''Oneida Indian Nation of New York v. County of Oneida'', 414 U.S. 661 (1974), is a

landmark decision Landmark court decisions, in present-day common law legal systems, establish precedents that determine a significant new legal principle or concept, or otherwise substantially affect the interpretation of existing law. "Leading case" is commonly ...

by the

United States Supreme Court The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that involve a point o ...

concerning

aboriginal title in the United States The United States was the first jurisdiction to acknowledge the common law doctrine of aboriginal title (also known as "original Indian title" or "Indian right of occupancy"). Native American tribes and nations establish aboriginal title by act ...

. The original suit in this matter was the first modern-day Native American land claim litigated in the federal court system rather than before the

Indian Claims Commission The Indian Claims Commission was a judicial relations arbiter between the United States federal government and Native American tribes. It was established under the Indian Claims Act of 1946 by the United States Congress to hear any longstanding cl ...

. It was also the first to go to final judgement. The Supreme Court held that there is federal

subject-matter jurisdiction Subject-matter jurisdiction (also called jurisdiction ''ratione materiae')'' is the authority of a court to hear cases of a particular type or cases relating to a specific subject matter. For instance, bankruptcy court only has the authority ...

for possessory land claims brought by Indian tribes based upon

aboriginal title Aboriginal title is a common law doctrine that the land rights of indigenous peoples to customary tenure persist after the assumption of sovereignty under settler colonialism. The requirements of proof for the recognition of aboriginal titl ...

, the Nonintercourse Act, and Indian treaties. In delivering the opinion of the Court,

Associate Justice Associate justice or associate judge (or simply associate) is a judicial panel member who is not the chief justice in some jurisdictions. The title "Associate Justice" is used for members of the Supreme Court of the United States and some sta ...

Byron White Byron "Whizzer" Raymond White (June 8, 1917 April 15, 2002) was an American professional football player and jurist who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1962 until his retirement in 1993. Born and raised in Colo ...

wrote that jurisdiction for such suits arose both fro
28 U.S.C. § 1331
conferring jurisdiction for cases arising under the Constitution, laws, or treaties of the United States an
28 U.S.C. § 1362
conferring similar jurisdiction to cases brought by Indian tribes regardless of the amount in controversy. The case is often referred to as ''Oneida I'' because it is the first of three times the Oneida Indian Nation reached the Supreme Court in litigating its land rights claims. It was followed by '' County of Oneida v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York State'' (Oneida II) (1985), rejecting all of the

affirmative defense An affirmative defense to a civil lawsuit or criminal charge is a fact or set of facts other than those alleged by the plaintiff or prosecutor which, if proven by the defendant, defeats or mitigates the legal consequences of the defendant's ...

s raised by the counties in the same action, and ''

City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York ''City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York'', 544 U.S. 197 (2005), was a Supreme Court of the United States case in which the Court held that repurchase of traditional tribal lands 200 years later did not restore tribal sovereignty to t ...

'' (Sherrill) (2005), rejecting the tribe's attempt in a later lawsuit to reassert tribal sovereignty over parcels of land reacquired by the tribe in

fee simple In English law, a fee simple or fee simple absolute is an estate in land, a form of freehold ownership. A "fee" is a vested, inheritable, present possessory interest in land. A "fee simple" is real property held without limit of time (i.e., pe ...

Background

District Court

In 1970, the Oneida Indian Nation of New York State and Oneida Indian Nation of Wisconsin filed suit against

Oneida County, New York Oneida County is a county in the state of New York, United States. As of the 2020 census, the population was 232,125. The county seat is Utica. The name is in honor of the Oneida, one of the Five Nations of the Iroquois League or ''Haudenos ...

and

Madison County, New York Madison County is a county located in the U.S. state of New York. As of the 2020 census, the population was 68,016. Its county seat is Wampsville. The county is named after James Madison, the fourth president of the United States, and was f ...

in the

United States District Court for the Northern District of New York The United States District Court for the Northern District of New York (in case citations, N.D.N.Y.) serves one of the 94 judicial districts in the United States and one of four in the state of New York. Appeals from the Northern District of Ne ...

. The Oneidas alleged that vast swathes of tribal lands had been conveyed to the state of New York in violation of the Nonintercourse Act and three Indian treaties: the

Treaty of Fort Stanwix The Treaty of Fort Stanwix was a treaty signed between representatives from the Iroquois and Great Britain (accompanied by negotiators from New Jersey, Virginia and Pennsylvania) in 1768 at Fort Stanwix. It was negotiated between Sir William ...

(1784), the

Treaty of Fort Harmar The Treaty of Fort Harmar (1789) was an agreement between the United States government and numerous Native American tribes with claims to the Northwest Territory. History The Treaty of Fort Harmar was signed at Fort Harmar, near present-day ...

(1789), and the

Treaty of Canandaigua The Treaty of Canandaigua (or Konondaigua, as spelled in the treaty itself) also known as the Pickering Treaty and the Calico Treaty, is a treaty signed after the American Revolutionary War between the Iroquois#Government, Grand Council of the Si ...

(1794). Although the complaint named over conveyed in such manner, the suit involved only the portion of that land held by the two counties. As damages, the tribes asked only for the

fair rental value Rental value is the fair market value of property while rented out in a lease. More generally, it may be the consideration paid under the lease for the right to occupy, or the royalties or return received by a lessor ( landlord) under a license t ...

of the lands from the period January 1, 1968 through December 31, 1969. The District Court held that the complaint asserted only state law claims, implicating federal law only indirectly, and thus granted the motion to dismiss under the

well-pleaded complaint ''Louisville & Nashville Railroad Company v. Mottley'', 211 U.S. 149 (1908), was a United States Supreme Court decision that held that under the existing statutory scheme, federal question jurisdiction could not be predicated on a plaintiff's anti ...

rule.

Circuit Court

A divided panel of the

United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (in case citations, 2d Cir.) is one of the thirteen United States Courts of Appeals. Its territory comprises the states of Connecticut, New York and Vermont. The court has appellate ju ...

affirmed the dismissal. Chief Judge Henry Friendly, for the Second Circuit, held that the assertion of jurisdiction "shatters on the rock of the 'well-pleaded complaint' rule." The Second Circuit placed weight upon ''Taylor v. Anderson'', 234 U.S. 74 (1914), holding that there was no federal jurisdiction for an

ejectment Ejectment is a common law term for civil action to recover the possession of or title to land. It replaced the old real actions and the various possessory assizes (denoting county-based pleas to local sittings of the courts) where boundary dis ...

action that alleged wrongful alienation of lands allotted to

Choctaw The Choctaw (in the Choctaw language, Chahta) are a Native American people originally based in the Southeastern Woodlands, in what is now Alabama and Mississippi. Their Choctaw language is a Western Muskogean language. Today, Choctaw people are ...

and

Chickasaw The Chickasaw ( ) are an indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands. Their traditional territory was in the Southeastern United States of Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee as well in southwestern Kentucky. Their language is classif ...

Indians.

Opinion of the Court

The Supreme Court reversed. Justice White noted "Accepting the premise of the Court of Appeals that the case was essentially a possessory action, we are of the view that the complaint asserted a current right to possession conferred by federal law, wholly independent of state law." The Court distinguished ''Taylor v. Anderson'' on these grounds

Here, the right to possession itself is claimed to arise under federal law in the first instance. Allegedly, aboriginal title of an Indian tribe guaranteed by treaty and protected by statute has never been extinguished. In Taylor, the plaintiffs were individual Indians, not an Indian tribe; and the suit concerned lands allocated to individual Indians, not tribal rights to lands....
In the present case, however, the assertion of a federal controversy does not rest solely on the claim of a right to possession derived from a federal grant of title whose scope will be governed by state law. Rather, it rests on the not insubstantial claim that federal law now protects, and has continuously protected from the time of the formation of the United States, possessory rights to tribal lands, wholly apart from the application of state law principles which normally and separately protect a valid right of possession.

The majority emphasized the supremacy of federal Indian law to state law:

There has been recurring tension between federal and state law; state authorities have not easily accepted the notion that federal law and federal courts must be deemed the controlling considerations in dealing with the Indians. '' Fellows v. Blacksmith'', ''The New York Indians'', ''United States v. Forness'', and the Tuscarora litigation are sufficient evidence that the reach and exclusivity of federal law with respect to reservation lands and reservation Indians did not go unchallenged; and it may be that they are to some extent challenged here. But this only underlines the legal reality that the controversy alleged in the complaint may well depend on what the reach and impact of the federal law will prove to be in this case.

Because the District Court had disposed on the case on a motion to dismiss, the Supreme Court reversed and remanded for further proceedings.

Concurrence

Justices Rehnquist and Powell concurred separately, emphasizing their understanding that the majority's holding would not apply to ejectment actions brought by non-Indians. The concurrence concluded: "The opinion for the Court today should give no comfort to persons with garden-variety ejectment claims who, for one reason or another, are covetously eyeing the door to the federal courthouse."

Subsequent developments

On remand, the District Court and Second Circuit rejected the counties'

s and awarded money damages. This time, the counties appealed to the Supreme Court, which again granted

certiorari In law, ''certiorari'' is a court process to seek judicial review of a decision of a lower court or government agency. ''Certiorari'' comes from the name of an English prerogative writ, issued by a superior court to direct that the record of ...

. The impact of ''Oneida I'' was summed up, in the interpretation of Allan Van Gestal, the lawyer for Oneida County, in his argument in ''Oneida II'':

This case is a test case, having been so designated by the plaintiffs, having been so tried by the courts below.... The 1974 opinion in this case has already spawned a vast number of Indian land claims. A number of cases are pending throughout the eastern states and southern states, citing the 1974 jurisdictional opinion as if it were an opinion on the merits of the issues. That case, indeed, has already been cited 162 times since 1974.

'' County of Oneida v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York State'', 470 U.S. 226 (1985), affirmed the rejection of the counties' affirmative defenses, leaving the damages award intact. The larger portion of the Oneida claim, to the tract, was rejected by the Second Circuit in 1988 on the grounds that the Confederation Congress Proclamation of 1783 had neither the authority nor the intent to limit the acquisition of Indian lands within the borders of US states.''Oneida Indian Nation of N.Y. v. New York'', 860 F.2d 1145 (2d Cir. 1988).

Notes

References

*Kristina Ackley, Renewing Haudenosaunee Ties: Laura Cornelius Kellogg and the Idea of Unity in the Oneida Land Claim, 32 Am. Indian Culture & Res. J. 57 (2008). *John Edward Barry, Comment, ''Oneida Indian Nation v. County of Oneida'': Tribal Rights of Action and the Indian Trade and Intercourse Act, 84 Colum. L. Rev. 1852 (1984). *Jack Campisi, The New York-Oneida Treaty of 1795: A Finding of Fact, 4 Am. Indian L. Rev. 71 (1976). *Kathryn E. Fort
Disruption and Impossibility: The Unfortunate Resolution of the Modern Iroquois Land Claims
11 Wyo. L. Rev. 375 (2011). *Joshua N. Lief, The Oneida Land Claims: Equity and Ejectment, 39 Syracuse L. Rev. 825 (1988). *George C. Shattuck, ''The Oneida Land Claims: A Legal History'' (1991). *Christopher Vecsey & William A. Starna, ''Iroquois land claims'' (1988).

External links

* {{Native American rights United States Constitution Article Three case law United States Supreme Court cases Aboriginal title case law in the United States United States federal question jurisdiction case law Oneida Aboriginal title in New York 1974 in United States case law United States Supreme Court cases of the Burger Court