The Mashpee Wampanoag tribal council last week voted to take back its 7-0 vote of “no confidence” in longtime Chairman Cedric Cromwell and to restate his fiduciary responsibilities as president of the tribal gaming authority.
The council’s “never mind” to its earlier vote came after an investigation of the chairman’s financial situation. The fact that he and his wife (Cheryl Frye-Cromwell, who also serves on the council) owe more than $37,000 in federal taxes had set off alarms. The couple is in the midst of a divorce.
Tribal Council Secretary Marie Askew made a statement for the council: “Now that we’ve had time to look at this more carefully, based on evidence and documents, the Tribal Council made a conscious, collective decision to reinstate the Chairman’s power back. We didn’t do this because he asked us. We did this on our own. We worked it out and we are tired of beating a dead horse.”
She continued, “There is no evidence of any financial impropriety on the part of any tribal officer. Our ancestors are twisting in their graves over people running to the news media to try and divide us. United we stand. That’s the kind of people we are.”
Cromwell accepted the take back with good grace although he conceded that it was painful to have his credibility challenged. According to Askew Cromwell remained steadfast in wanting to move forward to protect the tribe’s sovereignty over its ancestral lands and to urge Congress to pass a bill that would affirm the lands in trust.
Cromwell issued this statement: “Since our reservation has been called into question by those who are trying to use the courts to undermine our sovereign rights, as well as the subsequent decision by the Interior Department to reverse its 2015 decision to hold our land in trust, it’s been one of the most trying times for our people in recent memory. Of course, it’s painful for personal attacks and innuendo to be flung in my direction, but this struggle is bigger than me or any one person. So I will continue to fight for my people as best as I know how.”
That doesn’t mean that criticism of the chairman has ceased. Elections over the weekend saw three council seats change hands, and one of them went to a longtime critic of the Cromwell, Aaron Tobey Jr. and another to Carlton Hendricks Jr., also a critic.
The tribal elections typically involved just a few hundred voters. For example, one incumbent, Marie Stone, lost by 10 votes. Despite the vote to reverse the rescinding of Cromwell’s authority, Tobey promised to turn up the heat. “He’s been very lucky to avoid any accountability, but now it’s about time he’s held accountable,” he said recently.
Hendricks has demanded more oversight on the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Gaming Authority, a five member board that Cromwell also chairs. That body was cited by name critically in a recently revealed audit of the tribe’s finances.
The Taunton Daily Gazette interviewed Hendricks recently and he noted the constantly changing figures on tribal debt to the Genting Group, which is now reported at $507 million and which was $60 million less than that just a few months ago.
The Genting Group was the tribe’s partner and bankroller in its proposed $1 billion casino for the town of Taunton—a plan that started to unravel after the adverse court decision forced the Interior Department to rethink its action putting land into trust.
A bill has been languishing in Congress for many months now. The bill would put the land into trust, going around the department.
One of the most vocal supporters of that bill, and who reintroduced it in the Senate this year, is recently declared presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren.
Increasingly her association with the tribal casino, after years as a very vocal critic of the social ills connected to gambling, has focused attention on several aspects of her career that could labeled her “Indian” problems.
Some are well known. Such as her long maintained but unsubstantiated claims that she has Indian blood, and the more recent evidence that she actively listed herself as “American Indian” on academic job applications 30 to 40 years ago and on the Texas State Bar in 1986. Claims that caused her embarrassment when she first ran for U.S. Senator in 2012 and more recently when President Trump has unrelentingly mocked her as “Pocahontas.” This came to a head with Warren’s infamous DNA test that upped the temperature of the debate.
Her association with the Mashpee casino is of a different character. As reported by Michael Graham in a Newsday commentary, “For a year, Liz Warren has been working on behalf of the Massachusetts-based Mashpee Wampanoag tribe to secure a $1 billion casino deal with an international gaming corporation. As a result, she’s abandoned long-held social-justice views of gambling’s impact on the poor and vulnerable; linked herself to a troubled Indian tribe whose leaders have been either forced out or jailed; and made herself a champion of a scandal-ridden billion-dollar multinational conglomerate.”
None of this causes the senator much heartburn in Massachusetts, a solidly Democratic state. But now that she has stepped onto the national presidential stage, peccadillos can be magnified into a pachyderms.
As Graham notes, Warren began trying to win back support among Native Americans about a year ago, roughly the same time she began to support the Taunton casino. In January 2018 she made an unannounced appearance at the National Congress of American Indians in Washington. A few weeks later she reintroduced the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe Reservation Reaffirmation Act in the Senate.
The senator concedes that this is a 180 degree turn from his well-documented criticism of the corporate gaming industry. For example, she opposed the 2011 law that legalized gaming in the Bay State. She also lent her name to the unsuccessful effort to repeal it in 2014. At that time she declared, “It’s a tough call to make. People need jobs, but gambling can also be a real problem economically for a lot of people. I didn’t support gambling the first time around and I don’t expect to support it now.”
During the years that Genting money supported the Mashpee tribal government, paying it $500 million that backed by the 40 percent of casino revenue the tribe promised to pay—some of that money went into tribal leaders’ pockets. The first chairman to lead the tribe in an effort to get a casino was Glenn Marshall, who was sent to prison for fraud and embezzlement. He was succeeded by Cromwell.
Graham writes: “The ironies for Senator Warren are impossible to overlook: An avowed opponent of predatory businesses, Warren is pushing a casino in a distressed, low-income section of Massachusetts. A warrior against big business, she’s helping a billion-dollar company seal a massive deal and recover hundreds of millions in potential losses. And an advocate for transparency and oversight, she’s aiding a tribal government rife with mismanagement and accusations of corruption.”
Now some supporters of the Mashpees are saying Warren’s support might hurt more than help. In fact, the two issues seem to feed off each other. When Warren has a problem with her Indian heritage, it reflects on the Mashpees. When the Mashpees’ financial issues are in the new, Warren’s presidential campaign gets phone calls for comments.
Meanwhile the federal judge in the lawsuit filed by the Mashpee Wampanoag against the Department of the Interior has given the department until February 20 to respond to the lawsuit, which was filed in September 2018. Its original deadline was January 30.
In asking for an extension the department cited the residual effects of the partial government shutdown in January.
The tribe challenged the department’s rescinding of its 2015 decision to put 321 acres in Taunton and on Martha’s Vineyard into trust. That decision had been challenged in federal court, which ordered the department to rethink its original action due to it conflicting with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Carcieri v. Salazar.
The judge said the department needed to rethink its rationale for putting the land into trust. Eventually it decided that it couldn’t justify it in light of the Carcieri decision, which says that a tribe must have been under federal jurisdiction since 1934 to be able to put land into trust. The tribe was recognized by DOI in 2007.
Now the tribe is challenging the department’s take back of its earlier action.
