Opening from On This Site - Native Long Island

Shinnecock Hills

Shinnecock Hills is sacred Shinnecock land and a burial landscape with ancestors present for thousands of years. The hills also sit at the center of later land-loss history, preservation fights, and public disputes over development, golf, and recognition of Shinnecock land rights. Despite holding the remains of Indigenous ancestors buried there for over three thousand years, the sacred Shinnecock Hills were illegally seized by Southampton town officials in 1859 through forged signatures and deceit. Acknowledging this blatant theft underscores the painful realities of colonial dispossession while highlighting the Shinnecock Nation's modern, federally recognized fight to reclaim their ancestral sovereignty and stolen homelands. The Shinnecock Nation built electronic billboard monuments along Sunrise Highway as an assertion of sovereign economic rights on Shinnecock territory. Opposition...