AUGUSTA — An environmentalist who accuses Maine of harming the endangered right whale compared the state’s treatment of the mammal Friday to the near annihilation of the American Indian.

“The Maine people have not only killed off the American Indians that were living in Maine, but now they have driven the right whales off the coastline so they will be driven into extinction,” Max Strahan, a Massachusetts resident who calls himself the “Prince of Whales,” said.

Strahan was responding to Gov. Angus King’s promise to “vigorously oppose” a lawsuit the environmentalist has threatened to bring against Maine.

Earlier this month, Strahan told the Bangor Daily News: “Enjoy your last year of fishing.”

Strahan has won a legal victory in Massachusetts, where a federal judge ruled that that state broke the law by issuing permits to lobstermen and other fishermen who use nets and lines known to have killed the whales.

King has said there is no evidence to prove Maine’s lobster and gill-net fishing industries are responsible for the right whale’s failure to flourish.

The governor said of the more than 10,000 recorded sightings of these whales over the past 25 years, less than a dozen have been in Maine waters. Strahan says that’s because the state’s fishing industry as well as boats and pollution have driven the whales away from the coastline, where they breed and nurse their young.

Federal law is broken even if “the whale is harassed, even if the whale is annoyed in its behavior, even if a boat separates a mother from its calf,” Strahan said.

Strahan said there are only about 220 of the whales remaining, and they’re dying at the rate of eight a year. He said he was being forced to file a lawsuit as a last alternative after attempts to discuss the issue with Maine officials failed.

King has promised to stand by Maine’s fishing industry.

“We will work with the men and women of the Maine lobster and gill-net fisheries to make sure that everything we can reasonably do to protect these whales is done,” King said. “But we will not accept threats to the future of Maine’s fisheries that are without merit.”