Every time the Maine Indian Tribal-State Commission meets, four seats at the table are empty.
Formed in 1980, the board is supposed to report to the Legislature on state-tribal affairs and provide feedback on issues that concern the Wabanaki Nations. It is also charged with regulating fishing in certain waters and approving additions to reservations.
Gov. Janet Mills, who controls six of the 13 seats, vowed on the campaign trail to restore the commission, which she said had been “too long neglected” under her predecessor, former Gov. Paul LePage.
Per Maine law, nine members must be present for the board to vote or conduct formal business. By the end of LePage’s second term, he had failed to replace nearly all of the state commissioners after they retired, leaving the group without a quorum and unable to act.
In addition to the governor’s seats, three of the tribes control six seats and a chairperson is elected to the 13th by the other members.
“I will work to enhance the Commission’s authority and responsibilities, making that body a forum for real communication and real problem solving and dispute resolution,” Mills wrote on her 2018 campaign website.
And at first, she made good on that pledge.
In her first six months in office, Mills filled all of the state’s seats, and the Passamaquoddy Tribe, Penobscot Nation and Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians each had two representatives on the board.
But for years, the commission has struggled to find its place in state government. Insiders describe it as hobbled by structural limitations; outside observers call it “dysfunctional.”
And with a year and a half until Mills leaves the Blaine House, most of the state’s seats are vacant again. With exactly nine sitting members, the commission is teetering on the verge of stalling out, and the governor’s staff is tight-lipped on whether she will fill those seats — while others question whether the board is relevant at all anymore.
READY TO DO THE WORK
The commission is reevaluating, for the first time in nearly 30 years, fishing regulations governing several streams, lakes and ponds that sit mostly on reservation lands.
Members say they are ready to see the group sharpen its focus on the broader work it was created to perform.
“We are looking for someone willing to do work,” said Osihkiyol “Zeke” Crofton-Macdonald, the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians tribal ambassador and representative on the board.
The vacancies are the largest challenge facing the commission, according to a June 6 report delivered by Executive Director Jill Tompkins. It did not have enough members present to conduct official business at four meetings in the last 13 months.
In 2023, when five of six state seats were empty, several commissioners pushed lawmakers to pass a bill that would allow it to function despite those vacancies, as long as at least seven members were present.
But the Judiciary Committee removed that provision after Mills’ chief legal counsel, Jerry Reid, urged them to do so.
The governor submitted three new nominations to the Maine Senate for approval in March 2024.
In an unusual public confrontation, Tompkins and chairperson Newell Lewey, who is Passamaquoddy, penned a letter to the Judiciary Committee alleging that the nominees were biased with “obvious opposition” to tribal interests.
Letter from Maine Tribal Relations Board by Maine Trust For Local News
Mills, in response, withdrew two of the nominations. But in a scathing shot back, the governor called Newey and Tompkin’s incursion “inappropriate and unprecedented,” and said they had poisoned the commission’s neutrality, according to letters she sent to the House speaker and Senate president.
Mills’ third nominee, former state fisheries resources manager Gordon Kramer, was confirmed.
In response to questions from the Press Herald about plans to fill the remaining vacancies, a Mills spokesman emphasized the governor’s 10 nominations — six in 2019, one in 2021 and the three in 2024.
“There is no timeframe for additional nominations at this point,” spokesman Anthony Ronzio wrote in an email.
AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE
Even after Mills’ campaign commitment to restore the state-tribal commission to relevance and before her 2024 spat with its leaders, the board was not poised to succeed, insiders say.
It is a product of the 1980 state law that implemented the Maine Indian Land Claims Settlement Act passed by Congress the same year. And it was supposed to function as a big-picture think tank that kept tabs on the settlement and implementing acts. The state has used those laws to subject tribes in Maine to a unique statutory framework that prevents them from exercising the rights of self-governance that accompany federal recognition for the other 570 federally recognized tribes.
“As a practical matter, these calls for fast replies to the Legislature did not suit a very light institution with meetings held only quarterly and a staff of only one or two,” attorney Robert Checkoway, who sits on the board and was first appointed by Mills in 2019, wrote in an email to the Press Herald. “We could hardly be expected to react to much of anything in the legislative timetable of mere days when Commission bylaws require seven days’ notice even for emergency action, much less the kind of long, slow development ordinarily needed to reach a consensus on difficult topics.”
The commission’s larger struggle is a decades-long identity crisis.
Lewey, the chairperson, still wants the state to fill its seats because the diversity in perspectives is valuable.
“What’re we looking for in state commissioners? We’re looking for state commissioners,” he said in an interview.
James Cote, a natural resources consultant and lobbyist, was appointed to the board by the governor in 2019. He opted not to seek reappointment in 2022.
“It felt like a rudderless ship at some points in time,” he said.
His mandate from Mills had been vague.
“Think critically, and think about everybody in the state,” Cote recalled the governor saying.
But he found that many of his fellow commissioners were looking to a future in which the unique restrictions of the law they had been charged with reviewing no longer existed.
It was as if everybody had showed up wearing the same jersey. But it wasn’t clear they were playing the same game.
“Anything we do that is under the 1980 settlement act is in fact submitting to that act,” said former Penobscot Nation Chief Barry Dana.
With the formation in 2020 of the Wabanki Alliance, a nonprofit with the explicit goal of securing recognition of tribal sovereignty — and which has become a key player in tribal legislative issues since then — the state-tribal board has, to some degree, lost its market.
The commission’s structure gives Maine and the combined Wabanaki Nations an equal number of representatives. That is inherently unfair, according to Dana, given that any one tribe is a minority at the table.
“You’re only sovereign if you act it,” he said.
Reuben M. Schafir is a Report for America corps member who writes about Indigenous communities for the Portland Press Herald.
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