Chief Brenda Gagne of the St. Francis/Sokoki Band of Missisquoi Abenaki, listens as the Abenaki Circle of Courage, comprised of Franklin County middle and high school students, beat a drum while singing in a circle during a Vermont Truth and Reconciliation Commission event in Montpelier on Friday, October 11. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
As Vermont’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission — the panel tasked with studying the historic impacts of racism, discrimination and eugenics on state laws — enters a new phase of its work, it’s facing criticism from Abenaki leaders over who is being included in that work.
Last week, the commission held an event on the steps of the Statehouse in Montpelier to mark the release of its strategic plan. It was the panel’s first major public event. The document outlines the scope of the commission members’ work and lays out a timeline, culminating in a final report expected sometime in mid-2027.
The event opened with a drum circle featuring youth from the Abenaki Circle of Courage, an afterschool program associated with the Abenaki Nation at Missisquoi, one of four groups that has been recognized as Native American by the state of Vermont, though not by the federal government. Brenda Gagne, chief of the Missisquoi group and the leader of the Circle of Courage program, also spoke.
“We’re happy to be here today,” Gagne said, but “not happy of why it brings us here, and what’s happened in the history of Vermont to our people and people of color.”
The launch also featured about a dozen other speakers, many of whom represented other communities that the commission expects to be part of its work and who said they were excited the commission could soon start gathering testimony from the public.
“We exist in pursuit of community-centered justice and holistic healing that prioritize impacted Act 128 communities,” the report’s mission statement reads, referring to the demographic groups outlined in the 2022 state law that stood up the commission.
Those include people “who identify as Native American or Indigenous,” people with “physical, psychiatric or mental conditions or disabilities,” those who are Black or “other individuals of color,” people with “French Canadian, French-Indian or other mixed ethnic or racial heritage,” or any other communities that the commissioners see fit to include, the law states.
Beverly Little Thunder of Huntington speaks during a Vermont Truth and Reconciliation Commission event in Montpelier on Friday, October 11. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
But the panel’s focus on people who “identify” as Indigenous has drawn criticism from Abenaki leaders who have federal-level recognition in Canada and have continuous historic ties to territory that today includes Vermont and other parts of New England. Specifically, they said that directive has already led the commission to tie at least part of its work to groups that they assert cannot claim legitimate Indigenous ancestry.
In Vermont’s case, the leaders said, those are the four groups that the state recognized as Native American in 2011 and 2012: the Elnu Abenaki, Nulhegan Abenaki, Koasek Band of the Koas Abenaki Nation and the Abenaki Nation at Missisquoi.
“Vermont’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (VTRC) practices neither truth nor reconciliation when it works with these pretend Indians,” said leaders of Odanak and W8linak First Nations, which today are based in Quebec, in a public statement issued ahead of last week’s Statehouse event. By supporting the commission’s work, they said, “Vermonters with the best intentions are supporting theft and cultural appropriation, and furthering colonization.”
‘Tethered to myths’
Rick O’Bomsawin, the chief of Odanak First Nation, has repeatedly called for Vermont officials to allow him, and other Abenaki leaders based in Quebec, to have a greater role in the truth and reconciliation process. In an interview Wednesday, O’Bomsawin said that the commission has almost entirely continued to ignore those calls.
“We have not been invited to the table. We haven’t had a voice in this,” O’Bomsawin said. “It’s not right.”
Commissioner Mia Schultz of the Vermont Truth and Reconciliation Commission speaks in Montpelier on Friday, October 11. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
The First Nation has maintained for years that many members of Vermont’s four state-recognized tribes are not Indigenous and, instead, are appropriating Abenaki identity in ways that harm Odanak and W8linak’s band members. Research from scholars on Indigenous communities in New England and Canada — as well as reports from the Vermont and U.S. governments — have concluded that there is little evidence to support the existence of Abenaki tribes in Vermont with ties to historic Abenaki groups.
At the same time, Odanak and W8linak leaders, a Vermont Attorney General’s Office report and additional, newly-published scholarly research have concluded there is no evidence that Abenaki people were targeted for sterilization as part of Vermont’s state-sanctioned eugenics program in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The program did target poor and disabled people, many of them women, according to the recent research, published in The UVM History Review.
That’s contrary to claims by leaders of Vermont’s four state-recognized groups, who say that many of their members’ families hid their Indigenous identities during the 20th century in an effort to protect themselves from being targeted by that program.
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It’s also contrary to the official apology state lawmakers issued three years ago that preceded the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The apology stated that the eugenics movement — which resulted in about 250 people being sterilized in Vermont — also targeted people whose descendants “now identify as Abenaki.”
That contradiction means that the commission’s work is fundamentally flawed, according to David Massell, a Canadian Studies professor at the University of Vermont who has helped organize multiple panels at UVM in recent years on the topic of Indigenous identity.
“In Vermont, in other words, we have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission founded and funded by a Legislature that has been reliant on, and tethered to, myths, rather than evidence-based history,” Massell wrote in an email.
Massell said he also takes issue with the list of demographic groups that the commission plans to work with, following lawmakers’ direction.
The Abenaki Circle of Courage, comprised of Franklin County middle and high school students, beat a drum while singing in a circle during a Vermont Truth and Reconciliation Commission event in Montpelier on Friday, October 11. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
“It seems it is to be good enough for the Commission, as it was for the Legislature, that persons ‘identify’ as Indigenous. They need not be Indigenous People themselves,” Massell said. “No wonder that the actual Abenaki People, of Odanak and Wolinak First Nations, are incensed at this process and their exclusion from it.”
An ‘open door’
The newly-released strategic plan also underscores the commission’s task, as described by lawmakers two years ago, to suggest ways the government could redress the impacts of the eugenics movement. The state’s participation in eugenics was codified in 1931 with a law called an “Act for Human Betterment by Voluntary Sterilization.”
“Reparative measures are not just about acknowledging the harm. They are about fixing what is broken,” said Mia Schultz, one of the panel’s commissioners, at last week’s event. “We need to dismantle the barriers that prevent people of color, individuals with disabilities and others, from accessing the opportunities that they deserve.”
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s other commissioner, Melody Mackin, is a member of the Elnu group, which has its headquarters in Brattleboro. In their statement, Odanak and W8linak leaders describe a “pretender” sitting on the commission.
Commissioner Melody Mackin of the Vermont Truth and Reconciliation Commission speaks in Montpelier on Friday, October 11. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
Asked about the First Nation’s comments, Mackin wrote in an email that her job “is to listen to the truths” of anyone who is part of the communities that lawmakers identified in their establishing legislation. She said that she spoke with one of Odanak First Nation’s leaders earlier this year and invited members of Odanak’s community to share their perspectives with the Vermont panel, including “how state of Vermont policies have impacted them.”
“The door is always open,” Mackin said. Both she and Schultz were among the several dozen people who gathered at the Statehouse last Friday for the event marking the strategic plan’s release.
The plan describes Vermont as a historic homeland for Abenaki people, without elaborating. One speaker at last week’s event, though, made reference to the contentious recent debate over Abenaki identity in the state: Beverly Little Thunder, an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe from North Dakota.
Little Thunder now lives in Vermont, and served on the state’s Commission on Native American Affairs before resigning her seat last year and accusing its members in a later interview of being “a whole room full of white men pretending to be Native.”
Beverly Little Thunder of Huntington speaks during a Vermont Truth and Reconciliation Commission event in Montpelier on Friday, October 11. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
At last week’s event, Little Thunder questioned why there was not anyone present from Odanak and W8linak First Nations — and suggested that the commission’s work was not as inclusive as it professed to be.
“Those citizens there should be here,” she told the crowd. “We’re talking about reconciliation. They should be here talking about the harm that has been done to their communities.”
The commission’s plan divides its work into four phases, two of which have largely been completed and included hiring commissioners and support staff as well as conducting background research. The third phase includes taking public testimony on ways that people have been harmed by discriminatory state policies — potentially, the plan states, in the form of “verbal statements, videos, and written and artistic expression.”
Mackin said she expects to start collecting testimony around the start of 2025.
The commission expects that process to take about another year, after which it will enter the final phase, which is creating a report on its work. The report is expected to include, among other conclusions, “recommendations of new laws or revisions to current laws and policies” for state lawmakers to consider,” the strategic plan states.
Read the story on VTDigger here: As Vermont’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission lays out its plans, it faces renewed criticism from Abenaki leaders.