Blood Relations Maine’s Indians ponder loosening rules for tribal membership

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A foot of snow has covered most of the smaller headstones in the Penobscot Indian Nation’s New Cemetery on Indian Island. With temperatures in the single digits this recent day, visitors are nowhere in sight at the sprawling burial ground – one of three on the island reservation north of Old Town.

No visitors except for Crystal Treadwell.

“I can’t wait to tell my mom about the new stone,” says Treadwell, brushing snow from the chiseled name of her great-grandfather Peter Almon Paul, whose neatly kept marker, flanked by a birdbath and wind chimes, stands under a tree in a corner of the cemetery.

The 30-year-old Hermon woman isn’t a member of the tribe, and was admittedly a little nervous about resuming the search for her ancestors on the island, where records show her mother was baptized and her grandfather lived for decades before moving his family to Dexter in the mid-1940s.

For Treadwell and others like her, such ties have been no guarantee of tribal membership, qualifications for which vary by tribe but generally require a 25 percent “blood quantum,” the government-sanctioned measure of the degree to which someone is an American Indian.

But faced with stagnant census rolls and a rapid dilution of Indian blood as more and more members marry non-Indians, smaller tribes such as those in Maine are revisiting their membership conditions.

Most recently, the Passamaquoddy Joint Tribal Council voted to rewrite the Washington County tribe’s laws to consider anyone on its 1980 Census a full-blooded Indian.The change – set to be reviewed by the council next week – has concerned some of the tribe’s more traditional members because it essentially boosts blood-quantum levels across the board, thus allowing into the tribe people previously considered ineligible.

For instance, people considered one-eighth Passamaquoddy – and unqualified for membership under the old rules – are likely to have their blood quantum raised to the required 25 percent, or more, under the new system.Back on Indian Island, the Penobscots recently relaxed a strict mandate that essentially reserved membership to those on the tribe’s 1980 roll and their direct descendants with at least 25 percent Indian blood.The new rules allow the tribe to consider earlier Penobscot ancestry, according to Chief Barry Dana, who advocated the change to open membership opportunities to those who have enough Penobscot blood but perhaps no direct ties to the existing tribe.

“Regardless of one’s perception, they may be as much Penobscot as I am. Some of them are even more Penobscot,” Dana said.

For Treadwell, whose grandfather died before the 1980 Census, the new standards could mean another chance at membership, a status that carries with it some educational, medical and tax benefits. The chance to apply for scholarships aimed at American Indians interests the aspiring law school student. But Treadwell, a paralegal, said her efforts to join the tribe were rooted more in her family’s wishes to affirm its heritage.

“I’d guess I’d just like to know which world we belong in,” she said.

A second chance

It has been almost five years since Treadwell and her family were told they didn’t belong with the Penobscot.

At that time, Treadwell, her three siblings and their 58-year-old mother, Frances Smith, petitioned the tribe to “adopt” them, an alternate path to membership that didn’t require strict ties to the 1980 Census.

No one denied their Indian heritage, bolstered by stacks of genealogical and baptismal records. Even the fact that their Maliseet roots earned them membership in Kingsclear First Nation, a New Brunswick tribe, was not listed among the reasons for denial.

Indeed, records state the family was rejected because it had no “social or economic ties” to the tribe, an additional requirement for adoption. The rejection, while it stung, is in the past, Treadwell said before mustering the courage to walk into the tribal offices to pick up another three-page membership application.

It was just moments before her awkward visit to the census office that Treadwell’s connection to the island seemed more real.

“Hey, can I help you find anybody?” yelled Joseph Loring, the cemetery’s caretaker, waving at Treadwell as she walked among the headstones.

Treadwell waited until Loring drew closer before offering a brief synopsis of her link to the island. The conversation quickly led to the two swapping stories about the man Loring called “Uncle Gussie,” a reference to Treadwell’s grandfather George Augustus Paul.

“See there,” a smiling Loring said before climbing into his truck and driving away. “Come to the island and you’ll meet a cousin.”

But distant family ties such as those that bind Treadwell and Loring don’t necessarily translate into membership, and the answer to the question “Who is an Indian?” is often more complex.

“I don’t know that I really care about that question or the answer,” said Mike Dolson, a member of Montana’s Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribe, which last month overwhelmingly rejected a try to remove its blood-quantum restriction. “But I do care about my tribe, and ‘Indian’ is just a label attached to it a long time ago, and not by us.”

For Dolson, a college instructor who supported the change, removing the restriction was a way to unite tribal families on the tribe’s Flathead reservation whose younger generations were ineligible for membership because their blood was considered “too thin.”

Unifying Passamaquoddy families was also a major force behind the Maine tribe’s recent effort to enroll more descendants of its 1980 members.

“We weren’t being fair about it,” said John Stevens, a 70-year-old Passamaquoddy tribal council member from Indian Township, noting that younger members – many of whom fell below the 25 percent blood quantum – are already allowed to live on the reservations with their parents or other family members.

“They are from here. They go through the same crap we do, so we might as well make them part of it,” he said.

Blood or tradition?

Jodi Socobasin was part of the 3,300-member Passamaquoddy Tribe. But not for long.

Socobasin, now 27, was removed from the rolls at age 6 when her grandfather’s ancestry could not be confirmed.

During a break between classes at Washington County Community College in Calais on Thursday, the mother of two applauded the Joint Tribal Council’s decision.

“It’s good for our tribe in that it keeps the bloodline going,” said Socobasin, who, because she appeared on the 1980 Census as a child, would be considered a full-blooded Passamaquoddy under the new rules.

Her children, Dakota, 8, and Taylor, 7 – once excluded from the tribe – also could become members, each with a 50 percent blood quantum.

By and large, attempts to change a tribe’s membership rules do not go unchallenged.

On the two Passamaquoddy reservations, the Joint Tribal Council’s vote quickly sparked a petition to reverse the decision, with several tribal members saying a change of such magnitude should go out to a popular vote.

Socobasin, who has returned to live on the Indian Township reservation after decades away, said she understands the opposition.

“I mean, how can you put blood into somebody that doesn’t have it?” she said. “I can relate to the other side.”

About 25 miles south of Calais at the tribe’s Pleasant Point reservation Thursday, Passamaquoddy elder Joseph “Cozy” Nicholas remained skeptical about the need to change the rules.

“How are we going to identify ourselves as Indian?” Nicholas, 78, wondered about the effect of using the 1980 Census as a starting point for the bloodline rather than 1900, the tribe’s previous benchmark. “Are they going to change the rules again in five years?”

Like Nicholas, 87-year-old David Francis, the tribe’s linguist, signed the petition to overturn the council’s decision.

Sitting amid grainy black-and-white photographs of his ancestors hanging in the tribe’s Waponahki Museum, Francis bemoaned the fact that so few members knew the tribe’s traditional tongue and so many had married outside the tribe.

Both, he said, could threaten the tribe’s survival.

“It’s only been about 25 years [since the Maine Indian Claims Settlement] and we’re already in trouble,” he said.

Changing the rules

Considered sovereign nations, tribes make their own membership rules.

Some of the 562 federally recognized tribes require members to live on the reservation. Others require adherence to traditional Indian ways.

Blood-quantum requirements, if they exist, range from one-thirty-second among some smaller tribes to one-half in larger ones, according to the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

But almost invariably, if a conflict exists concerning these membership rules, it centers on blood.

Some opponents of the blood-quantum requirements believe they were placed upon the tribes by the federal government in the 1930s to breed Indians out of existence. For others, the bloodline is an important part of preserving the race.

“At some point you have to bring in hard-core science and take emotions out of the picture,” said Penobscot Chief Dana, who favors the blood measure. “It could be that, in their heart, someone is 100 percent Indian, but that doesn’t do much for the bloodline.”

Some tribes – particularly those with successful casinos – often impose strict blood-quantum requirements to protect themselves from those who simply hope to realize an economic windfall, according to Melissa Meyer, an associate professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The stakes aren’t as high for the Maine tribes, which last November were denied a potentially lucrative casino deal in the southern part of the state.

“I’m sure we would have had a lot more [applications] had it passed,” Dana said.

Smaller tribes such as Dana’s 2,200-member Penobscot Nation often have to debate the blood-quantum issue sooner rather than later as populations on reservations level off and marriages within the tribe become rarer.

“There are subtle hopes [that people will marry within the tribe], but a realistic acceptance that it’s difficult,” said Dana, who himself married outside the tribe.

Meyer said tribes would be well-served to abandon what she sees as a racist burden imposed only on Indians and no other ethnic group.

“This is not the way tribes historically determined their membership,” said Meyer, noting that living among a tribe and adherence to tribal ways often played larger roles in determining who belonged. “The lines were not hard and fast.”

Considering the ramifications for the Passamaquoddy Tribe, Joseph Socobasin, Jodi’s uncle and Indian Township’s lieutenant governor, said he, too, favors changing the blood-quantum requirement. But eventually, he said, it must go altogether.

“We have to change something,” he said, noting that the average Passamaquoddy now has only 37 percent Indian blood. “If we leave things the way they are, we’ll eventually just fade out.”