The Washington Times has obtained a letter that shows that last July Rhode Island Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed threatened to block the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe Reservation Reaffirmation Act which was being pushed by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, where the Mashpee tribe is based.
What is unusual about this is that Whitehouse, Reed and Warren are all Democrats. Apparently, Reed and Whitehouse opposed the bill because they fear that if the Mashpees’ lands are put into trust, a Rhode Island tribe, the Narragansett Tribe, will demand the same thing next. Not long after this letter was written, the bill failed to move forward despite bipartisan support.
The bill if passed would allow the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe to put into trust more than 321 acres in the city of Taunton and on Martha’s Vineyard. This would make possible the long sought $1 billion Casino First Light the tribe has partnered with the Genting group to build.
In the letter to Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer they wrote: “We respectfully request that this legislation not advance to the Senate floor for consideration. We will be obliged to use all avenues to block this legislation if there is an attempt to move it.” They added, “As a result, federally recognized tribes in Rhode Island would argue that they hold the same standing as the Massachusetts tribe and request that similar legislation be introduced on their behalf.”
The bill is now active again, this time in the House of Representatives where Bay State Reps. William Keating and Joe Kennedy III reintroduced it as H.R.312. A companion bill has not yet been introduced in the young legislative session.
The bill would overrule a federal court judge who ruled in 2016 that the Department of the Interior could not put the land into trust for the tribe because of the 2009 Carcieri v. Salazar ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that tribes not under federal jurisdiction in 1934 can’t put land into trust. That ruling specifically concerned the Narragansett Tribe
Writing the majority in that ruling, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote, “We hold that the term ‘now under federal jurisdiction’ . . . unambiguously refers to those tribes that were under the federal jurisdiction of the United States when the IRA was enacted in 1934,” adding “None of the parties or amici, including the Narragansett Tribe itself, has argued that the tribe was under federal jurisdiction in 1934.”
The Mashpee tribe achieved federal recognition in 2007, but claims it can trace its history back to 1620 when its ancestors greeted the Pilgrims when they landed at Plymouth.
Last year Rep. Ruben Gallego, who was then chairman of the House Subcommittee on Indian, Insular and Alaska Native Affairs, declared “Until we finally pass a Carcieri fix, we will have to continue addressing this issue on a tribe-by-tribe basis.”
