Tax free cigarettes will continue to be sold to non-Natives on the Seneca Nation for the meantime.

A New York State Supreme Court judge issued a temporary restraining order on the proposed New York state tax of cigarettes Tuesday. The state cannot collect taxes on the sale of cigarettes to non-Indians on Seneca land until the judge hears arguments in the issue on June 1, the Buffalo News reports.

The issue has been bouncing around in courts for months, as the tribes fight the tax.

Meanwhile, two major tobacco wholesalers said this morning that they have shut off the tobacco supply line to Indian tribes across the state.

“It looks like it’s over,” said Peter Day, president of Day Wholesale in Tupper Lake.

The moves come a day after a federal court gave the state the green light to begin collecting taxes on cigarette sales by Indian retailers to non-Indians.

“We’ll be out of business,” said Frank Attea of Buffalo’s Attea Milhem & Bros.

He said the court decision will force him to close his Buffalo tobacco business, which once had been the major tobacco supplier to the Seneca Nation of Indians. He said 30 workers face the loss of their jobs.

Jenna Cederberg

The True Language of a Pow Wow Drum
Preserving language is an ever important task for Natives everywhere. This includes the language of the drum – a kind of communication that some fear few understand today.

ICTMN chronicles Doug Goodfeather’s (Lakota) knowledge of the language.

The Battle of the Little Bighorn is told in a series of six victory songs (called When the Battle Happened) sung in order, Goodfeather said, explaining that the songs tell of defending the women and children, what happened with Custer, events leading up to the battle, and the battle itself.

In addition to learning the words, drum groups singing those songs accompany them with three kinds of drumbeats—honor, round dance, and straight beat– which differ in pattern and tempo, he said, alluding to the complexity behind what appears straightforward to casual pow wow attendees.

Grannies with Gumption: Standing up to Corporate Giants in Canada and Ecuador
These indigenous women have made great strides for their people and the environment by not backing down to big corporations.

As ICTMN reports, it was their strength that helped curb big oil intimidation in their areas.

Chevron didn’t stand a chance before the ire of indigenous villager Maria Aguinda. Enbridge quailed before the determination of Saik’uz First Nation Chief Jackie Thomas.

Both women, 4,300 miles apart, refused to take no for an answer. They stood up to two corporate giants and won. Aguinda, 61, spearheaded rural Ecuadoreans’ fight against Chevron, accused of polluting the Amazon for decades, and helped them win a $9.5-billion judgment against the company. Thomas, 47, was instrumental in beating back Enbridge’s attempts to get several Canadian First Nations to sell rights of way for a pipeline to send oil from the tar sands to the Pacific coast. As the world celebrated the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day on March 8, these two women, both grandmothers, continued their respective fights for their people’s right to live on clean, productive land.

Tribe sues feds over reservation raid
The Yakama Nation is claiming in a lawsuit that the federal government violated the tribe’s treaty rights when it raided a reservation cigarette manufacturer.

The suit wants an order requiring the FBI to notify the tribe before it enters the reservation. It also seeks punitive damages, the Yakima Herald reports.

On Feb. 16, FBI agents swarmed King Mountain Tobacco, deep within the reservation, and seized company records and computer equipment.

Under the 1855 treaty, the Yakamas reserved their exclusive use of the reservation and authority over its land and people.

According to the lawsuit, the federal government violated those rights by conducting the raid without first contacting tribal leaders.

Jenna Cederberg

By Dustin Hurst, of the Idaho Reporter:

The Indian Affairs Council, a panel of state lawmakers and representatives from tribes around Idaho, met Wednesday in the Capitol and agreed to send a message to the House Revenue and Taxation Committee on a bill that would affect how cigarette taxes are handled on reservations: go slow.

The council approved a motion calling for the drafting of a letter to committee chairman Dennis Lake and Speaker of the House Lawerence Denney calling for the panel to wait until at least March 7 before giving the measure additional hearings.

The measure, introduced by Denney, a Republican from Midvale, would basically require that tribes match the state cigarette sales tax on reservations. Tribes would be able to acquire rebates of tribal cigarette taxes from the state and the measure would still exempt tribal members from paying the tax if purchasing on reservations.

The bill could counter smuggling efforts if lawmakers decide to hike cigarette taxes during the session, a plan in the works. Tribes are not yet required to hike cigarette taxes if the Legislature does.

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A roller coaster year in the courts for cigarette tax fights, Indian Country Today recaps the happenings and what it meant for Indian nations.

The “cigarette tax war” is one of ICT’s top stories of 2010.

Much of the turmoil took place in New York, where a law was passed by the legislature to ensure non-Indian residents who bought cigarettes bought on reservations were charged a state tax, to be collected from tribes that have already purchased the cigarettes. That fight is currently tied up in the courts on appeal.

The law provides an onerous system whereby nations can opt into a coupon system to get a refund of the taxes they’ve already paid on tax-free cigarettes sold to Indians, or an allocation system in which a wholesaler can tie up a nation’s entire allocation of cigarettes even if the nation or individual retailers have not ordered stock for the wholesaler. . .

So far, the nations have managed to stop the state from implementing its new tax collection scheme. On Dec. 9, a three-judge panel of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the state’s request to lift injunctions in place that stop the state from collecting cigarette taxes sold on Indian land while several challenges to the tax laws are pending. All of the pending lawsuits against the state have been consolidated into one case in front of the federal appeals court.

Also making waves was the federal Prevent All Cigarette Trafficking Act passed this year.

The federal PACT Act – Prevent All Cigarette Trafficking Act – which had been bouncing from Congress to Congress in various incarnations for a number of years was signed into law by President Barack Obama in April.

The new law bans the U.S. Postal Service from delivering cigarettes and certain other tobacco products – a move that will effectively extinguish the mail order tobacco trade run by the many business owners of the Seneca Nation of Indians and other Indian-owned tobacco businesses around the country.

Jenna Cederberg