The plaintiffs of Littlefield v. U.S. Department of Interior, which challenges the right of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe of Massachusetts to put land into trust in Taunton have requested a change of venue for the lawsuit, back to Massachusetts. It is currently in a Washington D.C. based court, where the judge is U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary M. Collyer.
The move by the attorneys for lead plaintiff Michelle Littlefield of East Taunton is the latest in a lawsuit that Littlefield and her group of 25 residents have so far successfully conducted. They seek to prevent the tribe from putting land into trust, and more to the point from their perspective, to keep it from building and operating a casino.
One of the attorneys, David Tennant, explained that the motion would have been filed weeks earlier if it hadn’t been derailed by the month-long partial government shutdown.
Littlefield’s group first filed suit in 2015, shortly after the Bureau of Indian Affairs put the 151 acres in Taunton and 170 acres Martha’s Vineyard into trust. In 2016 a federal judge ruled in their favor, writing that the tribe had violated a 2009 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, Carcieri v. Salazar that prevents tribes that were not under jurisdiction of the federal government in 1934—the year when Congress adopted the Indian Reorganization Act—from putting land into trust. The tribe was granted federal recognition in 2007.
Boston U.S. District Court Judge William Young remanded the case back to the Department of the Interior and ordered it to reconsider how it might put the land into trust without violating Carcieri. The department was unable to find a way to do that and so withdrew the land from trust. The department didn’t buy the tribe’s argument that the state of Massachusetts had served a surrogate role for the federal government. The tribe maintained a long association with first the colony and then state that began when the tribe is said to have greeted the Pilgrims when they landed at Plymouth in 1620.
The Mashpee Tribe has sued DOI to seek to reverse that decision, and at the same time that Littlefield and her fellow plaintiffs filed for a change of venue they also filed to “intervene” in that case, since it concerns them. If their motion is granted they would become “intervener-defendants, aligned with the Department of the Interior.
Tennant’s motion argues that the separate cases are concerned with a “narrow legal question” of whether the tribe was under federal jurisdiction in 1934. He wrote, “The Littlefield action challenging Interior’s September 2015 decision, and the tribe’s present action challenging Interior’s September 2018 decision, represent two sides of the same coin.”
Tennant hopes the case will be transferred back Massachusetts and to Judge Young’s court. The tribe opposes that, arguing that the cases differ, and in its suit against the department, claims that it “failed to apply established law” by “contorting relevant facts and ignoring others to engineer a negative decision.”
The tribe argues the DOI “indefensibly reverses course” from decisions that it had made in previous cases and ignored case law. The motion resubmits the same evidence that the tribe originally submitted to DOI to support its claim that it was under federal jurisdiction in 1934.
Meanwhile the tribe’s hopes for putting the land into trust rest on the single thread of a bill in Congress that would circumvent the Interior Department and put the land into trust.
This would allow the tribe to go forward with its $1 billion casino resort, the Casino First Light, in partnership with the Genting Malaysia Group. Genting previously loaned the tribe $400 million, which helped fund tribal government functions for several years. Genting recently revealed in a public filing that it has written off the loan.
The bill was filed in the House by Rep. William Keating.
