From the NYTs:

There’s no irony or attitude at the Shinnecock Nation Cultural Center and Museum, just the whaling artifacts, the carved elk on the front door, the portraits and memorabilia of a people whose history on Long Island goes back thousands of years.

Still, only a deity with a perverse sense of humor could have written the story of the Shinnecocks, which entered a new era on Tuesday when a 32-year legal effort culminated in the formal federal recognition of the tribe.

You could start with the locale: how the bays and beaches the Shinnecocks and their ancestors fished and nurtured for millennia morphed into not just the Hamptons, but some of the richest and snootiest precincts there. That left the Shinnecocks strangers in their own land, a largely poor tribe of 1,200 with an 800-acre reservation tucked amid the lime-green slacks, the $36 lobster roll (Silver’s on Main Street) and the perma-tan, perma-thin habitués of this playground of the seriously rich.

Then there’s been the long legal dance and periodic skirmishes over the tribe’s nuclear option: its threat to build a casino on the reservation that could have turned the standard East End gridlock into a graveyard of permanently immobilized Lexuses, Range Rovers and BMWs.

And now, with the economy still in the tank and development hard to come by, the outsiders at the banquet are the ones holding all the chips. The courting and wooing for what could be one of New York State’s biggest economic projects in many years have been going on quietly for some time.

But the action begins in earnest next month, when, 30 days after the designation, the tribe can start taking official steps to build what could be New York’s answer to Connecticut’s mega-casinos.

Continue reading →