Schaghticoke recognition issue resurfaces

KENT — Years of denial of petitions to the courts and subsequent failures in appellate cases have not ended the campaign for federal recognition on the part of the Schaghticoke Indian Tribe (SIT) and their claims to ancestral reservation land in the town of Kent.

A special meeting of the Board of Selectmen, initially scheduled for Monday, April 4, was to have considered the town’s response to a current petition seeking federal acknowledgement filed on behalf of the SIT by Kent resident Alan Russell. The petition is through the new Office of Federal Acknowledgement within the Bureau of Indian Affairs at the federal Department of the Interior.

Attorney Jeff Sienkiewicz is assisting the town with drafting a response that is due by July 5. As of April 4, however, information was still being gathered and the April 4 meeting was cancelled. A new date has not been set.

The matter has been considered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs for years and consistently denied, but recent changes appear to create some daylight in interpretation of the regulations, sufficient to encourage this latest petition.

As recently as 2005, Sienkiewicz noted that the tribe had been denied recognition and their land claims had been dismissed around 2012. Subsequently, the Bureau of Indian Affairs has adopted a new set of regulations, making it easier to achieve tribal recognition from the federal government.

Under existing regulations, a tribe would need to show that it was descended from an historical tribe and that it has lived ever since as a separate entity with documented leadership in place.

Recent changes to the regulations allow the existence of reservation land to serve as evidence of a political authority.

“There are a number of Schaghticoke entities claiming recognition,”  Sienkiewicz told the selectmen at a Tuesday, March 29, special meeting during which he reviewed the tribe’s history and years of the local tribe’s effort toward recognition.

Marriage records provide another avenue toward recognition, Sienkiewicz explained. If 50% of the marriages were between members of the tribe, that could be used as evidence of a political entity. New interpretations of the regulations have stipulated that each marriage can be counted as twice because two people are marrying.

The process calls for a preliminary review of the petition to determine whether today’s Schaghticoke tribe is descended from an historic tribe supported by a governing document and whether the current members have a genealogical thread connecting them to the original tribe.

The town needs to respond to the issues stemming from the original 2,000 acres of land that had been deeded by the colonists to the Native Americans. However, historical evidence indicates that the Schaghticoke people migrated there in the 1780s, and over the years, the land has been sold off in pieces, leaving about 400 acres. Courts have ruled in the past on that issue and appeals have been unsuccessful, Steinkowicz explained.

“Kent is involved indirectly in that portion,” Steinkowicz said.

A 1978 law established that previously denied groups cannot re-apply, but there is now some precedent allowing for re-application in some cases, Sienkiewicz said. The town of Kent has asked that the ban be upheld.

Over the last 15 years, there have been two separate entities vying for federal recognition as the true represntatives of the Schaghicoke tribe. The current petition is from the SIT, which is run by Russell, who lives in Kent. The other group is the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation, which has an office in Derby, Conn. The  Tribal Nation chief is Richard Velky.