If you or someone you know needs resources or support related to sexual violence, contact the Maine Coalition Against Sexual Assault’s 24/7 hotline at 800-871-7741.
For decades, Wendy Little Bear, 56, struggled to cross the bridge leading to Indian Island. Just over the bridge to the Penobscot Nation’s reservation stands St. Ann’s Catholic Church.
When Little Bear sees the church, she remembers the year she spent living on Indian Island with her family at age 7 — the year she said both a priest and a nun sexually abused her. Her family moved away after her father discovered the priest’s abuse, she explained on a recent morning, but the memories stayed with her.
Little Bear is one of about 100 survivors of sexual abuse, including roughly 10 members of the Wabanaki Nations, who reached a multimillion-dollar settlement with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland in two waves starting last fall and continuing this spring and summer. The settlement is the culmination of a yearslong push for justice.
But a number of the survivors and their advocates said they’re still waiting for an apology and for the church to publicly name all the clergy who abused children.
Little Bear sued the diocese after the state passed a law in 2021 removing the statute of limitations for civil claims alleging child sexual abuse. But the diocese challenged the law as dozens of claims rolled in.
In 2025, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court found the law unconstitutional, making it more difficult for survivors to pursue claims, said Michael Bigos of Bigos Law, one of the lawyers representing survivors.
In the settlements reached this year, the diocese chose to still include cases where survivors lost standing because of the statute of limitations decision.
“Even though pending cases that were decades old no longer had legal standing based on the ruling, the diocese recognizes that the harm caused by sexual abuse is not erased with time and still desired to respond with compassion,” Bishop James Ruggieri wrote in a statement on July 30.
Little Bear said she felt the church’s decision showed some acknowledgment of wrongdoing. But for her, the lawsuit was never about money. She wanted the responsible clergy to be publicly named and held accountable.
The Portland diocese has not published a list of credibly accused clergy, one of less than a fifth of U.S. dioceses and Catholic religious orders that had not done so as of a 2020 ProPublica report. An online repository of public information on clergy sexual abuse maintained by the Massachusetts-based nonprofit bishop-accountability.org lists 60 clergy in Maine alleged to have sexually abused children.
Molly DiLorenzo, director of communications for the diocese, wrote in an email to The Maine Monitor that the diocese would not comment further on the settlement. Dioecesan clergy, employees and volunteers facing sexual abuse allegations are “immediately removed from ministry pending an investigation, and authorities are contacted,” she wrote.
There have been no substantiated claims of sexual abuse of a minor by diocesan clergy that occurred in the past 30 years, DiLorenzo wrote, and no priests with current assignments have faced substantiated claims.
The settlement hasn’t brought closure for Little Bear. Now that she’s through the legal process, she said, she’s ready to be more vocal about her experience and how she views the church’s presence on Indian Island.
‘Those of us’
At first, when Little Bear and her family moved from Bucksport to Indian Island in 1977, she said she liked being so close to her cousins and living on her tribe’s homeland. She felt protected. But that feeling of safety didn’t last.
Her family lived across the street from St. Ann’s, the third-oldest site of continuous Catholic worship in New England and third-oldest Catholic church in Maine, according to the Portland diocese. She and her brother attended the nearby Indian Island School, which has since been torn down.
One day at school, Little Bear’s younger brother made a mistake while writing the letter S. Sister Helen McKeough, the principal, slapped his hands with a ruler, Little Bear recalled in a recent interview, cutting his palms. Incensed, Little Bear said she grabbed the ruler and slapped McKeough across the face.
That’s when McKeough took Little Bear into her office and sexually touched her the first time, Little Bear said. McKeough threatened to hurt Little Bear’s brother if she spoke about it, she said. It took decades before she disclosed what happened to a cousin. McKeough sexually abused Little Bear one other time before her family moved, she said.
While Little Bear’s family didn’t attend services at St. Ann’s, she saw the priest, Father David Cote, often. Little Bear and the other kids played near the church, incorporating a statue in front of the rectory into their games.
One day, Little Bear recalled, Cote asked her to come into the rectory so he could treat her sunburn. There, she said, he performed a sexual act in the room with her. Little Bear’s father walked in, saw what had happened, and threatened Cote, telling him to stay away from Little Bear, she said.
Neither Little Bear nor her father told her mother what had happened, she said, but at the end of the school year they moved back to Bucksport. They still visited her grandmother and cousins on Indian Island each week. She struggled to breathe when passing the rectory next to the church until it was eventually torn down, though the church building still stands.
It wasn’t until four Penobscot Nation members filed civil complaints alleging abuse by three priests, including Cote, in 2023 that Little Bear started to tell her relatives about her own experience. That lawsuit came a week after a judge asked the Maine Supreme Judicial Court to consider the constitutionality of the Legislature’s law removing the statute of limitations for civil cases alleging child sexual abuse.
Little Bear saw the news of the Penoboscot Nation members’ complaints and realized that both her cousin and her childhood friend were among those who filed claims. She met her cousin for coffee shortly after.
“I said, ‘I want to thank you for coming forward and speaking up and representing those of us who have been afraid to speak up,’” she recalled. “He looked over at me, and he said, ‘Those of us?’”
She told him that she too had been abused, and he put her in touch with a team of advocates. Four months later, she filed her own claim as a Jane Doe. Her mother still didn’t know about the abuse. Little Bear told her about it during a therapy session after filing the lawsuit.
“She actually got mad at my father for never having told her,” Little Bear said. “I said, ‘Mom, you were of the faith, and he wanted to protect you, too.’”
Her mom was not Catholic when they lived on Indian Island but converted to the faith in the early 2000s. Today, Little Bear said, her mom is still Catholic but no longer attends services.
Cote, the St. Ann’s priest, retired in 2014 and appears to still be alive, according to a background check. So does McKeough, the former principal of the school on Indian Island. The Maine Monitor called phone numbers listed for each, but they appeared to be disconnected.
The Portland diocese implemented a child sexual abuse awareness and prevention program called Protecting God’s Children in 2002. According to its website, the diocese performs between 4,000 and 5,000 background checks per year, and all active clergy, employees and volunteers have completed training on how to recognize potential abuse.
‘Connection with the earth’
Little Bear received compensation after the settlement was reached earlier this year. The lawyers and the church have not disclosed the settlement amount beyond saying it was seven figures.
Not everyone lived to see the result. Two members of the Penobscot Nation died before the agreement was finalized. The money is going to their estates, Bigos said.
One of the survivors who died was Little Bear’s childhood friend. The tribe used to hold three-day sacred fires behind St. Ann’s for members who died, but in recent years they moved them to a gazebo built for that purpose. In 2025, Little Bear served as a fire keeper for her friend’s ceremony, keeping it lit from midnight until 2 a.m.
“It was a very peaceful time here on the river. Cold, but very peaceful,” Little Bear said. “It did help, some, because I was able to get a lot off my chest.”
Little Bear would like to see spaces for similar traditions grow.
“We do have a lot of Catholics up here now because that’s how they were brought up,” Little Bear said, “but we are a people who are not Catholics, who have a belief that goes way past having the Catholic Church here.”
She would like to see St. Ann’s replaced with a longhouse where Penobscot Nation members can celebrate their tribe’s traditional spirituality. She knows of others who also want to see the church gone, she said, but it’s been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1973.
June Glossian, a member of the Penobscot Nation who lives on Indian Island, said she hates that the church is the first and last building she sees when she enters and leaves her ancestral homeland. The church reminds her of the Doctrine of Discovery, a theory extolled by a 1493 papal declaration that helped justify European colonization by saying Christians had a right to claim land inhabited by non-Christians. The Vatican didn’t formally repudiate the doctrine until 2023.
Glossian, who attended the Catholic school on Indian Island for a couple of years as a child, said she has unlearned the church teachings as an adult and embraced a more traditional spirituality since then.
“My connection with the earth is my spirituality,” Glossian said. “Creation is my God. For me, the trees and the land and the water and the animals, people, that’s my spirituality.”
St. Ann’s is now part of the Parish of the Resurrection of the Lord, which has four churches covering Old Town, Orono, Bradley and the Penobscot Nation. Both Penobscot Nation members and non-members attend the church.
In a Sept. 6 bulletin, the parish pastor Rev. Brad Morin wrote that the Catholic Church previously “hid problems to protect its image,” and now some people “want to expose every fault to destroy the Church’s credibility.”
“Both approaches hurt people,” he wrote, adding that covering up abuse destroys trust, but “sensationalizing sin … destroys faith and drives people away from God.”
DiLorenzo, the diocesan director of communications, said the bulletin was not in reference to the recent settlements.
Bigos, the lawyer who represented tribal members suing the diocese, said some of his clients described the church as historically “friendlier and more supportive” than the state. When they experienced abuse at the hands of Catholic clergy, Bigos said they described it as betrayal.
That betrayal spans generations for Little Bear, who said her father also suffered from clergy sexual abuse. For a time, Little Bear allowed her daughters to attend Catholic masses with her mother. After filing her lawsuit, Little Bear asked her daughters if they had ever experienced abuse. They told her no, she said, but said they had heard similar stories from others their age.
All but one of the survivors who filed claims since 2021 were included in the settlement, Bigos said. The remaining person has paused his litigation as Bigos and others continue to fight for statute of limitations reform. Two more people have approached Bigos since the settlement was announced and said they are interested in pursuing claims if another attempt at reforming the statute of limitations is successful.
This story appears as part of a collaboration to strengthen investigative journalism in Maine between the BDN and The Maine Monitor. Read more about the partnership.