This commentary is by David Massell. He has been a member of UVM’s history department since 1997. He is director of UVM’s Canadian Studies Program and member of the Environmental Program. His research and courses explore Canadian-American history, environmental history and Native-Newcomer relations.
Two years ago, I welcomed a delegation of Abenaki citizens from Odanak First Nation in Quebec to a conference at the University of Vermont. For doing so, I was accused of engaging in a conspiracy with Hydro-Québec. That lie may be more exciting than the truth. But the truth should be more troubling to Vermonters.
Peer review is the process by which scholars assess and validate each other’s work prior to publication. It is a standard obligation of university faculty. In 2021, I was asked to review a manuscript titled “State Recognition and the Dangers of Race-Shifting: The Case of Vermont.” Later I learned that the author was a Canadian sociologist named Darryl Leroux.
Tapping Quebec’s vast, genealogical database of baptisms, burials and marriages, Leroux demonstrated that Vermonters of the four state-recognized “tribes,” who claim to be Abenaki, are in fact of French-Canadian and/or other European descent. Almost none have Abenaki ancestry.
How could this be? Vermont governors, legislators, conservationists and educators have long proclaimed their support for Vermont’s “Abenaki.” Vermont’s Legislature has granted hunting and fishing licenses and property tax relief. It even created a truth and reconciliation commission to study compensating the alleged harms done. Like my colleagues, I had invited members of the “Abenaki” leadership to share their experience with students as Vermont’s First People.
Could I have made a mistake?
Joining with other scholars at and beyond UVM, we began a deep dive into the historical record, which led to the organization of three public forums. We invited the Abenaki of Odanak, who were excluded from Vermont’s state-recognition process, to speak their piece. We brought top Indigenous scholars to teach about “race-shifting” in which growing numbers of white people have claimed Indigenous identity on little or no basis since the 1970s.
Then last month, Leroux presented his research at a UVM forum alongside Mi’kmaq scholar and lawyer Pamela Palmater and Anishinaabe scholar and writer Gordon Henry.
Any “truth and reconciliation” process begins with truth, and the evidence is unmistakable and overwhelming. All but a few of Vermont’s state-recognized “Abenaki,” including the leadership, have no Abenaki ancestry and no continuous link to any historic North American Indian tribe. Leroux’s findings align with those of Vermont Attorney General’s study of 2003 and that of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 2005-07. Multiple recent investigations concur, including by Vermont Public, New Hampshire Public Radio and VTDigger.
Vermont’s self-identified “Abenaki” have their own creation story (of “hiding in plain sight”) but that too is groundless. No scholar has seen or shared credible evidence that Vermont’s early-20th-century eugenics campaign ever targeted Abenaki people, nor that Abenaki in Vermont were ever in hiding from persecution. In fact, the opposite is true. News reports and photographs of the late 19th and early 20th centuries show Abenaki families from Odanak First Nation making summer visits to tourist towns like Highgate Springs to sell ash baskets. The Abenaki did not hide who they were.
In embracing invented tribes, we have nearly erased from memory the state’s actual Indigenous people and their all-too-real experience of colonization. For the Abenaki, that meant waves of pandemic disease, multiple colonial wars, forced assimilation, and then coerced removal from and vast reduction of homeland. The broad swath of historic Abenaki territory has been reduced to reservations (“reserves” in Canada) totaling less than three square miles.
Allowing non-Natives to speak on behalf of Indigenous People is also to be complicit in what Indigenous scholars like Kim Tallbear describe as the most recent and insidious phase of colonization by which Euro-Americans claim the very bodies and identities of the vanquished as one “final Indian bounty.”
The Vermont legislative process to award that bounty was deeply problematic. The self-proclaimed “tribes” were not required to demonstrate Native ancestry and were placed in charge of key decisions, producing glaring conflicts of interest. Excluding the historic Abenaki nation (Odanak) from the process — in fact, failing to center the Abenaki — was a denial of the sovereign right of Indigenous people to determine their citizenship.
Vermont’s state recognition process is now cited by Indigenous scholars as the worst in the United States, in which the Legislature created a special legal status for what amount to “clubs.” Odanak First Nation has now brought their case of Indigenous identity fraud in Vermont to the United Nations.
What about the fair use of public funds? When citizens harvest benefits based on fictitious Native claims — including hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent federal grants — they take those benefits away from Indigenous people.
This is a lot to digest for Vermont citizens, including the fact that so many well-meaning Vermonters, myself included, have been misled while trying to do good. Misled as well are the members of the four “tribes” whose leaders have led them to believe that they have a right to claim Abenaki citizenship.
As a professor at the state’s flagship university, it is my job to explore the historical record with colleagues and students, regardless of what facts are revealed or how disconcerting those truths may be. Vermonters who favor Indigenous justice will take these findings seriously.
