Righting Wrongs

Dating back to when they began in Sag Harbor, and continuing and expanding when the Express News Group was formed in 2019, a mission statement for Express Sessions might have read, simply, “To get people in a room for a respectful, frank conversation, and find solutions.”

Last week’s event in Southampton Village, which focused on the Shinnecock Nation and its economic development proposals — especially the most recent: a proposed travel plaza offering tax-free gasoline on part of the Westwoods property off Sunrise Highway — seemed to go a step further. It continued a thawing of the chilly relationship between the Shinnecock Nation and the Town of Southampton, and even offered glimpses of a new reality where the two sides set aside the adversarial past and begin to see a unified future.

On one hand, that might be a bit too optimistic: The “generational trauma” spoken of by tribal members won’t be easily eclipsed. On the other hand, the progress made in recent years, when the nation and Town Hall worked hand in hand on legislation to protect acres of historic burial grounds in Shinnecock Hills, against all odds, should not be understated. It’s a solid foundation to build on.

The travel plaza proposal is a project that might be seen as an entrepreneurial idea with real value to both the Shinnecock and the outside community that shares its spit of sandy soil.

This time, the State of New York finds itself the adversary. It might well find the town and the nation aligned on the other side.

Beneath layers of legal disputes, the Shinnecock seem to have a reasonably defensible right to develop the 10 acres they’ve cleared just north of the highway. A travel plaza there only makes sense if, at the monuments erected by the tribe a few years back, exit ramps direct westbound traffic to the site. Otherwise, it will have to be accessed from a clumsy labyrinth of two-lane roads in the canal area, already a congested spot along Montauk Highway.

The state, however, still upset by the monuments erected on tribal land without official permission, and still fighting that battle in court, refuses to even discuss the idea of access roads with the nation, refuses to even acknowledge the proposal at all.

Together, the town and the nation can be a formidable opponent. How refreshing it would be for the two entities to set aside literal decades of friction and mistrust, and work together to make the case to the state that a gas station and retail outlet just off the highway on tribe-owned lands is sensible, and an access road is a no-brainer for both convenience and safety.

It also might be an opportunity, once and for all, for state officials to begin to come to terms with the many inequities the Shinnecock Nation has endured in its dealings with New York, dating not just to the slipshod way the state established a right-of-way for the highway bisecting the tribe’s land, but all the way back to the 1800s and the state courts that conspired — not too strong a word — to seize Westwoods in legal actions that remains a stain on New York jurisprudence more than a century later.

After the Express Sessions offered a chance for a public detente, it’s time to build on that. Southampton Town officials, led by the new supervisor, Maria Moore, should make it top-of-agenda to convince the state it’s time to start taking the Shinnecock Nation more seriously — and to start making right what has been wrong for so long.