Archive

News Article Tribal-state relations need repair Written by Jim McCarthy, Editorial Page Editor from Times Record Paul Bisulca’s decision to step down as the unpaid chairman of the Maine Indian Tribal-State Commission should be a wake-up call to all Mainers — not just our political leaders in Augusta — that our relationship with Maine’s Wabanaki tribes needs some serious attention. Some context might be helpful: MITSC is the intergovernmental entity created by the legislation implementing the 1980 Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act. Its purpose is to continually review the effectivness of the act and the social, economic, and legal relationship between the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians, Passamaquoddy Tribe, the Penobscot Indian Nation, and the state. Bisulca, a Penobscot Indian who is a West Point graduate and a retired Army officer, served four years as MITSC’s chairman. By all accounts, he’s been an effective leader, well-respected for his integrity and commitment to improving the lives of Maine’s native peoples. He made public his Jan. 4 decision not to continue serving on MITSC in an Indian Country Today article published on Wednesday. In the story reported by Gale Courey Toensing, he cited the state’s failure to live up to its responsibilities under the 1980 act — most notably contentious issues relating to tribal sovereignty. “They have not lived up to that agreement and for 30 years the state has stymied all efforts to have this organization [i.e., MITSC] function to address those unaddressed issues (and) unintended consequences that everyone knew were going to be problems,” he told Indian Country Today. In recent years, a major sticking point has been MITSC’s funding by the state, which the tribes consider to be a matter that should be decided between equals. In 2008, over the objections of the tribes and overriding Gov. John Baldacci’s recommended funding, the Judiciary Committee unilaterally cut the MITSC budget. The tribes saw that as a snub of their sovereignty and a direct violation of the 1980 implementing act, in that it effectively put them in a subservient relationship to a state government committee. Adding insult to injury, also in 2008, the Judiciary Committee ignored the recommendations of Gov. Baldacci and his staff and passed the Tribal State Work Group Bill, LD 2221 with only two of the work group’s unanimously endorsed recommendations. Another snub. While there had been a marked improvement in relations between the Judiciary Committee’s leadership and MITSC in the first session of the 124th Legislature, the Indian Country Today article cites Bisulca’s frustration that Maine’s tribes don’t know “who is really in charge of Indian relations on the state side, with no one seemingly able to deliver solutions to the substantive issues blocking normalization in Indian relations ... It also appears that Indian issues are being ‘pushed down’ and are not considered at the highest levels of leadership.” John Dieffenbacher-Krall, MITSC’s paid executive director, characterized Bisulca’s departure as a “great loss” for both the Wabanaki nations and the people of Maine. A quick rundown of accomplishments during Bisulca’s tenure as MITSC’s chairman bears that out: Passamaquoddy Wayne Newell appointed as the first Wabanaki member of the University of Maine’s board of trustees; the Wabanaki Bates-Bowdoin-Colby collaborative created; a law making Maine the first state to have an official Native American Veterans Day; a law closing a loophole in Maine’s prohibition on the use of “squaw” in official place names; the appointment of Denise Altvater as a Wabanaki representative to Maine State Prison Board of Visitors. These are important initiatives that help build trust and greater understanding between the tribes and the state. They also should provide some hope that relations between the Wabanaki tribes and the state can be improved. But so long as overarching issues of tribal sovereignty remain unresolved, Maine’s Wabanaki peoples will be denied the equality implicitly promised in the 1980 Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act.

Maine Indian Tribal-State Commission (MITSC) P.O. Box 241 Stillwater, Maine 04489 (207) 817-3799 Email: mitsced@roadrunner.com Copyright 2010MITSC Privacy Policy