INDIAN ISLAND – Indian tribes across the country pledged their support Thursday for two Maine tribes in their fight over water quality regulation.

Members of the National Congress of American Indians, meeting in St. Paul, Minn., passed an unprecedented resolution supporting the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy tribes in their legal wrangling with three paper companies and the state.

The tribes’ governors faced jail time earlier this week for not giving the paper companies documents they sought under the state freedom of access law. Rather than sit in jail, the tribal governors appealed the judge’s contempt of court ruling to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court.

The NCAI resolution was announced during a press conference in St. Paul, which Penobscot Nation Gov. Barry Dana joined by telephone from the tribal offices on Indian Island. About half the country’s 558 federally recognized Indian tribes belong to the congress. Representatives of many of them packed the auditorium floor to sign the resolution.

“If you attack one of us, you attack all of us,” said Susan Matsen, NCAI president. “We will not stand by and see our brothers go to jail” for protecting the rights of their people and for protecting the earth from desecration, she said.

Alma Ransom, chief of the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe and the northeastern area vice president who represents the Maine tribes at the congress, said she and other members of her tribe who attended the court proceedings in Auburn last week were prepared to go to jail with the governors.

“I believe time was set back in that court,” she said, urging the Maine tribes not to quit the fight.

Rick Doyle, governor of the Passamaquoddy Tribe at Pleasant Point, who attended the Minnesota meeting, said his people simply want to fish and swim in tribal waters without worrying about dioxin and other dangerous pollutants.

“My crime was I was standing up for my people,” he said. “I was saying no to the paper companies.”

As part of an ongoing battle over whether the state or federal government should regulate quality in waters around Indian lands, three paper companies asked the tribes to turn over documents related to this issue. The tribes refused, saying that as sovereign entities they are not subject to the access law. In addition, their lawyers argued, water quality is an internal tribal matter.

The judge disagreed and sentenced Dana, Doyle and Richard Stevens, the Passamaquoddy governor at Indian Township, to jail until they turned over the documents or appealed his decision.

The tribes filed an appeal Monday.

The fight came about because, last year, the state Department of Environmental Protection applied to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for authority to issue federal permits to companies that dump treated wastewater in Maine waters. To streamline the permitting process, 44 states have been granted such authority.

The Passamaquoddy and Penobscot tribes contested the state’s application and asked that the federal government retain permitting authority over waters in tribal lands because they believe state officials are too beholden to paper companies.

The EPA is months overdue in issuing a decision.

After hearing of the proclamation, Dana said the support of fellow tribes was “empowering.” The time had come for the Penobscots, and all Maine people, to become more vocal in their efforts to clean up the state’s environment, he said.

“If we are too quiet, if we are in the great hope that others will do it for us, we are going to lose,” he said.

But, he added, when some tribal members talk of attacking the state, they mean it literally. “There are people right now who would like to fight it, not with computers, physically. We’re holding them back.”

He said the judge’s jail sentence was severe and unprecedented. “When you do that to Indian people, they tend to get a little fiesty.”