A recent report from Harvard University confirms that their “stark economic underperformance” is unique to Maine and rooted in the “restrictive construct of MICSA.” 2 This has crushed their ability to prosper: while the incomes of nearly all other tribes under federal Indian policy have grown an average of 61 percent since the 1980s, the Wabanaki’s has increased a skimpy 9 percent. They have been deprived of opportunities to determine how to regulate their own health care, housing, disaster response, and environmental protections. As a result, Maine’s Wabanaki Nations-which include the Penobscots-are uniquely prevented from benefiting from these federal Indian policies, including the more than 150 laws passed since the signing of MICSA. However, MICSA includes provisions that allow Maine to deem federal Indian policies void if they interfere with the application of Maine state law.
At the time, most MICSA stakeholders considered this a victory for both the tribe and the state. In return for their vacated land claims, Penobscots were granted rights that supported tribal self-determination through self-governance, which, under federal Indian policy, other tribes across the country already enjoyed. In 1980 the lawsuit was settled, resulting in the federal Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act ( MICSA) and its accompanying state legislation.
At issue was the ownership of nearly two thirds of the entire state. Penobscots claimed, rightly, that the transfer of their land to Massachusetts (now Maine) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had broken this law, and they wanted their land back. The claims centered on the applicability of the Nonintercourse Act of 1790, a federal statute prohibiting the sale or confiscation of Native land without the express approval of Congress.
Two weeks later, it filed suit on behalf of Penobscot Nation.
In June 1972 a long ribbon of litigation began to unspool that obliged the Department of Justice to sue the state of Maine on behalf of the Passamaquoddy Tribe. Penobscot Nation-along with the rest of Maine’s Native population-has suffered all of the above. Most of its residents live on roads where the 15.6 million tourists who visited in 2021 probably didn’t go: in communities damaged by toxic pollutants or opioids, bankrupted by government inaction, devoured by poverty, haunted by our country’s colonial past. The Way Life Should Be.” This seductive dictum, however, obscures less romantic landscapes within the borders of our state. A sign flanking the Maine Turnpike near the New Hampshire border greets drivers as they file in from points south: “Maine.
0 kommentar(er)
