GUEST OPINION: Mashpee Claims vs. Regulatory and historical reality
A rendering of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe's proposed casino in Taunton.
In the May 8 edition of the Taunton Daily Gazette, Michael Speller, a spokesman for Arkana, the local subsidiary of the Malaysian Genting Syndicate, the financial backers of the Mashpee tribe’s efforts to establish a gambling facility within Taunton, remarked in regard to the proposed casino “that the first of four phases can be built within 15 months.” That same day in an article appearing in “Massachusetts Live,” Stephen P. Crosby, chairman of the Massachusetts Gaming Commission remarked, “it will be three to five years before a casino is up and running” in Massachusetts. Here we are faced with a rhetorical dichotomy. Which, if any, of the two conflicting statements are true in regard to the Mashpee?
To begin, we ask what are the regulatory and legal obstacles facing the Mashpee in order to have lands taken into federal trust in Taunton, that is, the Secretary of the Interior assuming the title to lands purchased by the Mashpee within Taunton to be held for the benefit of the Mashpee? There are significant issues facing the tribe in this endevour.
First and foremost is the 2009 US. Supreme Court decision in the matter of Carcieri v. Salazar. Here the court ruled that the Secretary of the Interior could not take land into federal trust for a tribe unless it was under federal jurisdiction prior to June 18, 1935. The federal and state records are clear that the Mashpee were totally under Massachusetts legal jurisdiction since 1655 to the time of their federal recognition in 2007. Secondly, the Mashpee are attempting to have two tracts of land simultaneously declared initial Indian reservations and taken into trust as the tribe’s initial reservation. This is a unique request to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Other similar attempts have failed. The federal regulations that legally define what an Indian reservation is, speaks only of a single parcel of land having contiguous boundaries. Here the Mashpee are asking for a reservation on Cape Cod and one in Taunton.
The odds, so to speak, are against such a request being granted by the Bureau. Third, a tribe asking for land to be taken into trust, especially for gambling purposes, must demonstrate a significant historical association or connection to the lands so requested. The regulations state, “The regulation sets forth that the tribe must have present and historical connections to the land, and that the land must be proclaimed a new reservation pursuant to 25 USC 467 before land can qualify under this exception…. Significant historical connection is defined by the federal government as, … the land is located within the boundaries of the tribe’s last reservation under a ratified or unratified treaty, or a tribe can demonstrate by historical documentation the existence of the tribe’s villages, burial grounds, occupancy or subsistence use in the vicinity of the land…The definition of ‘significant historical connection’ establishes criteria which require something more than evidence that a tribe merely passed through a particular area.”
The historical record clearly demonstrates that the Mashpee never occupied or utilized lands off of Cape Cod, especially in Taunton, nor did any lands within Taunton hold any culturally significant meaning to the Mashpee such as burial grounds or mythlogically significant locations.
The Mashpee are claiming that they were part of a historically non-existent “Wampanoag” tribe of Indians that they assert encompassed all the Indians of Cape Cod and southeastern Masachusetts. The only Indian groups that historically and legitimately could be called “Wampanoag” were those of the so-called Wampanoag Confederacy” (Pokanoket, Narragansett, and Nipmuc tribes) which sided with King Philip (c. 1675) the Pokanoket tribal sachem, in their war against the colonists. Mashpee sided with the colony in that conflict and were therefore not historically “Wampanoag.”
Another federal regulation that must be met by the Mashpee, is that the tribe must have a present day presence in the area in which the land being sought is located. The regulation requires, “The land is within a 25 mile radius of the tribe’s headquarters or other tribal governmental facilities that have existed at that location for at least two years at the time of the application for land into trust. ...”
The Mashpee recently opened a administrative office in New Bedford. That location is well outside the mandated twenty-five mile maximum radius. So the Mashpee would have to open a tribal administrative office within twenty-five miles of Taunton and wait two years before any action to take the land into trust could be taken.
Lastly, assuming the Mashpee could somehow circumvent the U.S. Supreme Court ruling, and meet the rigid regulatory requirements posited by the Department of the Interior, the Bureau of Indian Affairs has, at last count, some 150 similar requests for land to be taken into trust by other tribes in front of their petition. That process may take up to ten years to complete. This is the reality facing Taunton.
Mr. Lynch is owner and principal of Waterbury, Conn.-based, Historical Consulting & Research Services, LLC. He has been a practicing Ethno-historian for more than 25 years. He is also the author of four books addressing colonial — tribe land issues, tribal history, and the development of Federal Indian Policy
Read more: http://www.tauntongazette.com/dcover/x85610280/GUEST-OPINION-Mashpee-Claims-vs-Regulatory-and-historical-reality#ixzz1usHDXbaw
This fails to include a potential Aquinnah lawsuit, the resolution of the KG Urban appeal scheduled to be heard in June and a potential lawsuit by the Pokasset Tribe to whom it would seem Governor Slot Barns promised support for a Slot Barn in Freetown.
Is Cedric Cromwell being truthful about even having an active application for lands-in-trust?
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