Maine Attorney General Janet Mills’ recent Bangor Daily News OpEd had this header: “After lawsuit, it’s time to move on, keep working for healthy Penobscot River.”
The U.S. District Court in Portland recently decided the lawsuit Penobscot Nation v. Mills. Judge George Singal ruled that Penobscots have a right to individual fishing sustenance in the river and that the state of Maine has sovereignty over the river.
Mills’ OpEd moves issues in the Penobscot River case to center stage in the court of public opinion. How informed are we as jurors?
Like most Maine residents, I graduated with little knowledge of the Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet and Micmac tribes. In my eighth decade, Wabanaki friends blessed me with some awareness of the “view from the shore.”
I suggest Wabanaki might ask, “Can anyone be sovereign over a river?” Rivers determine where they will flow, when they will crest and how high. Further, Wabanaki might say, “What matters most is our relationship with the river.” For all who live along the Penobscot, their relationship with the river and the quality of its water are intertwined.
Survival-based issues relating to sovereignty and water quality motivated Penobscots to file suit in federal court. These issues prompted the U.S. Department of Justice to take the uncommon step of entering the lawsuit as an intervener, supporting the Penobscot Nation.
At least eight municipalities and about a dozen businesses, many with discharge pipes, supported Maine in this lawsuit.
Orono withdrew from the lawsuit after Maria Girouard, an expert on the Maine Indian Lands Claim Settlement Act, and John Banks, director of the Department of Natural Resources for the Penobscot Nation, provided residents with current facts and historical background.
As reported in the BDN on March 16, 2015, Banks said at a meeting of the Orono Community Development Committee that in 1775, Massachusetts leaders “asked my tribe to join the calling” during the American Revolution.
“Our tribal chief at that time was named Orono,” he said. In exchange for fighting the British, those Massachusetts leaders promised the Penobscots “our lands and our fishing privileges within our waters would be protected in perpetuation.
“It’s really hard for me, in 2015, to be fighting the same battle,” Banks said. “This is all about our fishing rights.”
The Penobscot Nation’s Department of Natural Resources has higher water quality standards than Maine. In fact, last year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency informed Maine, according to the Portland Press Herald, that its “proposed water quality standards are inadequate to protect sustenance fishermen on the reservations from certain toxins, because they eat much greater volumes of fish than the average Mainer.”
Compassionate Mainers will ask, “What good is the right to individual sustenance fishing if the quality of the water is too low to permit Penobscots to eat the fish safely?” What standard of water quality do we want for Penobscot families now and for our children’s children?
Mills suggests that Wabanaki tribes have been served well. This is not the case. Not until 1967 did Maine grant Native Americans the right to vote in state elections. In 2015, legislators declined to adopt a bill that would have assured Native American women in Maine the full protection of the recently passed federal Violence Against Women Act by transferring enforcement authority from the state to the tribes. That bill is still pending before the Legislature this winter.
Wabanaki cannot simply “move on” as Mills suggests. Governmental decisions, past and present, continue to affect their lives negatively.
For 10,000 years before Europeans used the musket and the papal Doctrine of Discovery to claim sovereignty, Wabanaki lived throughout what we now call Maine. Wabanaki maintained the quality of waterways by living in relationship with nature, by regarding earth as Mother, trees as Brothers, and rocks as Ancient Ones.
Now a U.S. District Court judge has decided Penobscots do not have sovereignty over their ancestral river. What matters more to the quality of life of all who live along the river — sovereignty and the right to pollute for profit or science and clean water?
It is time for Mainers to ask larger questions than courts can answer. What relationship do we want with our water resources? What relationship do we want with our Wabanaki neighbors? Where do our moral compasses point us?
Paul Frost, an Anglo-American, lives in Bass Harbor. He taught “Education in a Multicultural Society” at the University of Maine’s College of Education from 2006 to 2011. He is a coordinator of the Wabanaki Writers Project.