John Sapiel, got law opposing Indians repealed, dies at 75

FALMOUTH, Mass. – A well-known Penobscot Indian who in 2004 successfully challenged a Colonial-era law that required the imprisonment of Indians who entered Boston died last weekend.

John “Sam” Sapiel, 75, died Saturday in Falmouth, a family friend confirmed in a news release.

Sapiel was raised and educated on the Penobscot Indian reservation on Indian Island in Old Town, Maine. In the early 1980s he lived on Cape Cod and worked for Harwich Concrete Block and later as a security guard at the Woods Hole, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket Steamship Authority until his retirement in 2004, according to the release.

It was on July 8, 2004, during a press conference in his Falmouth living room, that Sapiel called on the Legislature to repeal the statute, which dated from the 17th century, according to the Times archive. The statute read in part that any Indian “not be suffered to Lodge in Town, unless in Prison.”

In a 2005 interview with the Bangor Daily News, Sapiel said the law made him angry when he first heard about it while he was working with a group of Indian tribes in 1996 to protect tribal burial grounds on the Boston Harbor Islands.

“When I’m in Boston I just feel that I have to be careful about what I do and say,” Sapiel told then-Bangor Daily News columnist Tom Weber. “It’s definitely a creepy feeling because I’m a full-blood.”

The 2004 Democratic National Convention was scheduled to be held in Boston, and Sapiel believed it was symbolically important for the state to take the law off the books given the number of American Indian delegates that would attend, the Times archive said.