Leaders of Vermont-recognized tribes defiant at Statehouse panel on Abenaki identity – VTDigger

MONTPELIER — Two months ago, leaders from an Abenaki nation based in Quebec urged Vermont lawmakers at a panel in the Statehouse to reconsider a contentious past decision: granting state tribal recognition to four groups based throughout the state. 

On Wednesday, leaders of those four groups — the Elnu Abenaki, Nulhegan Abenaki, Koasek Band of the Koas Abenaki Nation and the Abenaki Nation at Missisquoi — appealed to legislators at an event at the Capitol, too, and struck a defiant tone.

“We know who we are,” said Don Stevens, chief of the Nulhegan group, during the evening panel. “We will never stop being who we are — regardless of what people do.”

Wednesday’s event brought out about 100 people and took place in the same meeting room in the Statehouse as the panel in February. Among the crowd were members and supporters of the state-recognized groups and at least 15 House or Senate members. Lt. Gov. John Rodgers, the state’s second-highest-ranking official, also attended.

Stevens and the other state-recognized tribal leaders urged lawmakers to reject the recent push by Odanak First Nation, the Abenaki tribe centered in Quebec, to revisit the state recognition process, which lawmakers created in 2010. They urged legislators instead to spend time advocating for their own communities’ needs and interests. 

The latest panel was hosted by the Vermont Commission on Native American Affairs,  the state-established body tasked with advocating for local Indigenous communities and making recommendations either for or against tribal recognition to state legislators.

The state recognition process has come under scrutiny in recent years as leaders from Odanak First Nation and its sister Abenaki community, W8linak First Nation, have maintained that Vermont granted tribal legitimacy to groups whose members largely can’t claim continuous ties to historic Abenaki people, or to any Indigenous people.

Instead, the First Nation’s leaders have contended, many members of Vermont’s groups are appropriating Abenaki identity and leveraging state resources that they should have no claim to, and that instead could be directed to Odanak and W8linak tribal citizens.

“It is imperative to correct the errors made and restore the truth,” said Rick O’Bomsawin, chief of Odanak First Nation, in a press release sent out Thursday morning in response to the latest event. “By accepting and promoting these unfounded claims, Vermont authorities contribute to legitimizing cultural and identity fraud, which harms the true descendants and guardians of this heritage.”

The Vermont groups’ state-level recognition allows them to access college scholarships, get free hunting and fishing licenses and benefit from certain property tax exemptions. The groups also get some funding and benefits from the federal government, including legal permission to label arts and crafts their members make as “Indian produced.”

Odanak and W8linak have federal-level recognition in Canada, which gives them access to relatively greater funding and other resources in that country, and, critically, allows them to claim pieces of land as sovereign territory. Both bands have reserves located northeast of Montreal, though also claim Vermont, among other areas, as part of their unceded territory.

One of the Vermont groups, the Missisquoi, applied for recognition from the U.S. federal government in the 1980s but was later rejected, with the government finding that less than 1% of its members could show descent from an Abenaki ancestor. A Vermont Attorney General’s Office report in 2002 arrived at similar conclusions.

One of Wednesday’s speakers — former longtime Vermont state archaeologist Giovanna Peebles — challenged those government findings. She told attendees that it would be “a grave mistake” to rely on them because they evaluated Vermont’s groups against a standard for historical documentation that, in her view, not all Indigenous communities can meet. 

Rather, “the indigeneity of all four state-recognized Abenaki tribes is solidly based on powerful family histories, stories and traditions passed along through families,” Peebles said, noting that she had spent “hundreds of hours” hearing such narratives directly from families in her career. 

“As archaeologists, we know that most of history was never written down,” she added.

Margaret Bruchac, a professor emerita at the University of Pennsylvania who is a member of the Nulhegan group, offered a similar assessment at the panel. Bruchac said that “the lack of trustworthy records obscures the continuing presence” of the groups in Vermont, adding that Indigenous families’ identities in the region may have been written down inaccurately by European colonial officials.  

Odanak and W8linak leaders have argued, to the contrary, that historical records are critical to establishing ties to legitimate Indigenous communities — saying that they have never received sufficient evidence of that kind from the groups in Vermont.

At the same time, research published in 2023 by Darryl Leroux, a University of Ottawa associate professor who spoke at February’s Statehouse panel, found that many members of the Vermont-recognized groups have little connection to Abenaki ancestors, and instead have French-Canadian ancestry.

Some speakers Wednesday also drew a distinction between the history and culture of the state-recognized groups and those of Odanak and W8linak. The Elnu chief, Roger Longtoe Sheehan, said there are “Vermont Abenaki” and “Canadian Abenaki.”

Referring to the panel earlier this year with the First Nation leaders based in Quebec, Stevens, the Nulhegan chief, asked lawmakers in the room Wednesday: “Why are we entertaining a foreign entity, in a foreign country, over your own constituents?” 

The first panel was hosted not by the state but by Rep. Troy Headrick, I-Burlington. Headrick has since introduced a bill that would, among a handful of other measures, establish a task force to “review the validity” of the state’s past tribal recognitions.

The bill, H.362, had a brief hearing in the House General and Housing Committee earlier this month, though it’s unlikely to advance further this legislative session.

During Wednesday’s panel, several lawmakers voiced support for the state-recognized groups, including Rep. Mike Mrowicki, D-Putney, and Rep. Brian Cina, P/D-Burlington. The panel was moderated by former Craftsbury Democratic Rep. Katherine Sims.

Perhaps the strongest comments came from Rep. Michael Morgan, R-Milton. 

“I was at the last presentation, if you want to call it that — maybe I’d call it a hijacking — back two months ago,” he said, before speaking about the Odanak leaders directly.

“I don’t know what all their motivations are,” Morgan said. “But they need to leave people here alone.”