HARTFORD, Conn. – “Moles” at the BIA, possibly including a current senior staff member, are undermining tribes fighting for federal recognition by giving information to their enemies.
This conclusion was drawn by attorneys representing American Indian tribes, among them former BIA head Kevin Gover. It is partly confirmed by Kay Davis, a former employee of the Bureau of Acknowledgement and Research (BAR), who admits she is consulting for three towns vehemently opposing recognition of a tribe whose petition she helped to shape.
Gover insists a current BAR staff member more senior than Davis also is feeding information to Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and other critics of tribal recognition. Although he declined to call the contacts illegal, he said they were “highly inappropriate.”
“I don’t have any doubt that someone in Interior is communicating with the AG, with the towns and with Congress about this,” he said in an interview.
Kay Davis, BAR’s former coordinator for Northeastern tribes, said she is “working to verify or nullify” evidence submitted by the Eastern Pequot and Paucatuck Eastern Pequot tribes in their quest for federal status.
“I’m on a research team that’s doing research for the towns,” she said, referring to Ledyard, Preston and North Stonington, southeastern Connecticut neighbors and vehement critics of both the Eastern Pequots and the federally recognized Mashantucket (western) Pequots. The towns fought the eastern tribe’s recognition in repeated submissions to the BIA and most recently, in a federal lawsuit.
As a BAR employee in the mid-’90s, Davis worked closely with Pequot leaders, visiting their Lantern Hill reservation in North Stonington and advising them on a preliminary petition.
Eastern Pequot tribal leaders learned of Davis’ change in allegiance last year when they saw her leave a BIA hearing on their petition in Washington, D.C., in a town car with a lawyer for the three towns.
“It was pretty surprising to me,” said Tribal Councilman Tom Perry Sr.
Emotion over what they considered a personal betrayal led them to file a Freedom of Information suit against North Stonington for the names of its consultants. Their suspicions about Davis became public at an April 6 hearing of the state Freedom of Information Commission.
North Stonington First Selectman Nicholas H. Mullane II refused to release any information and denied to one reporter at the hearing that Davis worked for the towns.
“The research team has tried to protect me,” Davis said. “I’m a 65-year-old lady. They’re very careful about me.”
Davis now lives in Minnesota, where she is Bois Forte Band of Chippewa tribal historian. She said she devotes most of her time to her duties with the tribe, helping set up a tribal museum.
The Eastern Pequots question the legality of her consulting work, but she says she observed more than the year-long “cooling off” period that keeps most federal employees from going straight into private sector work on matters they handled as a bureaucrat. She said she left the BAR in 1997 after three and a half years, including half a year as an intern.
For Gover, however, the issue isn’t Kay Davis. It is the alleged hypocrisy of Blumenthal and the three towns, who denounced him for going from the BIA to a Washington law firm, Steptoe and Johnson, which solicits business from tribes.
“The towns are talking out of both sides of their mouth when they criticize me,” he said. “I have not worked on any (recognition) petition since I left office.”
Gover said that as a political appointee he was under a lifetime prohibition from working on any petition on which he made a policy decision at BIA. These were rules of the District of Columbia bar, he noted, not federal law.
“I have no beef with Kay Davis. My take on it is that the people who oppose the Pequot recognition realize they don’t have a strong case.
“Instead of attacking the decision, they’re attacking me. It’s an old tactic, to try to demonize the decision-maker rather than deal with the decision.”
Gover said he felt some of his attackers were receiving information from inside the BAR, and he criticized his former subordinates bluntly for “arrogance.” He said some of the leaks seem to have come from professional staff he overruled on recognition cases.
“I think they feel that their decision should be final, not the assistant secretary’s,” he said.
“The real difference between me and the BAR is that they’re trying to decide things as historians, anthropologists and genealogists. They want proof that will stand review from other historians, anthros and genealogists. I looked at things as a lawyer. A lawyer wants decisions that will hold up in court.”
In spite of his suspicions, however, Gover said he made no effort to find out who might be passing on non-public information. “Trying to plug leaks at the BIA is a fool’s errand.”
Moreover, he refused to say that the alleged BIA leaks came from any undue outside influence.
“I don’t think BAR is corrupt. I think that when they disagree, they simply are doing things they shouldn’t do.”