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Thursday, December 23, 2021

'This news is so welcome': Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe can retain reservation land

 

'This news is so welcome': Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe can retain reservation land


Doug Fraser Cape Cod Times 
Published Dec 23, 2021 

MASHPEE — In a decision released late Wednesday, the U.S. Department of the Interior reversed a Trump administration order that rescinded the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe's right to 321 acres of reservation land that helped establish them as a sovereign government. Approximately 170 acres of that land in Taunton had been earmarked for the building of a casino. 

"I think it is important for people to understand that the land was still in trust. Trump tried to take it away, but this reaffirms that (it remains in trust)," said Brian Weeden, chairman of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Council. 

"I think the tribe is just really excited about the new year and this new chapter that we are headed in," Weeden said when asked to comment on the decision to restore tribal lands.

Brian Weeden

Just as the pandemic was descending upon the Cape in March 2020, shutting down life as we knew it, then-Mashpee Wampanoag chairman Cedric Cromwell learned in a phone call that then-Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt had ordered the tribe's land taken out of trust and the reservation disestablished.

At the time, Cromwell said it felt "like we've been dropped off into a new world we've never seen before" and a "direct, hardcore blow to dissolving and disestablishing the tribe."





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