with the precedent set in 1910 to deny them their right of existence in the eyes of the state. Despite the 1910 Pharaoh v. Benson case, in which the court declared them extinct while their leaders and 75 members of the nation sat in the courtroom, the Montaukett Indian Nation has continued to thrive and govern itself. The wrongful removal of their state recognition remains uncorrected.”
“I am grateful to my colleagues for again unanimously voting to pass this measure.” Schiavoni said, vowing to follow through on his pledge to “continue to prioritize the reinstatement of state recognition of the Montaukett Indian Nation, which was wrongfully stripped of its rights to exist more than a century ago.”
Schiavoni, a Sag Harbor Democrat, took office in the Assembly in January 2025. The 2026 Montaukett recognition measure, along with earlier bills, was sponsored in the State Senate by Republican Senator Anthony Palumbo of New Suffolk. It passed the Senate 50-to-1 in 2025.
In her veto message this past December for the 2025 measure, Hochul again cited the 1910 ruling in a case titled Pharaoh v. Benson. In it, State Supreme Court Justice Abel Blackmar, sitting in Riverhead, sided with the descendants of Arthur Benson, a developer, in awarding them Montaukett tribal lands. Hochul noted that “in my previous veto message,” in 2024, “I pledged to work with the Montaukett community regarding this issue. I take seriously the responsibility of determining whether to recognize a Native American tribe, which would be a sovereign nation. However, at this time, there are still outstanding questions and issues concerning the Montauketts’ eligibility for recognition according to traditional criteria.” So, “I am constrained to veto this bill.”
Schiavoni succeeded Fred W. Thiele, Jr., a member of the State Assembly for nearly 30 years, who sponsored the earlier Montaukett measures in the Assembly.
After Hochul cited the Pharoah v. Benson case in a veto of the 2023 bill, Thiele, a Sag Harbor Democrat, said he was shocked that the governor would reference the ruling, calling the case “one of the most racist decisions in the history of New York jurisprudence.”
Thiele further said: “An error doesn’t become a mistake until you refuse to correct it. Instead of rejecting the noxious rationale of Benson, [Hochul’s] veto affirmed it. I am ashamed of our state government.”
The case was an effort by Montaukett Chief Wyandank Pharoah to undo the taking of Montauk lands by Benson. Justice Blackmar rejected Pharaoh’s claims, asserting that the Montaukett tribe was “extinct” and its members lived “shiftless” lives as hunters, fishermen, and farmers. This was despite a 1906 memorandum filed in the case by C.F. Larrabee, then acting commissioner of Indian Affairs for the U.S. Department of the Interior, who wrote that the Montauketts were “an existing Indian tribe” and that those attempting to annex the tribe’s land, including Benson, should be “forever” restrained.
The case was part of a larger picture. As Newsday reporter Mark Harrington noted in his article on the 2025 Hochul veto: “Newsday in a 1998 investigation found that the process by which developers and the Long Island Rail Road annexed Montaukett and Shinnecock Indian Nation lands over the past 200 years was rife with ‘deceit, lies and possible forgery.’”
In the bill vetoed in 2025 by Hochul—and in the current and prior measures—is a passage stating Blackmar’s “arbitrary ruling ignored earlier U.S. Supreme Court decisions defining Indian Nations according to criteria under which the Montaukett Indian Nation qualified as an existing sovereign tribe and giving Congress, rather than the courts, power to decide the status” of an Indian tribe.
What about an override of the governor’s veto by the State Legislature, considering the extent of support for the Montaukett legislation? A two-thirds vote would be necessary.
However, as New York Focus reported last year, “it will be up to the Senate and Assembly whether to lock horns again over the bills Hochul rejected this year,” but
“direct overrides…are unheard of in Albany.”
The Montaukett situation has attracted attention beyond Long Island. A New York Post article this past December, after Hochul’s 2025 veto, said it “had Democratic legislators and some Montaukett leaders fuming.” It quoted Sandra Brewer-Walker, executive director of the Montaukett Indian Nation, saying: “The governor just doesn’t get it—she lacks an understanding of Native American history and is upholding an illegal, racist ruling.”
