The petitioner has not submitted evidence of political authority or a political organization governing an Abenaki tribe in Vermont from 1800 to 1974. There is a glaring example of the absence of political authority in the 1950's when Caughnawagha Mohawks laid claim to lands in Vermont. While a new political organization was created in 1974, it appeared to be a separate organization from whatever might have existed in the eighteenth century. As discussed under Criteria (b) and (e), there is no significant overlap of individuals and their descendants between the eighteenth century tribe and the group created in the 1970's.
Moreover, the organization created in the 1970's was not generally accepted as representing all Abenakis in Vermont. In the 1970's and again in the 1990's the organization splintered as people became disenchanted with the chief, disputed his authority, and disagreed with his exclusionary practises. The fact that petitioner might be able to point to a few events since 1974 as evidence of political authority is not enough to satisfy Criterion (c) since this is not evidence of a continuous political government from historical times to the present.
Criterion (e)—Descent from Historic Tribe
To qualify for federal acknowledgment under 225 C.F.R. 83.7(e), the petitioner's membership must consists [sic] of "individuals who descend from a historical Indian tribe or from historical Indian tribes which combined and functioned as a single autonomous political entity." It is essential that members trace their genealogy back to a group of people known to a historical tribe. Although it is not necessary to trace ancestry to the earliest history of a
group, petitioner must trace it to "rolls and/or other documents created when their ancestors can be identified clearly as affiliated with the historical tribe" (BIA Nipmuc Nation #69A, 2001:202).
A model example of proof under Criterion (e) is the Huron Potawatomi case. There all members of the tribe could prove descent from people listed on a 1904 roll of Potawatomi Indians prepared as a result of a federal court decision (BIA Huron Potawatomi 1995:3, 21). Standard genealogical documentation such as birth certificates and other vital records show the line of descent from the 1904 roll to the present.In contrast, the Southeastern Cherokee Confederacy was seriously deficient in its proof of historical descent. For many of its families, the evidence of Indian ancestry consisted of nothing more than a statement that they "knew that there was 'Indian' in their family," but they did not know what tribe or which relative was connected to it (BIA Southeastern Cherokee Confederacy 1985a:64). The Southeastern Cherokee tried to excuse this lack of evidence of Indian ancestry, claiming, like the St. Francis/Sokoki Abenaki " that they and their immediate forebears had to suppress their Cherokee heritage under threat of reprisals." The Southeastern Cherokee asserted "that they lived in denial of their Indian heritage, and were compelled never to mention it."
The BIA responded to this argument as follows:
While this claim is probable and in consonance with the general history of the area during the period in question, it is impossible to verify. In fact, it is impossible to verify whether all those members of the SECC who claim Indian ancestry are actually Indian descendants. (BIA Southeastern Cherokee Confederacy 1985a:14).
When the Southeastern Cherokee tried to fill this gap with personal affidavits from current members, the BIA rejected this material "as insufficient evidence of Indian heritage since
they were of recent origin and unsupported by other corroborating evidence" (BIA Southeastern Cherokee Confederacy 1985b). The lack of documentary evidence in the Southeastern Cherokee case was summed up this way:
Little if any documentary evidence could be found to document a member's Indian heritage. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that their ancestor(s) did not maintain a relationship with their hereditary tribe(s) but rather mingled with non-Indians or were assimilated into the non-Indian community. (BIA Southeastern Cherokee Confederacy 1985a:8).
Without sufficient evidence of Indian ancestry traced to a historic tribe, federal tribal acknowledgment cannot be granted. The reason that individuals may not know their ancestry is immaterial; the BIA requires that the group have a distinct Indian identity that can be traced in behavior and lineage to a historic tribe.
An Overview of the Progenitors
The petitioner has submitted various charts and lists of people who it claims are Abenaki Indians of Franklin County. These lists have the quality of shifting sands ever changing and impossible to grasp. In the 1982 submission, petitioner included family charts of approximately fifteen extended families (Petition: 62-65). Petitioner also provided a small group of names from the federal censuses from the first half of the nineteenth century to demonstrate the presence of Abenakis in northwestern Vermont. In 1986 petitioner vastly expanded its submission and included names of hundreds of families from the early nineteenth century (and into the twentieth) who it claimed were Abenakis (Petition Addendum Appendices). The 1986 list of names from the 1800 through 1830 censuses was over five times as large as the previous list submitted in 1982. The number of names that
petitioner gleaned from the 1840 census and labeled as Indian grew fifteen fold between its 1982 and 1986 submissions (Petition: 62-65; Petition Addendum, Appendix 1B:28-49).
The narrative portion of the 1986 Petition Addendum attempts to trace connections among family names that appear similar in historic Abenaki records and early nineteenth century birth and marriage records. While this complicated web may look interesting, it is entirely irrelevant to the present day community. The web it weaves is limited to the nineteenth century. The narrative does not connect the families who appear in the records in 1800 to 1830 with the petitioner's family descendants in the 1995 Family Descendancy Charts. For example, Madam Crapo who figures in the narrative does not appear on any of the Family Descendancy Charts as an ancestor (Petition:54; Petition Addendum:24, 26). In addition, two families described as front families on the island of North Hero, the Patnodes and Cameron, are not listed as ancestors of petitioner in the Family Descendancy Charts either (Petition Addendum:306, 326). This might be due to the fact that they may actually be French Canadian families (see DeMarce 1994).Most recently, in December 1995, petitioner submitted twenty Family Descendancy Charts. It declared that these genealogies replaced the earlier material that had been submitted in 1982 and 1986 (Second Addendum: 1). Compared with the 1986 material, this drastically cut back on the number of individuals claimed as members of the tribe. Each chart traces the descendants of a different progenitor. The families are substantially the same as the families shown in the 1982 papers filed by petitioner (Petition, Part VI). Three couples listed as progenitors in the 1982 papers have been omitted from the 1995 filing, and five new families have been added. 74.
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FOOTNOTE:
74. The following progenitor couples and their descendants shown in the Family Charts in Part VI of the 1982 Petition do not appear as separate family lines in the 1995 Family Descendancy Charts:
Page 164-b
We assume that the petitioner is claiming that each of the twenty progenitors is an Abenaki Indian of the St. Francis/Sokoki Abenaki Tribe of Vermont. Otherwise there would be no point in providing the charts. Presumably the living descendants on these charts comprise the current membership of the St. Francis/Sokoki Abenaki Tribe of Vermont. Of course, due to privacy rules, the State has not had access to the petitioner's current membership list. Three of the five progenitors that have been added seem to be ancestors of individuals who married into some of the families shown in the 1982 charts. See, e.g., Desmarais family (some Demers from this family married Gardners); Hakey family (Florence Hakey married Nazaire St. Francis); Belrose family (Mary Belrose married William Medor); LaFrance family (a LaFrance married a Vanselette descendant of the St. Laurent family).
The two other new progenitors are noteworthy in that they are the only two with proven Abenaki heritage: Jean Nepton and Simon Obomsawin. 75. If these two were added to lend legitimacy to the claims of Abenaki descent, the effort is transparent. The ancestors of these two families did not live in Swanton and did not maintain close ties with the rest of the petitioner's families. Jean Nepton was born in Massachusetts and lived in Canada. His descendants do not appear in Vermont records for six generations, hardly qualifying them as part of the Swanton community. Simon Obomsawin was born at Odanak/St. Francis. His descendants, William and Marion, show up repeatedly in the research by Gordon Day and John Huden--but never with any ties to any community in Swanton. (In fact they are not even included in the Family Descendancy Charts submitted by petitioner.) Their ties were____________________
74. (Continued from previous page FOOTNOTE)
Levi Bellvue/Mary Gonyea, Charles Guyette/Aurilla Bushey, Thomas Lapan/ Turner. Occasional members of these families do appear as spouses of people in other families that are traced.
75. The other three progenitors added in the 1995 charts are Margaret Gibeau, Antoine Edward Hance and Theodore Ouimette.
NOTE: APPARENTLY I AM WORKING WITH A DIGITAL PDF COPYof which was published in 2003...and the PAGE content between that and the "hard copy" I am in possession pulished in 2002 or visa-versa is typographical-constructively "in conflict" with the transcriptions I am putting into this blog. So, as a result I will post both of Pages 164 and 165, from each publication of this "State of Vermont Response"...in green highlight is the "distortion" sections between the [2] pages of 164 and 165...
Page 164
We assume that the petitioner is claiming that each of the twenty progenitors is an Abenaki Indian of the St. Francis/Sokoki Abenaki Tribe of Vermont. Otherwise there would be no point in providing the charts. Presumably the living descendants on these charts comprise the current membership of the St. Francis/Sokoki Abenaki Tribe of Vermont. Of course, due to privacy rules, the State has not had access to the petitioner's current membership list. Three of the five progenitors that have been added seem to be ancestors of individuals who married into some of the families shown in the 1982 charts. See, e.g., Desmarais family (some Demers from this family married Gardners); Hakey family (Florence Hakey married Nazaire St. Francis); Belrose family (Mary Belrose married William Medor); LaFrance family (a LaFrance married a Vanselette descendant of the St. Laurent family).
The two other new progenitors are noteworthy in that they are the only two with proven Abenaki heritage: Jean Nepton and Simon Obomsawin. 75. If these two were added to lend legitimacy to the claims of Abenaki descent, the effort is transparent. The ancestors of these two families did not live in Swanton and did not maintain close ties with the rest of the petitioner's families. Jean Nepton was born in Massachusetts and lived in Canada. His descendants do not appear in Vermont records for six generations, hardly qualifying them as part of the Swanton community. Simon Obomsawin was born at Odanak/St. Francis. His descendants, William and Marion, show up repeatedly in the research by Gordon Day and John Huden--but never with any ties to any community in Swanton. (In fact they are not
____________________
74. (Continued from previous page FOOTNOTE)
Levi Bellvue/Mary Gonyea, Charles Guyette/Aurilla Bushey, Thomas Lapan/ Turner. Occasional members of these families do appear as spouses of people in other families that are traced.
Page 165
NOTICE that in this type-set FOOTNOTE 75. of Page 165 is NOT ADDED to this Page 164; but instead has been placed on Page 165-b.even included on the Family Descendancy Charts submitted by petitioner. Only Simon's daughter Elvine is shown there.) Their ties were strictly to Abenakis at Odanak/St. Francis and Albany, N.Y. Petitioner has not cited any sources establishing Abenaki identity for the other eighteen progenitors. Presumably this is because their "ancestry is assumed," rather than proven, as petitioner stated was the case for the Louis Gardner line (Petition: 86).
According to these Family Descendancy charts, the progenitors were born at various times between 1790 and 1900. Their births are concentrated between 1800 and 1839. Eight of them were born at the beginning of this period, between 1800 and 1817, and another five were born at the end between 1830 and 1839. The remaining ones are scattered, with three born between 1790 and 1800, and four born between 1850 and 1900.76 The first thing that
becomes apparent from this selection is that the progenitors are not the basis of a community cross-section at a single point in time. This means that the progenitors were not all taken from one historic list and traced forward in time to the present. Rather, it appears that the list was prepared in reverse, starting from the current membership and tracing back as far as possible.
Since there are no lists of tribal members in Vermont after Robertson's Lease in 1765, the petitioner tried to reconstruct lists from the early census records. Each of its submissions to the BIA presented a different list of names. The rest of this section examines those reconstructed lists and the weaknesses in petitioner's attempts to connect them to the present day members.
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FOOTNOTE:
76. Margaret Gibeau's birth date is estimated to be around 1900, since she was married in 1924; the date was redacted from the copies provided to the State. Michel St. Francis's birth is estimated to be approximately 1800.
Page 165-b
NOTICE that in this type-set FOOTNOTE 75. instead has been placed on this Page 165-b
strictly to Abenakis at Odanak/St. Francis and Albany, N.Y. Petitioner has not cited any sources establishing Abenaki identity for the other eighteen progenitors. Presumably this is because their "ancestry is assumed," rather than proven, as petitioner stated was the case for the Louis Gardner line (Petition: 86).
According to these Family Descendancy charts, the progenitors were born at various times between 1790 and 1900. Their births are concentrated between 1800 and 1839. Eight of them were born at the beginning of this period, between 1800 and 1817, and another five were born at the end between 1830 and 1839. The remaining ones are scattered, with three born between 1790 and 1800, and four born between 1850 and 1900.76 The first thing that becomes apparent from this selection is that the progenitors are not the basis of a community cross-section at a single point in time. This means that the progenitors were not all taken from one historic list and traced forward in time to the present. Rather, it appears that the list was prepared in reverse, starting from the current membership and tracing back as far as possible.
Since there are no lists of tribal members in Vermont after Robertson's Lease in 1765, the petitioner tried to reconstruct lists from the early census records. Each of its submissions to the BIA presented a different list of names. The rest of this section examines those reconstructed lists and the weaknesses in petitioner's attempts to connect them to the present day members.
________________
FOOTNOTE:
75. The other three progenitors added in the 1995 charts are Margaret Gibeau, Antoine Edward Hance, and Theodore Ouimette.
76. Margaret Gibeau's birth date is estimated to be around 1900, since she was married in 1924; the date was redacted from the copies provided to the State. Michel St. Francis's birth is estimated to be approximately 1800.
OK, now that we have figured out that "Typographical Derailment" within these 2002 v. 2003 2-sets of published pages 164 and 165 in this transcription process.....onward, to Page 166:
Moody's Genealogical Work is Incomplete and Speculative
John Moody's 1979 manuscript claimed that the present day Swanton group was descended from the historic Missisquoi. However, he never fully supported his claim with genealogical research, a point made by Gordon Day upon reading Moody's manuscript. Day called on him to focus on the genealogies:You remember that I never said there were not Abenaki descendents on Lake Champlain. I said there were. I didn't realize how many. From the time of the first propaganda by Ronnie Cannes and company my position about the Abenaki "Nation" at Swanton was: examine their genealogies and see instead of taking anti-polar positions and arguing. (Day 4/27/1979).
Instead of clear genealogical lines between the present-day Abenaki petitioner and the historic tribe, Moody relied upon hypothetical connections that he described in his manuscript. Interestingly, these theoretical links were not incorporated into the Family Descendancy Charts submitted by petitioner in 1995.
Three examples of Moody's method of drawing conclusions from incomplete evidence illustrate the deficiencies in his analysis. First, in some instances Moody took names from the present group of petitioners and noted the similarity to names of Abenakis found in historic church records. Then without tracing the generations in between he drew the conclusion that the two were related. One example is with the 1800 marriage record found in Chambly, Quebec, of "Marie Morins, Abenakis of the Saint Francis village." Moody asserted this name developed into the following contemporary variations: Moricette, Morisseau, Molise, Morrisey, Morris, and Morits (Moody 1979:43, n.22). While this is intriguing speculation, it is not proof of Abenaki heritage.
Second are instances in which Moody documented Indians (not necessarily Abenakis) living in Quebec near the Vermont border. While these observations are interesting in
themselves, they do nothing to establish that the present day petitioners are Abenakis. For instance, Moody wrote of the Wabisan family, but there is no such family in the 1995 Family Descendancy Charts (Moody 1979:45). He wrote, too, of "Catherine, Indienne" marrying Pierre Lanoue, but acknowledges that she might not be Abenaki (Moody 1979:46-47). Moreover, she did not show up in the Family Descendancy Charts of the petitioner.
The third misleading assumption that infused Moody's genealogical work is his unquestioning acceptance of the current day petitioner as Abenaki. He traced the current members back through the records and then declared he had found the enclaves of Indian families. However, he declared the earlier generations to be Abenaki only because their descendants claim them to be. And, he leapt to make connections between these family names and others that appear on proven rolls of Odanak Abenakis.
So, for example, he wrote that:
The majority of families discovered so far lived on Missisquoi Bay and Lake Champlain with the other areas being maintained by individual families at different periods from 1820 to 1850. Not one of the families is cited as being "Indian," "Abenaki" or anything of the kind. The names are variants of those familiar at Odanak like Panadis (Benedict), Lazare, Gonzague, Benoit, Laurent, Denis, Saint Denis, Marie and Maurice in various combinations with names developed exclusively at Missisquoi like Campbell, Peter, CoulombCadoret, and Francis. (Moody 1979:49).
In this passage, Moody's claim that the names are "variants of those familiar at Odanak" indicates that he was unable to find an exact match of names in the Odanak records. It suggests that he only found names in the Odanak records that could be construed to sound similar to Vermont names. For example, he traced one family named Banady or Parody through civil and church records from 1826 to 1860 and proclaimed theirs to be "unmistakable Abenaki names," despite the fact that they "were not once acknowledged as such in any of the records cited, Catholic or civil" (Moody 1979:54). His assertions were
based on name similarity, rather than genealogical links or Indian identification in the records.
Another instance of Moody's attribution of Abenaki identity to ancestors, without proof, occurred in his description of the Freemore, St. Laurent, and Coulomb families. He wrote that he had found no Freemore name at Odanak and thus could not substantiate it as Abenaki through any such association (Moody 1979:57, n.34). However, since there were Freemores who married into other families whose descendants are among the current day group, he declared they are Missisquoi Abenaki. He knew there were Laurents at Odanak, so when he found Saint Laurents in Vermont he decided their name must have been changed by a priest (Moody 1979:57, n.35, 59, n.36). He did not consider that it could just be a French name on its own, though Gordon Day advised him as much (Day 8/2/1977). 77. Likewise, while he wrote that "Coulombe or Collaret is also an unsolved connection thus far," he speculated that the old Missisque name Cadenait or Cadenarat is sufficiently close to Cadoret and Collart to suspect a connection there" (Moody 1979:57, n.35). Despite these expressions of uncertainty, he went on to assert, totally without proof, that Cordelia Coulomb was an Abenaki woman (Moody 1979:57-58).Moody's analysis of the St. Francis family was also full of guesswork. He spun a tale of name changes to connect Mitchell St. Francis with "Charlotte, widow of the late chief of the Abenackque Nation at Missisque" who signed Robertson's lease in 1765 (Moody 1979:58-59, n.36). His jumping off point was the statement that "Michael, or Mitchell (M chel) St.
_________________
FOOTNOTE:
77. In that letter, Gordon Day told John Moody that "Saint-Laurent and Coulomb are French names, and I have never found them as the names of Abenakis."
Francis's sisters, which clearly state that his parents lived in Iberville County, Quebec (Drouin Genealogical Institute 1989).
John Moody also implied that Mitchell St. Francis's mother had dark Indian skin, by pointing to an unrelated woman in another town with the surname St. Francis who is listed on the census as black (Moody 1979:58, n.36). He offered this as evidence that Mitchell's family was Indian. However, there is not a shred of evidence that this black woman is related to Mitchell's family. Mitchell's mother and sister are listed on the 1860 census in Swanton, but no color is given. Indeed the census enumerator for that district left the column for color blank for everyone, suggesting all were white. Mitchell St. Francis's mother's and sister's birthplace is given as Canada and they live in a house owned by another Canadian—Paul Charland. The black woman mentioned above is not another of Mitchell's sisters she is far too old. Her age is 50, the same as Mitchell's mother. Moreover, her birthplace is given as Vermont, and she is specifically listed as a domestic. Mitchell's mother and sister have no occupation listed, though the census taker clearly indicated "family domestic" when appropriate on that same page. A careful examination of the records discloses the errors in Moody's speculations (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1860a, 1860b). This raises serious doubts about his conclusions.Petitioner's Family Charts Do Not Trace Back to Any Historic Lists of Known Abenaki Indians
The best type of evidence of descent from a historical tribe would be genealogical material showing descendants from Indians listed on an official roll or membership list (BIA Nipmuc Nation (#69A) 2001:205-06). The federal regulations suggest the use of "rolls prepared by the Secretary [of the Interior] on a descendancy basis for purposes of distributing
