U & D

Think for a moment about governments in distress, globally. There are contested elections, civil wars, usurpations of power, repressed and unrepresented populations, revolutions, invasions, rampant fraud, tyrannical leaders, cartels and pirates.  Within Maine itself, tribal-state relations have, over the last year, come unraveled, a situation  documented in MITSC’s archive of News.

The turmoil of nationhood and nation-building is not lost on the Micmacs of Maine. Federally recognized on November 26, 1991, the Aroostook Band has recently scored what should be a significant legal victory.

An April 13 decision in the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a trend that was tying the hands of tribal governments in resisting state encroachments. The ruling in the case Aroostook Band of Micmacs v. Patricia Ryan, executive director, Maine Human Rights Commission; [et al.]preserves the right of the northern Maine tribe to defend its sovereignty before a federal judge instead of a possibly biased state judiciary. (Micmac win sovereignty case)

The case was argued by the Micmac tribal lawyer, Douglas J. Lukerman, who is also arguing sovereignty cases for the Narragansett and Wampanoag tribes. The root of the cases, as indicated in the quotation above, is the ability of a federally recognized Nation to challenge the actions of a State that limit tribal sovereignty. Given the growth of tribal involvement in environmental, energy-generation/transmission, and gaming issues, for example, this may prove to be an important step forward for Maine’s tribes. It is certainly an example of a tribal government taking an action – all the way to a top court – that will benefit its people as a whole.

On the other hand, this same government is in some disarray. For the last two years, there has been a dirth of information about Micmac internal issues relating to government, even though the existence of distress is well known. This tribal privacy has to be respected.  I was surprised, therefore, to run across two recent articles in Indian Country Today.

The first, dated April 27, is called Report: BIA official supported unelected Micmac chief and council for two years. The article is a summary of a BIA report that has not been publically released, but which was obtained by ICT.  What we have here is a reporter’s summary of a report giving the background of the inter-tribal political issues of the last two or so years.

The 2nd article, dated May 1, is called BIA will encourage new Micmac elections.  Although it is interesting that the attitude and role of BIA and its officials, RE Micmac sovereignty, flip-flops between the two articles (more than once), the more interesting things to me are:

• The text of the interview with Victoria Higgins “Seated chief”, which is in the 2nd article.
• The Comments that follow both articles.

The interview is frank – I wonder if Chief Higgins saw it before publication. It is too bad that ICT did not show a tribal leader more respect. On the other hand, I do not know the history of the author, Gale Courey Toensing, but (he/she) also can be found writing about Maine issues in the MITSC archive. It may be that the interviewer has a less than objective point of view.

The Comments are really amazing, far out-numbering those for any other ICT article I have read recently; far outnumbering comments to articles in the Bangor Daily News or the Portland Press Herald. They demonstrate a deep and passionate response by the tribal community to the interview and to the issues embraced by the Report. Personalities and names aside, the  “outsider” reading these exchanges recognizes the depth of the concern of the tribal members for their sovereignty, their tribal health, and their future growth and welfare.  There are clearly disparate opinions and hyperbolic passions, but there are also voices of reason. These comment strings are a lesson in “civics,” it seems to me.

Would I use them in a classroom? No – from my point of view, these are private, inner-tribal conversations. But I would certainly not shy away from referring to the  political unrest in the  Aroostook Band of Micmacs – this is a validation of the sovereign and active nature of their government – and I would remind students that this government was able to achieve the legal victory that I noted at the top of this article.

Questions arise about the role and charge of the BIA.  Students can be referred to the Bureau of Indian Affairs Division of Tribal Government Services, which will at least provide a non-Indian frame of reference for reading the two articles above. But the relationship, in theory and in fact, between the BIA and the Micmacs seems to be complex and a bit smokey.  Some of the publications of the BIA that relate to “Self-Governance” seem to be more concerned with dotting tribal i’s and crossing tribal t’s than with facilitating self-determination and self-governance.

It is tempting to side with the Micmac Commenters who say, “Leave us alone to solve our problems – for we can.”