'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— In a decision released late Wednesday, the U.S. Department of the Interior reversed a Trump administration order that rescinded the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe's right to 321 acres of reservation land that helped establish them as a sovereign government.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.

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."

A series of court decisions at the state and federal level on whether the land could be put into trust and whether the Mashpee tribe qualified as a tribe placed the case back in the hands of the Interior Department for a decision.

Previously:Interior Department withdraws appeal in Mashpee tribe's land-in-trust case

The tribe gained a powerful ally when President Biden appointee U.S. Rep. Deb Haaland became the first Native American to serve as interior secretary. U.S. Rep. William Keating, D-Mass., had worked alongside Haaland during the Trump administration to help pass bills to protect Mashpee Wampanoag and other tribes' reservation lands.

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Keating said the decision Wednesday was historic in terms of avoiding what could have been "for all practical purposes, the extinction of the Tribe of the First Light, the tribe that dealt with the Pilgrims."

"This news is so welcome, so important and it strikes a blow for justice in a history marred by this country's treatment of Native Americans," Keating said. "A decision to the contrary would have perpetuated clearly what was a darker moment in our country's history."

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Keating said that without the land the Mashpee tribe would also not be able to access funds from the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill recently signed by Biden.

"There are great opportunities for the tribe to pursue much needed infrastructure funding that would have been more difficult without this decision," Keating said.   

Weeden said a decision on whether the tribe will pursue development of the casino remained up in the air.

"At this point, we're not really sure," he said. "It's wait-and-see. The tribe is going back to the drawing board."