Tribe leader Francis mourned Passamaquoddy governor killed in car crash on Route 9

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The Passamaquoddy tribal community at Pleasant Point prepared quietly Friday to honor and bury its leader, Gov. Melvin J. Francis, just hours after his death in a highway crash.

Tribal offices and the Pleasant Point reservation’s elementary school were closed. Roads of the reservation in Washington County were virtually empty as tribal members mourned privately.

About 50 residents of the reservation gathered at tribal headquarters for a smudging ceremony Friday morning.

Some of them then started a sacred fire as another observance.

The fire on the front lawn of the tribe’s headquarters along Route 190 will burn until Tuesday. A Mass is planned for 10 a.m. Tuesday at St. Ann’s Roman Catholic Church on the reservation, followed by burial at the tribal cemetery on the reservation’s hill.

“He was a good man,” one of his sons, Melvin Francis II, said quietly when he went to visit Gleason Cove, where his father had been building a house overlooking Passamaquoddy Bay.

The house is framed but unfinished. Another of Francis’ grown sons, Stephen Francis, also had gone to the site just hours after learning of the news.

Stephen Francis said that working on the new house had been his father’s current passion, outside of the governor’s duties.

Gov. Francis, 60, was killed instantly around 9 p.m. Thursday when his 2002 GMC pickup truck collided with an oil truck on Route 9 in Amherst in Hancock County.

He had been returning home from Indian Island in Penobscot County, where he had participated in the signing of an agreement by Venezuelan-owned Citgo Petroleum to donate heating oil to four Maine tribes this winter.

State police said Francis apparently lost control on black ice at the bottom of a hill as he traveled east. His pickup swerved head-on into the path of the empty tanker.

The truck driver, Scott Colcord, 38, of Monroe was not injured, nor was his passenger, Daren Holmes, 38, of Bucksport. Both men are employees of R.H. Foster of Hampden, which owns the truck. The truck had just delivered heating oil and was returning to its home base.

Route 9 was closed for three hours while a team of seven state troopers investigated the crash, which took place near the bridge over the Union River.

Family members were notified through the night, but most of the community learned the news early Friday.

“We are all still in shock,” Steve Francis, a brother-in-law, said barely 12 hours after the accident. “I grew up with him, practically. He would do anything for anybody.”

Community members spoke warmly of the man who had lived all of his life on the reservation, except for a few years in Presque Isle and Houlton in the 1990s.

In the 1960s, when many young people were leaving the reservation for lives elsewhere, Francis stayed, noted Calvin Nicholas, 70.

“There was much migration out, but he stayed right here,” Nicholas said. “He was very active in the community.”

He mastered the Passamaquoddy language and the tribe’s traditional dances, Nicholas and others said. He adored Indian Days every August at the reservation when tribal members take part in the festivities.

One of Melvin Francis’ grandsons, 13-year-old Joseph Francis, remembered his grandfather as he walked the reservation’s roads with three friends Friday morning.

“He taught me how to do the warrior dance,” the boy said in front of the Beatrice Rafferty School, where he is a pupil.

Francis and his wife, Carol, were parents not only of their own children but to numerous foster children.

Francis was in his last year of his four-year term as tribal governor. He had served since Oct. 1, 2002, and his term would have expired on Sept. 30.

Mark Altvater, the tribe’s lieutenant governor, automatically assumes the governor’s position on the leader’s death, according to the tribe’s constitution.

Francis also had served as governor more than a decade earlier. He had been elected to two two-year terms, starting in 1986.

In September 1990 he was elected to a four-year term after the tribe’s constitution adopted a change in term lengths. He resigned one year later because of poor health from an illness believed to have been Lyme disease.

There are 1,998 tribal members on the Pleasant Point tribal census rolls, according to the tribe’s Web site. About 600 live on the reservation.

Many Passamaquoddy who live beyond Sipayik, the Passamaquoddy name for the reservation, are coming home to mourn.

“He was an honorable man,” said one tribal member who did not want to be identified. “We have lost a friend and a great guy. It’s a big blow to the community.”