Cayuga Nation files lawsuit against state for operating Thruway on tribal lands

SENECA FALLS, N.Y. — The Cayuga Nation has filed a lawsuit claiming that New York State has operated the Thruway on its reservation in the Seneca Falls area for decades without federal approval.

The lawsuit aims to make the state turn over the proceeds to the Cayuga Nation of the tolls collected on the 64,000 acre reservation.

The Seneca Nation filed a similar lawsuit about the Thruway running through its lands in Western New York. That lawsuit will proceed after a judge denied the state’s motion to dismiss it earlier this year. Both nations are part of the Haudenosaunee confederacy, an alliance between six tribal nations in New York State.

In a release, the Cayuga Nation said the lawsuit “seeks to correct the decades long failure by the state to obtain federal approval for the highway.” The Cayuga Nation says the state failed to obtain approval from the Secretary of Interior when it built the Thruway in the 1950s through the reservation.

The release says the state has violated the Cayuga Nation’s sovereign right established by the Treaty of Canandaigua in 1794. That’s the treaty that federally recognized the Cayuga Nation’s reservation. The release also says the state violated the federal Right-of-Way Act in 1948, which says that no right-of-way can be made through Indian reservations without payment as determined by the Secretary of the Interior.