Report reveals state's effort to exterminate tribes

As the Maine state government is considering a sweeping tribal sovereignty measure, a recently released report reveals how early Maine governments sought to generate wealth from stolen resources of Wabanaki tribal lands and how state law has long sought to deny tribal sovereignty and to have the state treat the tribes as "wards, imbeciles and paupers."
Among many other documents, the analysis examines the state's Proctor Report of 1942, which reveals the strategy the state undertook "to effect a regime of isolation, control and elimination of the tribes." During the height of the lumber boom of the mid-1800s, the state sought to divest the tribes of their land and the old-growth forests upon which North American expansion was built. Then once tribal resources were depleted, the state sought to exterminate the Wabanaki because it was economically advantageous to do so.
The report, "One Nation Under Fraud: A Remonstrance," was written by Donna Loring, former state representative for the Penobscot Nation, Eric Mehnert, chief judge of the Penobscot tribal court, and attorney Joseph Gousse and was published by the Permanent Commission on the Status of Racial, Indigenous and Tribal Populations. The commission was established by the legislature in 2019 to improve the status of historically disadvantaged racial and tribal populations in the state.
Cited within the report are numerous examples of "a history of fraud" in which the state broke its promises with the tribes and failed to pay for land or denied them access to land they had rights to under treaties. Even the state attorney general in 1942, Frank Cowen, admitted that the state owed the tribes millions of dollars and that they were "robbed left and right."
One of the cases examined in the report is the State v. Newell, which began with "a seemingly innocuous hunting trip shared between two Passamaquoddy tribal members" and that would "precipitate the most caustic jurisprudence ever authored by the Maine judiciary." The 1892 ruling by the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, or Law Court, was an "attempted death blow to the recognition of tribal sovereignty in Maine." Despite the "genocidal and racist intentions" of the decision, it continues to set lawful precedent in the state. The authors write, "A shameful miscarriage of justice, Newell is an embarrassment to Maine jurisprudence that not only mars the legacy of the Law Court so long as it remains 'good law,' but continues to have deleterious effects on tribal sovereignty."
The case was based on the shooting of two deer during a closed hunting season in the state on January 14, 1891, by Peter Newell and Joseph Gabriel, both members of the Passamaquoddy Tribe at Indian Township. Later that year Newell was elected chief of the tribe at Indian Township. At his arraignment, Newell's attorney stated that he had a lawful right to shoot the deer because of treaties from the 1700s between the tribe and the English Crown or the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which reserved to the tribes hunting privileges. The case ended up being reviewed by the Law Court, with the chief justice being John Peters, the son of a Ellsworth lumber merchant whose second wife was the daughter of the lumber baron Amos Roberts, who was involved with the theft of four townships from the Penobscot Nation, according to the authors. "To state that Chief Justice Peters' immediate family had a vested interest in the vitality of the Maine lumber industry is perhaps an overly modest characterization," the report states. In its ruling the court endeavored to cloak itself with the authority to determine what constitutes an Indian tribe. The court wrote: "Whatever may have been the original force and obligation of these treaties, they are now functus officio. One party to them, the Indians, have wholly lost their political organization and their political existence. There has been no continuity or succession of political life and power. There is no mention in the treaties of a tribe called 'Passamaquoddy,' and we cannot say that these present Indians are the successors in territory, or power, of any tribe named in the treaties, or are their natural descendants."
The authors of the recently published report state that the Law Court "attempted to deliver a death blow to the tribes" by invalidating the treaties and not allowing the tribes to defend their sovereignty. The court's ruling was an illegal decision, as it went against the highest law of the land, the authors state. The decree was "a piece of shameful revisionist judicial activism aimed at eradicating the very existence of the ancient Wabanaki civilization" and is "the crown jewel of the house of cards that is Maine Indian law." They point out that the court did not have authority to issue rulings interpreting treaties with tribes or to define a tribe or to determine tribal membership.
Passamaquoddy tribal historian Donald Soctomah has noted that the precedent set by the case propelled the tribes into what he called "the Invisible Years" between 1890 and 1920. Concerning the living conditions of members of the Passamaquoddy Tribe at that time, a report for the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1934 stated, "Living amongst ramshackle shelters and failing structures was a malnourished and diseased population plagued by childhood malnutrition, tuberculosis and venereal disease." Almost all of the population relied on relief notes to survive, and families slept on floors "covered with threadbare coats, for want of proper beds."
The "One Nation Under Fraud" report maintains that the state's persecution of the tribes continues in new ways today, with Maine's failure to engage in government-to-government recognition of the tribes as sovereign entities, instead of the quasi-municipal status forced on them under the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act of 1980, being a form of "ongoing colonization." And the authors argue that the state's dereliction of its treaty obligations fits within the United Nations' definition of genocide.
The authors of the report do offer some suggestions for ways in which the state and the tribes can work together to improve their relations. Among those suggestions are to restore the language of the original treaties with the tribe's in the state's constitution; establish a constitutional officer on tribal relations; and implement an accord between the tribes and the state to establish proper government-to-government interactions between two cultures in one state and to provide a framework for dispute resolution.