PHOTO COURTESY: Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe
MASHPEE – The U.S. Justice Department has filed a motion to reconsider a ruling by a U.S. District Court that has put the brakes on the Mashpee Wampanoag Casino in Taunton.
The filing claims Judge William Young was incorrect in ruling the tribe was not under federal jurisdiction in 1934 because their federal recognition didn’t happen until 2007.
His ruling came in a lawsuit brought by homeowners seeking to block the tribe from building the $1 billion complex.
The Justice Department’s motion seeks to clarify why the District Court judge ruled on an aspect of the Indian Re-Organization Act that was not part of the record-of-decision.
“We applaud the Justice Department’s decision. We’ve been on our land for thousands of years and all we seek is the right to exist here as sovereign people. It was promised to us soon after the first Pilgrims arrived and it’s a promise we hope the courts will honor,” said Tribal Chairman Cedric Cromwell in a statement.
The District of Columbia Court of Appeals reached an opposite conclusion in a land-into-trust case involving a tribe in California.
In the Wampanoag case, Young ruled the U.S. Interior Department “lacked the authority” to designate the land as a Native American reservation.
“We respectfully but strongly disagree with Judge Young’s ruling. We are encouraged that the appellate justices affirmed the Interior Department’s interpretation of the law. There is indeed a very clear distinction between ‘federal jurisdiction’ and formal ‘federal recognition’ – a process that didn’t even exist at the time IRA was passed by Congress,” said Cromwell.
Last week, the tribe filed a motion to intervene in the case to assure them a more direct role.
The department’s 2015 decision to place over 300 acres in trust for the benefit of the tribe paved the way for the First Light casino project.
The casino, hotel and entertainment complex broke ground in April, months after a group of local residents filed suit seeking to block it.
The process to designate the land into trust had been underway for several years before last September’s approval and was one of the last hurdles the Wampanoag tribe faced before moving ahead with the casino.
Federally recognized Native American tribes are allowed to build casinos on native land, or land that has been taken into federal trust.
A holdup for the Mashpee tribe had been a previous Supreme Court decision that put into limbo whether land could be taken into trust for tribes recognized after 1934, when the Indian Reorganization Act was ratified.
While the Wampanoags only won their federal recognition in 2007, other tribes who have proven they were under federal jurisdiction before 1934 have still been able to get land into trust.
The Mashpee tribe had always argued they had been under federal jurisdiction long before 1934.
The 2011 law that legalized casino gambling in Massachusetts provided for a casino in eastern and western Massachusetts, a slots-only casino, and a casino set-aside for a federally recognized Native American tribe.
In announcing the land into trust approval last year, U.S. Department of the Interior Assistant Secretary – Indian Affairs Kevin Washburn said the tribe’s origins in southeastern Massachusetts predated the arrival of Europeans on the continent.
“At the time of initial European contact, the tribe’s ancestors occupied all of modern-day Bristol, Barnstable, and Plymouth Counties,” Washburn said in his ruling.
Washburn said that the tribe’s descendants were dispersed and lost much of their land in these areas to English settlers.
Federal officials said in 2015 that in reaching their decision, they conducted a thorough review of the tribe’s history and application, as well as the administrative record and comments submitted by numerous interested parties.
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