If you are driving in Upstate New York, BEWARE…you could be soon in the epicenter of an “international” incident.

The hunk of highway in question rests in the Cattaraugus reservation of the Seneca Nation.

Recently, a dispute as old as America’s history has boiled up between the governing bodies of New York and Native American tribe over money.

For the last four years, an agreement has allowed the Seneca Nation to collect $1 for every vehicle that has crossed the reservation on the Thruway (see sign above).

Now the state wants to get some money back. The tax collectors of New York are eyeballing profits from the Nation’s casinos and cigarette sales.

A court decision earlier this year awarded the State limited rights of collection. Now irate tribal tobacco shop owners are responding by filling their shelves with only Indian branded goods (because they are not subject to state taxes).

The Seneca’s new president, Robert Odawi Porter, said in an interview.

“It could be cigarettes today; it was beaver pelts 300 years ago. What we have to defend is the principle: that the State of New York has no authority to reach into our nation.”

The Seneca’s have proven they can be formidable adversaries.

Last week the nation won a two decade battle to gain limited rights to the Kinzua hydropower dam. Their claim stemmed from the ancestral homelands that were flooded against the tribe’s wishes to create the reservoir in the 1960’s.

Under the leadership of Harvard-educated Porter, it appears the Seneca Nation will be an assertive and newsworthy nation within the nation.