If The Citizen article titled "High court ruling also helps tribes" was supposed to provide valuable analyses of the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling, City of Sherrill vs. Oneida Indian Nation of N.Y., it failed.

Quoting law school professors and officials from the Department of Interior provides only a very skewed pro-tribal view.

What your article did demonstrate is that lawyers and government officials are often poor historians and biased interpreters of the law.

The unnamed Indian law experts and Professor Robert Porter, who claim that the Sherrill ruling affirms or gives added credence to the Indian land claims in New York, are grasping at straws in an attempt to find at least some small victory for the tribes from this ruling. Rather than affirming the tribes' land claims, the court left the claims undisturbed.

Knowing that the Cayuga land claim litigation was before the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, I suspect the court did not want to intrude on that case until it had to.

Dissenting Justice Stevens stated: "Without the benefit of relevant briefing from the parties, the court has ventured into legal territory that belongs to Congress."

In essence, the court ruled by fiat and simply ignored relevant briefings from both parties.

If any sort of tribal victory can be gleaned, it is that the court decided not to look too closely at the facts presented. The ruling could easily have been much worse for the tribes by completely emasculating the land claims themselves. Many of the facts presented by Sherrill were directly relevant to the land claims and had never been before the court.

At the end of the day, the Sherrill ruling represents a rare example of the court exercising something it called federal equity practice, known to us common folk as good ol' common sense. What kind of justice comes from allowing a handful of people, claiming to be a sovereign nation, to intrude into our communities to flout our laws and obligations - the kind that our senators and congressmen have heretofore been perfectly happy with.

The tribes now claim the court "guided" them by providing a "roadmap" (the taking of lands into trust by the Secretary of the Interior) to enable them to exercise sovereignty over their properties. That process was not provided by the court, and the tribes have been well aware of the process for decades. The court merely stated that if tribes wished to assert sovereignty over lands they owned, they had to go through the proper process.

It is clear, however, that if the decision was left to the court, it would not allow these lands to be taken into trust because, as it stated, "standards of federal Indian law and federal equity practice preclude the tribe from rekindling embers of sovereignty that long ago grew cold."

Indians are no longer a "separate" people; they are citizens, neighbors and countrymen, and need to be treated as such.