tribeOf all the issues that divide Gov. Janet Mills from most members of her own Democratic Party, none is more vexing, or seemingly inexplicable, than her dogged opposition to any substantive alteration of the Land Claims Settlement Act governing Maine’s relationship with its Indian tribes.

The 1980 law has had vast and invidious consequences far beyond anything that could had been foreseen at the time. Over more than four decades, Congress has passed literally scores of laws benefiting all tribes elsewhere in the nations, some 570 — but not Maine’s.

A study commissioned before the current session shows just how damaging this has been. While tribes elsewhere have shown improvement in incomes and well-being above the national average, Maine tribes’ fortunes have stagnated, denied significant federal funding for health care, education, and environmental protection.

It would be one thing if it cost Maine taxpayers something to relinquish the state’s unique sovereignty over the tribes, but it wouldn’t. Yet Mills’s position is that the tribes must ask her to bargain over each law, one by one, for any change to take place.

Surely it should be the opposite. Unless the administration can show that, somehow, granting federal access would be a problem, it should be provided. The burden of proof should lie with the state.

That was in essence the finding of the first legislative commission formed in 2019, with fanfare and hope, but wiped out when the pandemic shut down legislative proceedings in 2020. When the issue returned, the Legislature again proposed “full sovereignty” but finally withheld the bill in 2022 when Mills said she would veto it.

To be sure, there are some problems with “full sovereignty.” As legal scholars have pointed out, the Land Claims Settlement Act allowed tribes to purchase land anywhere they could find willing sellers — very different from most tribes, which have contiguous reservations to which they were consigned in the 19th century.

It wouldn’t be practical, for instance, for tribes to exercise police powers on each small tract. But that’s no impediment to applying most of the federal laws in question.

On May 31, in one of the last bills introduced this session, House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross and House Republican Leader Billy Bob Faulkingham collaborated on L.D. 2004, which would achieve most of the tribes’ goals but defers ultimate sovereignty questions.

It meets most of Mills’s stated objections, carving out both court jurisdiction and the perennial bugbear of gambling.

The latter issue was pretty much settled when, in a rare statesmanlike act, Mills offered the tribes exclusive access to online gaming proceeds.

This does nothing to redeem the shameful episode in 2003 when fierce lobbying defeated a tribal casino proposal in Kittery — the logical place for one — while letting a “racino” plan in Bangor proposed by out-of-staters slip through unopposed. The “racino” later became a full-fledged casino after voters narrowly approved a casino in Oxford in 2010.

Every other tribe in the U.S. can open a casino without state approval, but that’s not an issue Maine will probably ever set right, and the online gaming monopoly is at least rough justice.

Was Mills impressed by the new bill? She was not. Within hours, she issued a statement of blanket opposition, all but promising a veto.

What, one must ask, can she reasonably want?

In the previous session, she did accept amending the Land Claims Act in a small way.

The Passamaquoddy Tribe at Pleasant Point shares a decrepit water system with neighboring municipalities, and could accept federal funding only by modifying the act. True, Mills conceded only when it seemed certain a veto would be overridden, but it did happen.

The governor no doubt thinks hers is principled opposition, but to most of those in her party, and to some Republicans too, it looks like stubbornness.

It’s no secret things aren’t going well upstairs on the State House’s third floor. There’s still no Highway Fund budget as of this writing, and the big supplemental budget is nowhere in sight.

The Appropriations Committee has canceled work session after work session, and the predicted adjournment date of June 21 is looking extremely tenuous.

There could always be a magical Juneteenth weekend breakthrough, where the four key party leaders emerge from the governor’s office agreeing, if not exactly smiling.

But chances would be better if Mills could give a little ground, somewhere, and acknowledge that the Legislature, where she once served, is a co-equal branch in more than name.

The tribal bill wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

 

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