Tara Sweeney, the newly-installed Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs, poses with Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke at Department of the Interior headquarters in Washington, D.C. Photo: U.S. DOI
Trump administration takes Indian Country back to termination era
Less than two months into the job, the new leader of the Bureau of Indian Affairs has set an ominous tone for the Trump administration’s dealings with tribal nations.Tara Sweeney, the recently-installed Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs, issued a decision on Friday that paves the way for a reservation to be taken out of trust for the first time since the termination era. The victim in this age of self-determination and sovereignty is the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, whose homelands in Massachusetts are now on the chopping block.But the People of the First Light aren’t accepting Washington’s dictate without a fight. An emergency council meeting is taking place at tribal headquarters on Monday to address what Chairman Cedric Cromwell described as an “unbelievably grave injustice.'”We have been on this land for 12,000 years and we are not going anywhere,” Cromwell declared after receiving the negative decision.Key to the effort is legislation in Congress which would prevent the reservation from being taken out of trust. With the executive branch willing to walk away from any responsibilities, passage of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe Reservation Reaffirmation Act appears to be the only hope for success.“The decision by the Trump administration to move forward with denying the Mashpee Wampanoag a right to their ancestral homeland and to keep their reservation is an injustice,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), the sponsors of S.2628, said in a joint statement on Friday.”America has a painful history of systematically ripping apart tribal lands and breaking its word,” the lawmakers added. “We cannot repeat that history.”
Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe Chairman Cedric Cromwell, left, and elder Vernon Lopez celebrate approval of the tribe’s land-into-trust application on September 18, 2015. The Trump administration has since reversed course. Photo: Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe
The Wampanoag people’s place in history is well known. The tribe’s ancestors welcomed the first European settlers to the Americas almost 400 years ago and helped them thrive, an event commemorated with the annual celebration of Thanksgiving.But the decision issued by Sweeney, who joined the Trump administration at the end of July after promising to advocate for the trust responsibility, paints a different picture of the tribe’s relationship — or lack thereof — with the United States. In the 28-page document, she she said there was “little if any evidence” which showed that the tribe was “under federal jurisdiction” in 1934.The year 1934 is critical because that’s when the Indian Reorganization Act came into existence. Section 5 of the law authorized what is known as the land-into-trust process in order to reverse the effects of allotment, another highly-destructive federal policy which saw tribes lose 90 million acres of their homelands in less than 50 years.But decades of litigation by states and local governments led to a significant weakening of the law. In 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a case known as Carcieri v. Salazar, held that a tribe must have been “under federal jurisdiction” in 1934 in order to benefit from the land restoration provisions of the IRA.According to Sweeney, an Alaska Native who hails from a state where the Trump administration recently suspended the land-into-trust process, the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe fails to meet the “jurisdiction” in 1934 test. Even though the BIA, said the tribe retained its self-governance when it formally recognized the tribe in 2007, she concluded that the federal government did not take enough actions to demonstrate the type of trust relationship she has said she is “committed” to upholding.”The record demonstrates that the Mashpee Tribe had significant relations with the Commonwealth as a colony and state for nearly two centuries; that the Commonwealth’s exercises of authority over the tribe were extensive and pervasive; and that the laws enacted by the Commonwealth for the benefit of the tribe were often similar in substance to federal laws enacted for the benefit of tribes,” Sweeney wrote in reference to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, whose origin is directly tied to the establishment of the Pilgrim colony in 1620, more than a century before the United States came into being.”Nevertheless the record contains practically no evidence of any dealings with the federal government in that period,” Sweeney continued.
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