BANGOR, Maine — The state is appealing a federal judge’s ruling that found the Penobscot Indian Nation’s reservation includes the islands on the main stem of the Penobscot River but not the water itself.
The state is appealing U.S. District Judge George Singal’s decision to allow the Justice Department to intervene on the tribe’s behalf, according to Maine Attorney General Janet Mills.
She said late Thursday in an email that the state appealed because it questions “whether the federal government violated a 1980 law that prohibits it from suing the state.”
Singal also held that the tribe’s sustenance fishing rights include the waters of the Main Stem, bank to bank, but for the purposes of sustenance hunting and trapping, the reservation is confined to island surfaces only.
“The state has never prevented individuals of the Penobscot Nation from engaging in sustenance fishing or denied that right to the Penobscot Nation,” Mills said.
The notice of the state’s appeal to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston was posted Thursday through the court’s electronic case filing system.
The tribe and the U.S. Department of Justice earlier this month filed notice of their intent to appeal the decision.
Oral arguments have not been scheduled.
Singal’s ruling in December 2015 came more than three years after the tribe filed a lawsuit against the state as a result of former Attorney General William Schneider sending a letter dated Aug. 8, 2012, to the tribal warden service saying the state, not the tribe, has the authority to charge people with violating fishing regulations and water safety rules, according to court documents.
The tribe alleged in the lawsuit that its reservation includes the water in the river because of the tribe’s sustenance fishing rights.
Singal based his decision in part on language in the 1980 Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act, which defined the Penobscot Indian Reservation as the islands “consisting solely of Indian Island, also known as Old Town Island, and all islands in that river northward.”
“There is, in the court’s view, no ambiguity in these definitions,” Singal wrote in his 64-page decision. “MICSA is explicitly silent on the issue of any waters being included within the boundaries of the Penobscot Indian Reservation because [the statute] speaks only of ‘lands.’”
The statutes that cover most other tribes around the nation use the phrase “land and natural resources,” the judge wrote.
“Thus, [MICSA’s] use of the word ‘lands,’ instead of the more broadly defined phrase ‘land and natural resources,’ appears to reflect a congressional focus on defining only what land would make up the ‘Penobscot Indian Nation.’”