This commentary is by Lianna Constantino, a Cherokee Nation citizen from Oklahoma who now lives in Cherokee, North Carolina. She is co-founder and director of the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds, an organization consisting of federally recognized tribal members from the United States, First Nations citizens from Canada, and their allies.
George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” How that resonates today. American Indian voices continually being removed or replaced has been the history of the United States.
The University of Vermont held to the institution’s high standards by hosting the event Beyond Borders: Unheard Abenaki Voices from the Odanak First Nation. For numerous years, the CPAIN (Corporations Posing as Indian Nations) organizations that have recently become “state recognized tribes” have had their voices and fraudulent stories heard throughout Vermont to the total exclusion of actual Abenaki peoples.
The promotion of these fraudulent stories to the unsuspecting citizens of Vermont, who have had good intentions in regard to righting the wrongs of the past in regard to Vermont’s historical Indian communities, is exactly the environment that has allowed these four fraudulent CPAIN organizations to thrive.
Speaking out was no easy feat for the Abenaki speakers, and at numerous times during the program, their emotions displayed that fact. They not only relived the intergenerational grief and trauma of what had been perpetrated upon them during colonial times but also the last 40-plus years these CPAIN organizations have lied to and used them to appropriate their culture and history solely to dupe the state of Vermont and exploit monetary programs reserved for actual Indians.
The actual genealogy of the individuals who comprise the four CPAIN organizations — the Abenaki Nation at Missisquoi, the Nulhegan Abenaki Tribe, the Koasek Traditional Band of the Koas Abenaki Nation, and the Elnu Abenaki Tribe — has been done, and there are no Abenaki ancestors in their family lines. These organizations’ popular argument for why they are unable to prove their Abenaki ancestry has been that their ancestors hid their “Abenaki” identity and lived like everyone else.
This has been clearly stated in the state of Vermont’s response to Petition for Federal Acknowledgement of the St. Francis/Sokoki Band of the Abenaki Nation of Vermont, December 2002, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs summary under the Criteria and Evidence for Final Determination against Federal Acknowledgment of the St. Francis/Sokoki Band of Abenakis of VT, June 22, 2007.
These documents all stated that the Abenaki of Vermont were forced to relocate to the Saint Francis River area, Quebec, and the petitioning group had no Abenaki ancestry and didn’t socialize with each other until the 1970s.
The St. Francis/Sokoki Band of Abenaki Nation of Vermont is the name that the current Abenaki Nation at Missisquoi went by in 2007 when it applied for federal recognition through the Bureau of Indian Affairs Office of Federal Acknowledgement and was denied recognition as an American Indian Tribe. After this denial, the CPAIN groups focused on “state recognition.”
The criteria that they failed to prove, which can be read in their report and Press Release letter on the Bureau of Indian Affairs website, was 83.7(a), 83.7(b), 83.7(c) and 83.7(e) which is the most important criteria of having actual Abenaki ancestry, “Criterion 83.7(e) requires that a petitioner’s members descend from a historical Indian tribe. The available evidence demonstrated that only 8 of the petitioner’s 1,171 members, less than 1 percent, demonstrated descent from an Indian ancestor who once belonged to the historical Missisquoi Abenaki Indian tribe. The available evidence does not show that these eight individuals associated with the petitioner before the 1990s.”
Those eight individuals of actual Abenaki ancestry were from the Odanak Abenaki Community and were being used by the “Missisquoi” group to make them appear legitimate. This fact was spoken about during the UVM presentation by Mali Obomsawin, whose father was one of the actual Odanak Abenaki people used by the group.
As the speakers pointed out, there was no reason to hide because real Abenaki people were well known and outwardly present due to their popularity in Vermont because of their beautiful baskets they made. They didn’t create the border between the U.S. and Canada, nor did it stop them from traveling between Odanak and Vermont.
They have always been the Abenaki people who never ceded their land. There is no such thing as the American Abenaki or Canadian Abenaki. There has only been the Abenaki, of which there are only two distinct communities, at Odanak and Wolinak, with a few Abenaki families absorbed into the federally recognized St. Regis Mohawk Tribe of Akwesasne and the federally recognized tribes currently in the state of Maine.
How does any group that self-identified as white and live the life of a white person claim they have suffered the traumas that the real Abenaki or any other tribal nation have suffered? How can they claim they suffered, as American Indian people, the eugenics that were done to certain classes of Vermont citizens?
Thank you to everyone at the University of Vermont who gave the actual Abenaki people a platform where they could express their voices and make public the damage that these four fraudulent CPAIN groups have brought to the state of Vermont and its citizens. May we never forget the true Abenaki people or allow for the continued erasure and repeated genocide of American Indian people.