\n\t\tandwiched between two rows of suburban Long Island<\/a> homes, the fenced-off tract of grass looks like any other nondescript lot ready for construction. But take a walk inside and the ground is laden with faint slabs of rock, gravestones from a centuries-old Indigenous family cemetery that had been obscured by the passage of time and neglect. \u201cWhen we started working here seven years ago, it was nothing but trees and trash \u2014 there were couches buried here, you name it,\u201d says Sandi Brewster-walker, my spry octogenarian guide to the site. She bends over to pick up a discarded beer bottle. \u201cPeople in the houses throw stuff over the fence, so it\u2019s been a project.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tFor Brewster-walker, this place is sacred ground. The resting place of at least 80 members of her tribe: the Montaukett. Since she started serving as executive director a decade ago, uncovering lost history and setting records straight have been an obsession for Brewster-walker, whose caramel complexion is framed by warm hazel eyes and a beaded light-blue necklace. She points to the rear of the tract, where authorities are still in the process of removing brush that conceals some 50 additional graves. \u201cIt\u2019s probably more than that,\u201d she says. \u201cI have all the names.\u201d Thanks to Brewster-walker\u2019s tireless efforts digging up public records, tracing lineages, and petitioning officials, the town of Babylon will install a remembrance plaque and mow the grass here several times a year, as it has done at other rehabilitated Montaukett burial grounds. It\u2019s a small but meaningful gesture for a once-flourishing tribe that was gradually dispossessed of ancestral lands and then stripped of its official existence \u2014 a brazen case of legal erasure that continues to stain the annals of New York state government.<\/p>\n
\n\tIn an infamous 1910 court decision, Montaukett leaders and 75 tribal members were seated in the courtroom when a state Supreme Court judge declared them \u201cextinct,\u201d conferring their remaining lands to a white developer. The verdict came despite an earlier U.S. Supreme Court ruling under which the nation would have qualified for federal recognition, and a 1906 memorandum filed by the then-acting commissioner of Indian Affairs for the U.S. Department of the Interior, acknowledging that the Montauketts were \u201can existing Indian tribe\u201d and those trying to annex the tribe\u2019s land should be \u201cforever\u201d restrained.<\/p>\n
\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s one of the most racist court decisions in the history of New York state jurisprudence,\u201d says Fred W. Thiele Jr., a Democratic former state assemblyman who sponsored multiple bills to reinstate the tribe. He asserts the egregious case of judicial overreach is the \u201cNew York state version\u201d of the U.S. Supreme Court\u2019s shameful Dred Scott decision, which ruled that Black people had no rights, and Plessy v. Ferguson, a verdict that legalized racial segregation: \u201cThere\u2019s a wrong that needs to be corrected, and we shouldn\u2019t be making them go back to square one to prove something that we already know is true \u2014 we should just be correcting that wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\t\tSandi Brewster-walker at a tribal grave site she\u2019s rehabbed: \u201cWhen we started working here seven years ago, it was nothing but trees and trash,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJason Motlagh<\/p>\n
\n\tTo date, eight bills to recognize the tribe have passed both the State Assembly and Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support, only to be vetoed by Democratic Govs. Andrew Cuomo (three times) and Kathy Hochul (four times and counting). Year after year, Brewster-walker says, she and tribal leaders have worked in good faith with the Governor\u2019s Office to meet and exceed its every request for supporting materials and clarifications. Yet sometime around the Christmas holiday, a phone call with an Albany area code comes, informing them that the bill did not pass the governor\u2019s desk, a cruel charade that, Thiele says, \u201ccompounds the original sin.\u201d (The end-of-year timing all but ensures lawmakers will not be available to overturn the veto.)<\/p>\n
\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n
\n\tThe gnawing question is why? In these hyperpolarized times when bipartisan cooperation of any kind is rare, much less unanimous, Montaukett recognition would seem to be a legislative layup. Although the tribe\u2019s ancestral territory in eastern Long Island includes the Hamptons, some of the most valuable real estate in the country, the Montaukett have not made any land claims or requests for compensation. They insist that regaining state recognition is foremostly about correcting a historical error and preventing the tribe\u2019s history from sliding into oblivion.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI don\u2019t want to throw anybody out of their houses, and I\u2019m not looking for any big pieces of land,\u201d says Robert Pharaoh, hereditary chief of the Montaukett Indian Nation, affirming the tribe has no plans to sue for land. \u201cThe only thing I want is a piece of property big enough that I can put a museum or cultural research center on, and maybe put up a natural Indian village outside. That\u2019s all.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJason Motlagh<\/p>\n
\n\tLONG BEFORE THE expressway-traffic snarls, Maseratis, and sprawling waterfront estates, there were Montauketts. Archeological records show their Algonquian-speaking ancestors arrived in the easternmost reaches of what is now Long Island about 10,000 years ago. Surrounding seas offered fish and oysters, and woodlands brimmed with wild game and furnished the tools and building materials used to build wigwams and longhouses, along with dugout canoes that enabled the tribe to establish trade routes and military alliances into southern New England. This included a partnership with better-armed English settlers who arrived in the early 17th century. At the time, the native population was estimated to be upward of 10,000. Within decades, intertribal warfare and disease reduced it to about 500.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tIn the years that followed, predatory land purchases, restrictive edicts, and forced displacement further diminished their ranks. In his definitive study, The Montaukett Indians of Eastern Long Island, Long Island University historian John A. Strong debunks the myth that the tribe simply \u201cvanished,\u201d asserting the story was manufactured to clear the way for commercial expansion. Among other tactics, the English enforced deeds as permanent property transfers, whereas the Montauketts held them to be reciprocal agreements for shared land use and resource rights. Settlers bypassed local tribal bands and elevated a single Montaukett sachem to sign away vast tracts of land. As disease and intensified raids by rival tribes left the Montaukett more dependent on English protection, they were compelled to concede more land to pay off debts. \u201cThe Montauketts,\u201d Strong writes, \u201cwere to be drawn gradually into the web of an economic and political system where they would have less and less control over their own affairs.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\t\tRobert Pharaoh, chief of the Montaukett Indian Nation: \u201c\u201cI don\u2019t want to throw anybody out of their houses, and I\u2019m not looking for any big pieces of land,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJason Motlagh<\/p>\n
\n\tAs Montaukett territorial holdings thinned out, many intermarried with freed Black residents and other minorities. Bereft of land and fishing rights, they increasingly labored on behalf of powerful business interests, earning a reputation as hardy seamen on the Atlantic whaling ships sailing out of Sag Harbor in the 19th century. When plans were announced for a Long Island railroad extension to Montauk, at the far-eastern tip of the island, a developer named Arthur W. Benson began buying up vast tracts of land to create a summer resort, bypassing tribal consent. Families that did not acquiesce were forcibly relocated. Some saw their properties razed.<\/p>\n
\n\tIn 1896, Montaukett Chief Wyandanch Pharaoh filed a lawsuit to reclaim tribal territory. According to Strong, government policy at this time was based on the premise that Native Americans would be \u201cbetter off if they abandoned their traditional identity,\u201d and state courts weaponized prevailing racial stereotypes against the tribe. In the devastating 1910 Pharaoh v. Benson trial, Judge Abel Blackmar ruled that because the Montauketts had culturally assimilated and intermarried, their blood had \u201cbecome so mixed that in many of them Indian traits were obliterated.\u201d In an instant, the Montaukett lost their legal status and right to compensation. An appellate court upheld the ruling, although the U.S. Department of the Interior continued to count the Montaukett population until 1930.<\/p>\n
\n\tLong Island was the epicenter of eugenics in the U.S., a pseudoscientific movement aimed at \u201cimproving\u201d the genetic quality of the population (and would later go on to heavily influence the ideology and policies of the Nazi regime in Germany). In 1910, the same year as the ruling that wiped away the Montauketts\u2019 tribal rights, the Eugenics Record Office was founded in Cold Spring Harbor with a stated goal of maintaining an American hereditary ideal by eliminating the country of the \u201cunfit\u201d and \u201cdegenerate.\u201d By the 1920s, it was estimated that one out of seven Long Islanders belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. Federal agencies drew explicit red lines around minority neighborhoods, labeling them as hazardous and refusing to back mortgages, while parkways and overpasses engineered by Robert Moses, the autocratic urban planner, limited minority and lower-income public-transit access to recreational areas and beaches.<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\t\tSandi Brewster-walker does research at her favorite diner\/office.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJason Motlagh<\/p>\n
\n\tWith nothing left in their way, state authorities and developers laid the groundwork that made the East Hampton\u2013Montauk corridor one of the wealthiest in America. In 1925, Carl G. Fisher purchased 10,000 acres of former Montaukett land for $2.5 million, with a grand vision of creating \u201cthe Miami Beach of the North.\u201d He blasted holes to connect freshwater Lake Montauk to the local port, built golf courses and luxury hotels, and erected a six-story office building nicknamed the \u201cWhite Elephant.\u201d During the post-World War II construction boom, the Hamptons\u2019 old-money dynasties were joined by affluent New Yorkers, transforming the region into an exclusive summer playground where the average home now lists for nearly $3 million.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI call them \u2018the people behind the hedges,\u2019\u201d Brewster-walker quips as we drive through Southampton, one of the toniest zip codes in the country. Over several day trips from her home in Amityville to towns and villages eastward, she unpacks the tribe\u2019s invisible history with a matriarch\u2019s patience, a stack of folders in her lap for reference. Although the Montauketts\u2019 core ancestral territory encompassed the island\u2019s South Fork from East Hampton to Montauk Point, she reminds me that tribe members had settlements at the edge of Queens. \u201cThis was all our territory. Awwwl of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s one of the most racist court decisions in the history of New York,\u201d says\u00a0a former Democratic state assemblyman who sponsored bills to reinstate the tribe. \u201cThere\u2019s a wrong that needs to be corrected.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tA five-minute drive from East Hampton\u2019s Prada boutique, the Fowler House is the only official landmark in the U.S. recognizing Montaukett Indian history and culture. The small, saltbox-style home was once owned by George Fowler, a Montaukett born and raised at the Indian Fields reservation whose family was forced to relocate in the 1870s after their lands were sold at auction to Benson. The home was in a state of collapse until the town board members raised funds for its restoration, an ongoing project that Brewster-walker says would benefit from resources if Montaukett tribal status is restored. (In 2024, East Hampton Town officially recognized the Montaukett Nation.)<\/p>\n
\n\tPassing beachfront clam bars and a tennis club, we enter Hither Hills State Park, one of two parks made from seized Montaukett territory that tribal leaders say could provide the \u201csurplus land\u201d they seek for a cultural village. Brewster-walker guides me up a back road to a grassy knoll dotted with gravestones polished smooth by the salt breeze. One belongs to Stephen \u201cTalkhouse\u201d Pharaoh, a sachem, Civil War veteran, whaler, and California Gold Rush prospector with legendary stamina who was known to walk 25 to 50 miles a day round-trip between Montauk, East Hampton, and Sag Harbor. Today his name is more synonymous with a bar in Amagansett that features his portrait behind the stage. \u201cThey\u2019ve been capitalizing off his name,\u201d says Brewster-walker. \u201cStephen Talkhouse didn\u2019t drink.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tTaking back control of her people\u2019s narrative is a part-time job of sorts for Brewster-walker. \u201cPeople tend to have romantic or unrealistic ideas about who we were,\u201d she says, compelling her to \u201cdo battle\u201d with some well-intentioned historical groups. The Montauk Historical Society for many years operated a museum featuring mostly duplicate Montaukett artifacts, a violation of U.S. law, along with some authentic pieces she alleges were dubiously acquired. (The museum recently reopened with an enrolled Shinnecock, who also has Montaukett ancestors, as director.) And while the last registered Montaukett still living in Montauk passed away in June, Brewster-walker laments that plenty of non-natives still claim they are, mistakenly thinking they\u2019ll \u201cget a check\u201d from the government.<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\t\tFowler and Pharaoh family descendants photographed in 1924, Town of East Hampton. George Fowler (seated, front) was born at Indian Fields in Montauk, and his family was among the last residents of the Indian Fields settlement at the time of their dispossession from the land in the 1870s.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJASON Motlagh<\/p>\n
\n\tAt land\u2019s end, we park and hike past selfie-snapping South Korean tourists to the Montauk Point Lighthouse Museum. Brewster-walker receives free entry to the exhibit, and walks me through a section devoted to the Montauketts, the \u201cFirst People.\u201d Family portraits on loan from Chief Pharaoh include his mother, Olive, the former chief; his great-aunt, Pocahontas, in traditional buckskin regalia; the chief and his daughter. Talkhouse, along with a rugged cast of native whalers (for whom Brewster-walker has curated her own traveling exhibit) are also featured. \u201cWhat a history \u2014 what a wonderful history!\u201d an enthusiastic docent interjects.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cYes,\u201d Brewster-walker replies, \u201cbut it\u2019s so much more than this.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tNear the conclusion of the visual timeline, a series of pictures leaves Brewster-walker flabbergasted. \u201cWhy are they here?\u201d she asks, poking at an image of a family in native garb at a ceremony. \u201cHe\u2019s a fake Indian, too,\u201d she adds, gesturing at someone she claims is an impostor. \u201cThese two really should be removed.\u201d Taking pictures of the pictures, she promises to take the matter up immediately with the museum director. \u201cMy God, people think anyone with a feather in their hair is Indian,\u201d she huffs on our way out. \u201cIt\u2019s horrible.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tGROWING UP IN AMITYVILLE, a diverse working-class community on Long Island\u2019s South Shore, Brewster-walker got accustomed to people confusing appearance and race. Though of mixed Montaukett, Black, English, and Irish heritage, anyone who wasn\u2019t white was marked \u201ccolored\u201d by the census takers of the day. She credits her parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, all of whom lived on the same street (now Brewster Lane), with instilling her, her three sisters, and her brother with a strong sense of their native identity. Ancestral stories shared at family gatherings and trips to powwows across the island community steeped her awareness into adulthood.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2018We\u2019ll work with you, we\u2019ll work with you.\u2019 You know how many years we\u2019ve heard that,\u201d says Lance Gumbs, vice chairman of the Shinnecock Nation\u2019s Council of trustees. \u201cThat never happens.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tAfter climbing a male-dominated corporate ladder as an engineer at PerkinElmer, Brewster-walker plunged into Democratic politics. She served as Jesse Jackson\u2019s Connecticut primary director during his two presidential bids, and then as a Department of Agriculture official in the Clinton administration. When her older sister, a longtime Montaukett advocate, passed away, she began devoting more time to the recognition effort, figuring her skills as a writer-researcher and insider-party experience could help the tribe\u2019s push for recognition. In hindsight, she concedes, \u201cI never imagined it would take so long \u2014 I thought it would be a piece of cake.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tIn 2017, the first year Brewster-walker started working full-time for the Montaukett, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo rejected a second Thiele-sponsored reinstatement bill and announced the state would hold its own formal historical review. Believing this was \u201ca device to kick the can down the road,\u201d Thiele pivoted with legislation to bypass the administrative process and grant Montaukett recognition outright, which Cuomo vetoed again. Brewster-walker, for her part, remained hopeful Cuomo would ultimately deliver, that recognition was merely delayed by his hands-on, micromanagement style, but a sexual-harassment scandal moved him to resign in August 2021. Efforts to work with his successor, Kathy Hochul, have fared no better, despite the current governor\u2019s stated willingness to work with the tribe.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\t\tThe oldest known group photograph of the Montaukett. The Pharaoh family at Indian Fields before David Pharaoh\u2019s death in 1878.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJason Motlagh<\/p>\n