PORTLAND, Maine – Federal recognition and tribal sovereignty moved into the academic arena as featured topics at the annual New England American Studies Association Conference this year.
The two-day event, called “Homeland In/Security: Race and Citizenship in the United States,” was held at the University of Southern Maine in Portland over the Sept. 15 weekend. Around 100 people participated.
The conference’s keynote panel was called “Native Sovereignty and the Politics of Sovereignty in New England,” with tribal leaders from the Penobscot Indian Tribe, the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation and the Abenaki Nation of Missisquoi.
The New England American Studies Association is a regional chapter of the American Studies Association, and fosters the study of the culture and history of New England through interdisciplinary scholarship, publication and teaching at all levels and types of educational institutions.
J. Kehaulani Kauanui, an assistant professor of anthropology and American studies based at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., organized the panel and introduced the speakers.
The state of Connecticut has become the locus of anti-sovereignty activity, which provided the impetus for the keynote topic, because it “is shaping the way administrative policy is being formed at the national level,” Kauanui said.
Kauanui said Connecticut’s new stance “marks a 180-degree turn from 20 years ago” when the state played a major role in pressuring Congress to federally recognize the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation “because the state was to benefit financially.”
The state’s compacts with the Mashantuckets and, a few years later, with the Mohegan Tribe provide the state with 25 percent of the gross profits from the tribes’ slot machines – close to $450 million a year.
Kauanui, a Native Hawaiian from California, compared the Mashantuckets’ situation to the movement for federal acknowledgement of Native Hawaiians.
“We can see something similar in the case of Hawaii, where the state is supporting a federally driven bill in support of Native Hawaiian federal recognition, a proposal initiated by U.S. Sens. Daniel Akaka and Daniel Inouye, in the service of settling Hawaiian land claims for U.S. military expansion – but Hawaiian activists oppose federal recognition in favor of full decolonization under international law,” Kauanui said.
One of the key issues impacting tribal nations in the Northeast is the difference between historically state-recognized Eastern tribes and the “treaty tribes of the West,” she noted. But more recently, the backlash against casino development, bolstered by “citizens’ rights groups,” has fueled opposition to federal recognition, Kauanui said.
“The conflation of federal recognition with the specter of Indian casinos indicates that most non-tribal residents in these states refuse to uncouple questions of tribal economic development – a question of a nation’s political economy – and the social justice issue of honoring the U.S. trust doctrine,” Kauanui said.
The anti-Indian, anti-casino backlash has spread beyond Connecticut to the point where more than 20 state attorneys general have filed briefs to curtail tribal jurisdiction, arguing that portions of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 are unconstitutional.
“This new legal movement against sovereignty is being lead by Larry Long, the attorney general of South Dakota, and Richard Blumenthal, the attorney general of Connecticut,” Kauanui said.
Penobscot Indian Nation Chief James Sappier opened the panel discussion with a cleansing prayer, then related the story of how the Penobscots achieved federal acknowledgement.
It was the Penobscots who discovered the 1790 Indian Nonintercourse Act, a forgotten law still on the books, which said only the federal government – specifically, Congress – could sell or transfer Indian land. The discovery became the basis of federal acknowledgement bids through land claims throughout New England and beyond.
The tribe accidentally discovered a treaty “in a box under the bed,” Sappier said, which prompted the preparation of a historical land claim to two-thirds of Maine based on the 1790 law.
The land claim was so huge “the Supreme Court would go ballistic if the tribe sued,” Sappier said. After a complex multi-pronged strategy bundling its land claims with those other state tribes, obtaining resolutions of support from the United South and Eastern Tribes Inc. and the National Congress of American Indians, and lawsuits against the state and Interior Department, the Penobscots negotiated a settlement that included $85 million and land.
Sappier went on to participate in creating the seven criteria the BIA uses to acknowledge tribes.
That was in the 1980s. Although the STN filed a letter of intent to petition in 1981, by the time the tribe filed its petition with the BIA in the mid-1990s “everything had changed by then” because of the casinos, STN Chief Richard Velky said.
The Schaghticokes’ bid for federal acknowledgement is still playing out in federal court, Velky said. Currently, the tribe is appealing the BIA’s decision last October to rescind its prior decision of January 2004 granting the tribe federal recognition. The tribe filed another federal lawsuit alleging that a citizens’ group and its powerful lobbyist unlawfully interfered in the tribe’s federal recognition process.
Donna Roberts Moody, the repatriation and site protection coordinator for the Abenaki Nation, reviewed her tribe’s long struggle with state authorities in its efforts to achieve federal status. Last November, the BIA denied recognition in a proposed finding. The tribe is continuing its quest.
“The Indian wars aren’t over,” Roberts Moody said.
Kauanui said the conference was so successful she hopes to organize a conference on federal recognition in Connecticut in the future.
