By Staff Reporter
SENECA FALLS — When the Cayuga Nation announced in late August that it had named a new police superintendent, the release was mostly routine. One line was not, and the traditional leadership of the Gayogo̱hó:nǫʼ (Cayuga) people says it cannot let it stand.
The Nation credited Paul Daugherty, who was formally appointed superintendent of the Cayuga Nation Police Department on Aug. 13, with helping reclaim homes it said had been occupied by its opponents. He “assisted with multiple successful reacquisitions of Cayuga Nation properties that had been illegally occupied by dissident members,” the Nation said in its announcement, which was carried by FingerLakes1.com, Finger Lakes Daily News and the Finger Lakes Times.
Days later, the Condoled Chiefs and Clan Mothers Council, the traditional government of the Gayogo̱hó:nǫʼ under the Great Law of Peace, sent The Buffalo Chronicle a statement rejecting that framing, and with it the idea that the department speaks for the Cayuga people.
“Our concern is not with Mr. Daugherty personally or with his professional qualifications. It is with claims of governmental and police authority being made in the name of the Cayuga people,” the council said in the statement, which lists Bear Clan Sachem Sam George as its media contact.
“There was no consensus of the Condoled Chiefs and Clan Mothers Council approving Mr. Daugherty’s appointment or authorizing the current Cayuga Nation Police Department as an institution of the traditional Cayuga government,” the council said.
‘Not a personal attack’
The heart of the council’s objection is a single word. Under Haudenosaunee tradition, chiefs are raised up and removed by Clan Mothers, and decisions are made by consensus. The families who live by that system say they are not rebels against their nation but its oldest government.
“Cayuga citizens who oppose or do not recognize the Halftown administration should not be reduced to ‘dissidents,’ nor should longstanding disputes involving Cayuga leadership, land, authority, and jurisdiction be presented to the public as settled fact,” the council said.
“The Halftown administration does not speak for or represent the traditional government recognized by the Condoled Chiefs and Clan Mothers Council,” the statement continued, before closing on a note of restraint: “This statement is not a personal attack on Paul Daugherty. It is a clarification of authority, accountability, and consent, and a rejection of language that portrays disputed matters within the Cayuga Nation as settled fact.”
The council also asked the public to keep two numbers straight. The Cayuga reservation recognized in the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua covers roughly 64,015 acres in Seneca and Cayuga counties. The land the federal government has actually taken into trust for the Nation is far smaller: in March 2023, the Interior Department’s Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs approved 113.96 acres in the village of Union Springs and the town of Springport for trust status, in a decision letter addressed to Clint Halftown. A separate 2024 request covers 13.9 acres in Seneca Falls.
A winter of evictions
The statement on the superintendent was the latest in a string of releases the traditional families have sent this newspaper over the past year, none of which The Chronicle answered at the time.
In December, a group calling itself Concerned Gayogo̱hó:nǫʼ Citizens, with Wanda John, Amber Parker and Dusty Parker listed as contacts, issued a call to action against evictions and the threat of banishment by what it called the “federally imposed Halftown government,” citing both the Great Law of Peace and the federal Indian Civil Rights Act.
“For too long, our people have lived under uncertainty and intimidation,” the citizens wrote. “Families deserve leadership grounded in fairness, compassion, and mutual respect. Our community must not be governed by fear.”
“Sovereignty must never be used to silence or diminish the dignity and rights of our community members,” the release said.
On Jan. 7, the families sent an alert headlined “WINTER EVICTIONS?!” reporting that another Cayuga family had been evicted in midwinter in the Seneca Falls area, with ten children displaced from one household and six from another. They called for public documentation of the authority behind each eviction, an independent review, a moratorium on winter evictions and protection for at-risk families, and said they were putting Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand and Gov. Kathy Hochul “on notice.”
“No family should be forced from their home in freezing conditions without due process, accountability, and humanity,” the alert said.
The Chronicle has not independently confirmed the number of children displaced in January. What followed is a matter of public record. On Feb. 25, Nation police, backed by town, county and state officers, removed Amber Parker and her six children from a home on Cosad Road. The confrontation that day ended with one Nation officer hospitalized and four people charged by Seneca Falls police, as The Chronicle reported at the time. Supporters, including Akwesasne advocate Chrissy Jacobs, argue the homes were bought with tribal funds to bring families home and never carried rent.
A month later, Heron Clan member Leanna Young described the toll to the Ithaca Times. “It’s been really hard having to watch my brothers, my son and then myself and my children be evicted from the houses that we had turned into our homes,” Young said. “I had lived at the house I was in for three years, but because we had tied ourselves to the land, having to leave was like uprooting a tree.”
Sachem George put the divide more bluntly in the same report, describing the leadership that broke from the clans: “They were no longer traditional people,” he said. “They were money people now.”
Banishment in federal court
The families’ fears about banishment are being tested in a federal courtroom in Syracuse. In Parker v. Halftown, Dusty Parker is asking the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York to overturn the Halftown council’s July 2023 order banishing him from the reservation, arguing it violated the Indian Civil Rights Act. A judge allowed the petition to move forward in 2024.
In March, the traditional Council of Chiefs and Clan Mothers filed a friend-of-the-court brief on Parker’s behalf. “Banishment is the most serious punishment that the Cayuga Nation can levy against one of its citizens,” the chiefs and Clan Mothers wrote. “Here, Respondents weaponized banishment against the Petitioner.”
The Halftown council’s lawyers told the court that Parker ran an unlicensed business on the reservation for years and dodged the consequences “at every turn,” leaving the Nation “no choice but to exercise its sovereign right to banish Petitioner,” and that he received “a full and fair hearing” in the Nation’s courts. The Chronicle could find no public ruling on the petition as of this week.
The Nation’s position
The Halftown-led Cayuga Nation Council is the government the United States recognizes. Halftown has been the Nation’s federal representative since 2003; his Heron Clan Mother, Bernadette Hill, moved to remove him in 2004, a removal the traditional leadership says still stands. In 2016, after a “statement of support” that the Nation says drew backing from more than 60 percent of adult citizens, the Bureau of Indian Affairs recognized his council; a federal judge declined to block that decision in 2018, and in 2024 the Justice Department agreed to defer to it.
The Nation says the housing fight began in 2011, when occupants of 14 Nation-owned homes stopped paying income-adjusted rent and that each occupant got a hearing. New York’s highest court ruled in 2019 that such disputes are internal tribal matters. In April, the Nation said it had reclaimed the last of those homes, on Route 89. “This signifies the return of the final illegally occupied home to the Nation’s control,” Halftown told the Finger Lakes Times. It has called banishment a lawful sovereign process. A Nation spokesperson told the Ithaca Times that “there are no condoled chiefs of the Cayuga Nation in modern day and anyone claiming to be a ‘chief’ is falsely claiming a title.”
The traditional families reject that account. They held public question-and-answer sessions in Seneca Falls in January, in Ithaca in March and, according to an invitation sent to The Chronicle, at the Equal Rights Heritage Center in Auburn on July 1. The Ithaca Times reported in March that they are raising money to petition the U.S. Supreme Court over the federal recognition.
“We cannot allow the lives and futures of our families to be determined through fear, exclusion, or unchecked political power,” the December release said. “Our people deserve transparent processes, community-focused leadership, and a return to traditional principles of shared responsibility and mutual respect.”
The Buffalo Chronicle asked the Cayuga Nation’s media office on Tuesday for comment on the council’s statement and on Superintendent Daugherty’s appointment, and will update this story with any response.
Photo: The north end of Cayuga Lake, seen from Bridgeport in the Town of Seneca Falls. Andre Carrotflower / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped.
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