On Jan. 16 my wife and I listened with other Mainers to a public Zoom reading of the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” It was a powerful experience and fitting reminder on this national holiday honoring King to commit ourselves to his unfinished work.
Reflecting on those words written 60 years ago, both of us felt they equally relate to today’s Wabanaki people here in Maine. The obvious and most recent example of the Wabanaki being told to “Wait!” — a word used several times in MLK’s letter — is the removal of “The Advancing Equality for Wabanaki Nations Act” (HR 6707) from the FY 2023 Appropriations bill recently approved by the U.S. Senate.
It’s distressing to us that Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, and Maine Gov. Janet Mills have been in lockstep in blocking that bipartisan legislation approved in the U.S. House of Representatives last summer — a bill supported by both our U.S. Representatives that would have placed the Wabanaki Nations on equal footing with 570 federal tribes across the country.
The Wabanaki people know well from their own experience, as did MLK and African Americans in the South during the early 1960s, “This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’”
In a Dec. 21 interview on Maine Public, Sen. King’s spokesman told Steve Mistler the senator had “serious concerns about the legislation in its current form and the unintended consequences it poses for the state of Maine.” It begs the question: Well, what are they? Why not place them on the table for all to see?
Maine citizens would then be able to weigh them against the demonstrable harm Maine tribes and rural Maine have suffered due to restrictions of the 1980 Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act. These harms are detailed in the recent Harvard study’s findings that the four Wabanaki Nations “jump out as way near the bottom of the barrel nationally,” as its co-author Joseph P. Kalt told Maine Public on Dec. 6.
The full 69-page report can be found on the Wabanaki Alliance’s website. It documents in great detail how harmful it’s been for the Maliseet, Mi’kmaq, Passamaquoddy and Penobscot people and their non-tribal neighbors in rural Maine to have been systematically screened off from federal policies of Indian self-determination and self-governance for four decades. A graph accompanying the report shows 61% per-capita income growth since 1989 for all other tribes in the country, compared to only 9% for the four Wabanaki Nations.
As MLK reminds us in his 1963 Birmingham letter, “‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’” My wife and I believe, along with thousands of other Mainers, keeping the Wabanaki people under MICSA’s thumb is an injustice and civil rights issue here in Maine that rises to the level of the Rev. King’s “fierce urgency of now.”
My wife and I and thousands of other Mainers are no longer willing to look the other way and tell the Wabanaki Nations to “Wait!” We invite Sen. King and Gov. Mills to join this grassroots movement to modernize the archaic 1980 Settlement Act and thereby enable the Wabanaki and rural communities of Maine to benefit from the full range of federal policies and programs of self-determination that other tribes have enjoyed across the country.
As MLK stated in his Birmingham letter, “We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”
James McCarthy is a retired journalist, resident of Brunswick and member of the Committee on Indian Relations for the Episcopal Diocese of Maine.
Copy the Story LinkComments are not available on this story.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
