AUGUSTA, Maine — History will be made when Maine lawmakers return to the State House for their 2012 session and welcome a new member.
David Slagger will be seated in the House, becoming Maine’s first Maliseet Indian legislator. The University of Maine doctoral candidate will be sworn in by Gov. Paul LePage on Wednesday.
Two of Maine’s four tribes — the Penobscots and Passamaquoddies — are already represented in the Legislature; the Micmacs are not. The Houlton Band of Maliseets was authorized to send a representative to the Legislature in 2010.
Maine is unique among the states in having Indian tribal representatives, according to Maine Indian historian Glenn Starbird. The earliest record of Indian representation dates to 1823, three years after Maine became a state, when the Penobscots sent a member.
“As a native person, I want to be a representative that does substantial things that affect our people’s lives in a positive way,” said Slagger, whose first name is an Anglicized version of his native-language name, pronounced TAP-it.
Indian representatives are selected internally by their tribes. They are allowed to submit bills, participate in legislative committee sessions and speak on the floor of the House, but they cannot vote. Their districts are also represented by voting legislators.
The 800-member Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians is part of the larger Maliseet Nation of New Brunswick, Canada, and is led by a tribal chief, Brenda Commander. Graydon Nicholas, New Brunswick’s lieutenant governor and a member of the Maliseet Tribe, plans to attend Slagger’s swearing-in in Maine.
Slagger, lives in Kenduskeag near Bangor with his wife, who is a Micmac, and three children. He said he wants to make a difference for the Native Americans he represents when he comes to Augusta.
Acknowledging that relations between Maine’s state government and tribal officials have not always been smooth, he said, “I would like to have respectful, harmonious relations with the state, and I would like to be an agent of that change.”
Slagger comes to the Capitol with at least one specific proposal in mind, a bill that would make it illegal to impersonate Native Americans. Slagger said such misrepresentation occurs in the sale of arts and crafts.
A number of other issues that go before lawmakers are of interest to the tribes, notably gambling and, in recent years, the use of words on official place names in the state that many Indians consider offensive.
Maine lawmakers face a packed agenda in the concluding year of their two-year session.
The governor wants to close a budget gap by imposing sweeping cutbacks that could remove thousands from Medicaid, or MaineCare. Also on LePage’s agenda is legislation to make natural gas available to more people and businesses and to merge some Cabinet-level departments.
The bill noted in the article, An Act To Impose a Penalty for Making False Claims Regarding Affiliation with a Federally Recognized Tribe (LD1595,sponsored by Rep. Madonna Soctomah of the Passamaquoddy Tribe), is one of the emergency bills that will be taken up in the 2nd Session of the 125th Legislature. You can read it here:
http://www.mainelegislature.org/LawMakerWeb/summary.asp?ID=280043281
That bill creates the crime of claiming affiliation with a tribe, in order to claim eligibility for certain tribal based benefits His suggestion is that people are impersonating tribal affiliation in order to sell craft items.
It’s about time. The Maliseets deserve recognition just like the Passamaquoddies and Penobscots do. Unfortunately, even the tribal representatives have no Legislative voting powers. They merely have the power of knowledge and influence.
Congratulations to the Maliseets. And, Mr. Randall is quite right, unfortunately. The tribal representatives have no Legislative voting powers.
There should be at least one representative of Native Americans with full voting rights. Even with knowledge and influence they fall way short of representation of their interests getting a fair shake. Native issues go far beyond crafts and place names and should be considered. Poverty, discrimination, culture, a seperate nation yet working within the modern world to bring them the full benefits of social and technological changes. The same opertunities everyone else has to realize their own vision of how life should be.
Oops…. I seem to have lost my balance again…
The Maliseet people are very proud people and deserve to have a voice for them in Augusta.
And now, let’s give them the right to vote.