July 9, 2004
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A Day Of Cooperation On A Peconic Bay Beach In Hampton Bays

This past Saturday, July 3, I spent the better part of the day looking out upon the beach from a jetty in Peconic Bay, waiting to cover a controversial story that thankfully never happened.

That Saturday, the Shinnecock Indian Nation held its annual early summer celebration and camp-out on the beaches of the Westwoods section of the reservation. The weekend long event, according to Tribal Board Chairman Lance Gumbs, "has been going on for as long as anyone can remember."

"We cook outside, we pick the berries, we sleep on the beach; it gives us a chance to escape the confines of a modern home. It's about getting back to the old ways, and reminding ourselves of what's always been most important to us: the land, the water, the sky, the trees."

"It's not a party," Mr. Gumbs added, emphatically. "We're not out there celebrating the Fourth of July."

I was standing on the jetty that day, anticipating controversy, because of two newspaper articles that were published in the weeks leading up to the celebration.

Because the Westwoods section of Peconic shoreline is at the bottom of a steep sand dune, and because there is no access road leading down to the beach from reservation property, in the past the Shinnecocks have used trucks and SUVs to transport tribal elders and camping equipment to their beach at Westwoods. To do so, they have to drive across a few hundred yards of non-Shinnecock beach between the canal and the reservation, which belongs to the Hampton Groves Beach Association. Last year, according to one of the articles, the tribe abused the permission that they were given to do so by the Town Trustees, driving back and forth across the beach several times. A few confrontations with local residents ensued, including one "minor physical altercation," and the Town Police were called to the beach each day.

The first article, printed a few weeks ago, reported that the Southampton Town Trustees would not be granting the Shinnecocks beach permits to drive to and from their section of the beach that day. The second article, printed the Thursday before the celebration, reported that the Shinnecocks would be driving to their "July 4th beach party" nonetheless.

In our interview, Mr. Gumbs expressed remorse and accepted partial responsibility for the problems at last year's celebration. He suggested that tribe members may have made a few more round trips with a few more vehicles than were absolutely necessary (a matter on which the Trustee Scott Strough is quoted as feeling "taken advantage of".) "We didn't realize how many sunbathers there would be out there below the high water line," said Mr. Gumbs. Both last year and this year, the Shinnecock trucks intended to stay below the high tide mark on their drive down the beach, so that they would be on Town property rather than the private beach property of the homeowners. "So then we had to go up near the dunes, and people didn't like that."

He did note that responsibility for some of the more unpleasant incidents belonged equally to offending Hampton Groves beachgoers. One woman, apparently, had trespassed onto Shinnecock property and "started taking pictures like we were a circus or something." But he found the tribe's Hampton Groves neighbors to be reasonable and understanding when he talked with them. If anything, members of both groups expressed a mutual frustration that the town had not notified the residents of the relatively new Hampton Groves of how they would be affected by this age-old Shinnecock tradition.

Mr. Gumbs was also unhappy with the fact that the Trustees had been issuing quotations about being "taken advantage of" by the Shinnecocks, and more generally with the way that town officials had responded to their attempts to cooperate on this year's celebration. In the hopes of avoiding problems like the ones that surrounded last year's event, Shinnecock leadership decided to limit beach driving this year to only two trips per day, to take place during off-peak hours before 10 a.m. and after 5 p.m. A house-to-house bulletin was circulated around the reservation with these instructions, the tribe notified various organs of Southampton government of them, and in February, Mr. Gumbs requested a meeting between the tribe, the homeowners association, and the Town Trustees (a body that has controlled nautical issues in Southampton since being appointed by the British Royal Governor in 1648) to discuss the matter in a cooperative setting. The Trustees didn't respond to his request. When they finally did respond a few weeks later, it was with an unequivocal denial of any beach driving privileges.

Mr. Gumbs read about it in the first of the two newspaper articles. "They wouldn't even talk to us. They just went to the newspaper, with Scott Strough saying those things about us being misleading. And the thing was, we weren't even asking for permission; we were telling them what we were going to do, so they were prepared for it." He also said that it wasn't the first time a Southampton official had gone to the press on a matter pertinent to the Shinnecocks, before speaking to the tribe itself; Town Supervisor Patrick Heany had done the same thing in May of 2003, when he called into question the legality of the Shinnecocks claims upon Westwoods, where they are attempting to build a casino.

This is not to say that the Trustees' grounds for denial were completely invalid ones; they simply stated that they couldn't grant the Shinnecocks permission to drive on the Hampton Groves beaches because it was not Town property, but a private beach. But for good measure (and possibly because an argument could be made that the section of the beach below the high water mark was within their jurisdiction, like all town waters), the board expressed its unwillingness as well as its inability to grant permission, in terms like Mr. Strough's. No trustees could be reached for comment.

Rather than argue with the Board's decisions, the tribe "reached out to the homeowners" instead. The homeowners were happy to cooperate, and had no problem with the tribe making two truck trips across their beaches this past Saturday. As a result of this cooperation, the matter ended up having no bearing upon town government, and the town's decisions ended up having no bearing upon the neighbors of the Shinnecock reservation and the Hamptons Grove development this past Saturday in Hampton Bays.

And so at 9:50 a.m. this past Saturday, a black SUV pulled up onto the Hampton Groves beach by the Shinnecock Canal, drove below the high water mark (which is the area where the highest tide of the day strikes the beach), cruised west along empty beach for a few hundred yards, and pulled up next to a tent to unload a few elderly people and some camping equipment. The same thing happened again at 6 p.m., and though the beach was more crowded then, on both the Hampton Groves and the Shinnecock sides, the trip was similarly uneventful, even when the SUV had to drive further up on the sand from behind the high water mark to avoid some sunbathers (and ironically, entered the portion of beach that it was allowed to drive on.) A few heads turned, but not many, and there certainly weren't any "incidents." The only person to follow the SUV onto Shinnecock property had been strolling along the shoreline, and didn't even realize she'd done so until I asked her about it. She was undisturbed by the tribal security guard who was patrolling the area with his ATV.

It is a sad fact that that security guard had to be out there at all, but Shinnecock leadership, as I learned from Mr. Gumbs, has not forgotten all the times that the tribe has felt "taken advantage of."

"We've been good little Indians for 400 years, and that hasn't gotten us anywhere. Other tribes are making economic advances, advances in cultural education, and we live on one of the richest necks of land in the country and are still behind the 8-ball. So the days of being good little Indians are over."

No one knows what will happen with the Shinnecock's attempt to get a casino, or with their difficult relationship with local government. But one thing seems to be sure, and that is that they are good neighbors. Thanks to their accommodations on Saturday, and to the willingness of the Hampton Groves residents to cooperate, these two groups of good neighbors were able to enjoy a sunny day on the beach side by side. From my view on the jetty, the only unpleasant spot in the afternoon was the fact that they couldn't be sitting together. But if people continue being considerate neighbors, anything is possible.