Participants in the Indigenous Peoples Day rally called for expanded sovereignty rights for tribal communities and passage of a ballot question next month to restore treaty language to copies of the state constitution.
Participants in the Indigenous Peoples Day rally call for expanded sovereignty rights for tribal communities and passage of a ballot question next month to restore treaty language to printed copies of the Maine Constitution.
Participants in the Indigenous Peoples Day rally call for expanded sovereignty rights for tribal communities and passage of a ballot question next month to restore treaty language to printed copies of the Maine Constitution.
As part of a truth-telling initiative that seeks to illuminate the issue of land claims and the 1980 Settlement Act as well as celebrate the resilience of Indigenous communities, the group Wabanaki REACH has partnered with a Maine-based theater organization to create a play developed by and for Wabanaki people. The work is the first public offering based on a project in which Wabanaki REACH — an organization supporting Indigenous self-determination through education and other restorative practices — spent a year gathering more than 40 oral history interviews from Wabanaki people and those in Maine about Maine Indian land claims and the 1980 Settlement Act. As Beacon previously reported, Wabanaki tribes have long argued that the Settlement Act has stifled tribes’ economic development and allowed the state to treat sovereign Indigenous nations as municipalities, creating a paternalistic and unfair relationship that no other federally-recognized tribe