Jump to full article: 1010 WINS (NY, NY), 2009-10-27
Intro: State Police are concerned that a government effort to block the flow of tax-free cigarettes onto New York's Indian reservations would lead to violence and possibly escalate into a ``military problem,'' an adviser to Gov. David Paterson said Tuesday.
The governor's chief legal counsel, Peter Kiernan, told a state senate committee that a police ``threat assessment'' predicted that tribes based in western New York would fiercely resist any attempt to interfere with their multimillion dollar cigarette business.
The cost of enforcing order, he said, could run as much as $2 million per day -- a figure based on the state's experiences when it tried to impose cigarette taxes on the reservations in 1992 and 1997. . . .
Scores of Indians from across the state who traveled to the city to attend Tuesday's hearing by the senate's committee on investigations and government operations listened largely impassively as Kiernan discussed the potential for violence, although a few seemed offended at the suggestion that they would be the instigators of any conflict.
Still, J.C. Seneca, tribal councilor to the Seneca Nation, made it clear that the tribe takes its sovereignty seriously.
``Your government has no authority to collect taxes in our territory,'' he said, citing 19th Century peace treaties that, among other things, gave the Seneca control over land and freed them from any state taxes.
``We will fight to uphold these rights, now and forever,'' he said.
A small group of Seneca expressed their defiance Tuesday by lighting a fire near the state Thruway on the Cattaraugus reservation -- an action that mirrored protest fires set in 1997.
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