Residents of the wooded resort country round Big Moose, N. Y. (population about 150), awoke one morning last May to find they had some new neighbors. In the predawn hours, a band of Indians had taken over a 612-acre former girls' camp, now a forest preserve in New York's Adirondack State Park. They claimed the camp land and, thinking big, some 9 million additional acres in New York and Vermont, as Ganienkeh—the Land of the Flint, an independent Indian nation. Since then, to the frustration of state authorities and the growing anxiety of Big Moose's white settlers, the Indians have refused to budge. The squat-in is fast approaching a legal crunch, and TIME Cor respondent Don Sider recently visited the Indian camp. His report:
The land is much as it must have been in colonial times, when the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy held most of northeastern New York and portions of Vermont, Ontario and Quebec. The trees still whisper in the chill wind, and the delicate tracks of deer fleck the snow. Yet the primeval peace is reguarly broken now by the roar of a silver Porsche gunning out of the camp gate onto Big Moose Road, heading for the Food Town market or the Laundromat two miles away. These are 20th century Indians, fired by the militancy that prompted the occupations of Alcatraz in 1969 and Wounded Knee in 1973. They ride in cars toward their encounters with the white man. Their warriors are lawyers, who fight with manifestoes and 200-year-old treaties. But their aim is to return to the old ways. To do that they demand their ancestral lands.
For a while, New York State did nothing about the invaders, hoping that the problem—and the Indians— would simply go away. Only in September did the state go into federal court seeking to evict the Indians, basing its case on the fact that the Mohawks had been pro-British belligerents during the Revolutionary War and had later signed away their lands. The Indians reject that claim. "The Mohawk land was lost by fraud, and its possession by New York State and the State of Vermont constituted] illegal usurpation," charges the Ganienkeh Manifesto.
Through the summer, the white community waited with waning confidence for state or federal officials to act. Meanwhile, the Indians planted corn, beans, potatoes and tomatoes and moved in a dozen head of cattle, as well as rabbits, pigs, chickens, ducks and geese. They felled trees to block the snowmobile trails that cross the camp and erected a tall tepee near the old camp gate. They barred all non-Indian visitors, courteously but firmly escorting out occasional vacationers who strayed onto the site. Their numbers were, and are, a mystery. By some estimates, they are as few as 30; by others, 90 or more, including women and children.