Recognition, Antiracism & Indigenous Futures: A View from Connecticut

Chief Big Eagle (Aurelius H. Piper, Sr.) died in August of 2008 on the one-quarter-acre reservation of the Golden Hill Paugussett Tribe in Trumbull, Connecticut. He was ninety-two and had been the Paugussetts' hereditary tribal leader for over four decades. Those who knew him likely remember him as a force for justice who spoke in unvarnished terms about Native people's everyday experiences of oppression and racism in Connecticut.¹ His fight for the future of his tribal nation drew broad public attention in the mid-1970s, well before federal acknowledgment petitions and tribally owned casinos became the focus of racist hostility in southern New England.² In March 1974, The New York Times published an interview with Chief Big Eagle entitled “Connecticut Indians Act to Reclaim Reservation,” which detailed the Paugussetts' legal effort to reclaim nineteen and three-fourths acres of historical reservation land of which they had been wrongfully dispossessed. Those among the Times’ national readership who had followed media coverage of Indian activism at Alcatraz and Wounded Knee may not have imagined Connecticut as a site of Indian resistance (or even, perhaps, of living Indian people). Yet in this article, the Times directed wider public attention to the Chief of “the 100-member Golden Hill Tribe” defending “the nation's smallest reservation,” and asserting the Tribe's rights to other Paugussett ancestral lands.³ In their essential study of the Indian resistance movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior write that when Indians of All Tribes occupied Alcatraz Island in November of 1969, the press recognized it as “history in the making.” The Times depicted the Paugussetts' land rights struggle in a similar light. Accompanying the article was a striking photograph of Chief Big Eagle sitting on a tree stump in front of the sole house on the reservation.⁴ Looking away from the camera, his hat resting on his knee and his arms folded, he appears relaxed, certain, and focused on the land.

This essay is offered as a tribute to the life of Chief Big Eagle and his leadership, particularly his defiance of the virulent racism to which his tribal community has been subjected. The cultural and political foundations of the idea of “race” are ancient, but the ways in which racial categories and racist practices have been bureaucratically produced and normalized in the modern era indicate that race remains central to governmental tactics of control. In this essay, racialization refers to the imposition of politically calculated and fictitious notions of racial identity on Native individuals and Native communities. Connecticut history stands as an archetypal example of this practice. “Indian Affairs” – the official government apparatus created primarily to manage Native peoples' reservation lands and to administrate the state's understanding of Indigenous issues – must be investigated as a domain of strategic racialization of Indianness and of the rights of tribal nations. The moment when Chief Big Eagle was interviewed by The New York Times in 1974 marked a crucial juncture in Paugussett tribal history and the state-tribal relationship in Connecticut. Chief Big Eagle, along with other tribal leaders and activists, directly and publicly challenged Connecticut's twentieth-century governmental regime of Indian Affairs.

Racialization obscures and undermines the legal rights of Native peoples as well as their existence as sovereign political bodies.⁵ In Connecticut, racialization has presented tribal sovereignty as a threat and a fiction. For example, governmental scrutiny of tribal identities fosters White-supremacist notions of racial “illegitimacy,” which inform public assumptions about Indianness and the rights of tribes. Racialization operates in federal recognition struggles and is especially pernicious in its attacks on tribal communities whose members have African American ancestry. As Indigenous studies scholar Brian Klopotek has shown, “a complicated tangle of racial projects and colonialism [are] at work” in such cases, impacting tribal well-being and sometimes stoking racism within tribal communities themselves. Yet unfolding histories of tribal sovereignty in the United States also demonstrate the ways in which Native people have contested and exposed racialization projects.⁶

Connecticut's policies and practices of “managing” Indians and suppressing tribal sovereignty prior to federal recognition struggles provide a case study of the racialized targeting of state-recognized tribes. Connecticut's “Indian affairs” agenda has promoted racialized notions of Indian identity based on the foundational White-supremacist construct of “racial purity” and the assessment of Native identities according to spurious calculations of “Indian blood” (commonly known as “blood quantum”). Examples of governmental debate and policy formation in Connecticut demonstrate how anti-Indian, anti – African American, and anti – “minority group” White-supremacist thought underlies the state's attempts to trivialize and undermine Native peoples' rights to their homelands and to their existence as tribal communities.

The early 1970s marked a significant turn in Connecticut's tribal nations' centuries-long struggle to defend their reservation lands and ensure their futures. The state of Connecticut transferred Indian Affairs from its Welfare Department to the Department of Environmental Protection. The change was due in large part to tribal nations' political mobilization and assertion of their right to live on their reservation lands. Native activism brought wider public attention to tribal communities and to reservation lands as sites of resistance to state-sponsored injustice and racist practices. In Connecticut, however, entrenched racialization sanctioned the state's anti – federal recognition policy of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, which targeted Golden Hill Paugussetts and other tribal communities as “illegitimate” tribes and “frauds.” Chief Big Eagle's account of the injustice his tribe endured demonstrates that Connecticut reservation lands are central to an analysis of twentieth-century struggles for Indigenous self-determination.

These struggles for self-determination in the face of state genocide stretch back to the seventeenth century. The original eighty-acre Golden Hill reservation was established in 1659 in Fairfield, a town founded two years after the May 1637 massacre of hundreds of Pequots – including many women and children – at their fort in Mystic, Connecticut.⁷ Colonizers valorized the attempt to annihilate the Pequot nation as a supreme moment of conquest whose brutal violence would cow all Native peoples within the territory claimed by Connecticut. Major John Mason, an infamous leader of the massacre, extolled its horrors, describing the Pequots' suffering as their fort was set on fire: “God was above them,” he boasted, “making them as a fiery Oven … filling the Place with dead Bodies…. And thus in little more than one Hour's space was their impregnable Fort with themselves utterly destroyed.”⁸

Paugussetts, Mohegans, Western Niantics, and Pequot survivors struggled to remain within their homelands in the aftermath of the massacre. Pequots' refusal to relinquish their homeland defied the 1638 Treaty of Hartford, which declared that Pequots had ceased to exist. Their resistance led to the creation of three Pequot reservations: at Noank (1651), Mashantucket (1666), and Stonington (1683).⁹ In 1680, leaders from Paugussett, Pequot, Mohegan, and Western Niantic tribal communities met with Connecticut officials, seeking government protection for their reservations. The resulting law stipulated that reservation lands were to be preserved in perpetuity for tribal communities and forbade any attempt to sell or purchase reserved lands.

By 1680, the colony institutionalized a reservation system, along with government surveillance of tribal communities holding collective rights to reservation lands.¹⁰ The colony appointed Anglo men as reservation “guardians,” but they often perpetrated or facilitated the theft of reservation lands. Native people in eighteenth-century Connecticut sought justice in the colonial legal system nevertheless, documenting aggressions and invasions by Anglo “neighbors” and their livestock. Tribal communities' petitions recounted destruction of agricultural plots, threats and acts of violence against reservation communities, and extreme poverty. In the context of the reservation system, however, colonial legality was a refuge for colonial lawlessness.¹¹ During the Mohegan land case (Mohegan Indians v. Connecticut), colonial officials introduced the notion of impending “extinction” to legalize dispossession of the Mohegan people. A 1721 act of the Connecticut General Assembly proclaimed that what remained of the reservation would be turned over to the town of New London “when the whole nation, or stock of said Indians are extinct.”

A 1774 report of Mohegan reservation overseers reflects the racial notions that shaped the monitoring of reservation land and tribal communities at that time: “interlopers from other Tribes & Straggling Indians & Molattoes have cro[w]ded themselves in” the remaining Mohegan reservation, they claimed. Mohegan Zachary Johnson, who had allied with the colony against the land suit and “incurd ye Dislike of many” Mohegans, was described by officials in 1783 as “of pure Mohegan Blood,” “almost the only inveterate opposer” of the land suit, and “a staunch Friend to the colony or State.” Thus, the colonial classification of racial “purity” was to have been Johnson's reward for disavowing his tribal community and urging that Mohegans who supported the land suit “ought to be cast off” the reservation.¹²

The examples above demonstrate that notions of “purity of blood” were deployed in Connecticut well before the U.S. federal government imposed the notion of “blood quantum” in the 1887 General Allotment Act, or Dawes Act.¹³ From the colonial period into the twenty-first century, Connecticut has been a critical location of governmental racialization of Indian identity.

In the late twentieth century, racialization operated as a weapon intended to deny the legitimacy of tribal communities petitioning for federal acknowledgment as well as federally acknowledged tribes planning to establish casinos. One example is Donald Trump's widely publicized racist slander against the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, uttered during his 1993 testimony before a Congressional committee scrutinizing Indian gaming: “They don't look like Indians to me.” As former Connecticut Attorney General (now Senator) Richard Blumenthal led the state's efforts to oppose the federal acknowledgment petitions of Paugussetts, Eastern Pequots, and Schaghticokes, Trump targeted the Mashantucket Pequots and their right as a federally acknowledged tribe to establish a casino in accordance with the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988. In 2016, a Washington Post article argued that Trump's belief that “dark-skinned Native Americans in Connecticut were faking their ancestry” reflected his racism.¹⁴ The interlinkage of Trump's anti-Black and anti-Indian racism and his promotion of the fallacy of “racial purity” echoes the state's entrenched strategy of denigrating tribal communities petitioning for federal recognition.

In July 1993, a Golden Hill Paugussett land claim was in the courts and the Tribe's federal acknowledgment petition was about to be reviewed by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. That month, the Hartford Courant, Connecticut's largest newspaper, ran a cartoon by Robert Englehart titled “The Golden Hill Paugussetts (A Very Small Tribe of African-American Native Americans).” The image includes six heads, grossly caricatured according to the cartoonist's racist conceptualization of “Blackness,” under which six names are assigned: “Chief Dances With Lawyers,” “Chief Lotta Bull,” “Chief Running Joke,” “Chief Flipping Bird,” “Chief Rolling Dice,” and “Chief So Sioux Me.”¹⁵ The cartoon's appallingly racist language and imagery constitute a concrete form of violence – an intentional assault on Native lives and identities, striking at core principles of kinship and community. Such assaults are not random, nor are they merely a “reaction” or “backlash” against tribal sovereignty; they are historically embedded, normalized, and government-sanctioned tactics of domination, tied to the routine practices of White rule in the bureaucratic “management” of Indian tribes and their land rights.

The Times story on Chief Big Eagle opens with a summary of “Indian affairs” in Connecticut during the early 1970s that reflects the complex and troubling ways in which Indian identity and Indian existence within the state were framed and validated for a non-Native public audience:

The trope “Indian reawakening” is misleading; the suggestion that the political consciousness of Native people had ever been “asleep” is now widely considered a projection of the jostled consciousness of White Americans becoming aware of Native resistance while perhaps not yet recognizing the long history and multiple forms of violence employed to thwart that resistance. The idea that a “nationwide reawakening among Indians” propelled the actions of Native peoples in Connecticut at the time also undercuts the significance of the deep local roots of Indian activism in the region. Perhaps most significant in this opening passage from the Times article is the reference to the 1970 Census, which conveys the power of bureaucratic accounting of Indian existence, foreshadowing how that power would be employed in Native peoples' future struggles to assert their rights as tribal nations. The Times’ use of the population statistic draws attention to the political agency of Native people, but only those made “officially” visible as Native by the state.

As noted above, in 1973, Public Act 73–660 established the Connecticut Indian Affairs Council (ciac), defining the five state-recognized tribes as “self-governing entities possessing powers and duties over tribal members and reservations” and transferring Indian Affairs to the Department of Environmental Protection (dep).¹⁷ Schaghticoke Elder and activist Trudie Lamb Richmond noted that tribal citizens seeking to protect their reservations and “take control out of the hands of the Department of Welfare” worked with legislators to craft an earlier bill that would have established an Indian Affairs Commission rather than Council. The Commission was planned as a state agency headed by Indians and empowered to “tak[e] many of the old state statutes off the books, which had discouraged Indians from remaining on the reservations.” That bill was passed in 1971, but Connecticut Governor Thomas Meskill “refused to sign the bill” because “he did not feel there were a sufficient number of Indians” to “justify the creation of another agency.”¹⁸

While the passage of pa 73–660 two years later seems to have marked a policy shift in a positive direction, we must consider what legislators said they wanted to accomplish. Some supporters expressed the desire for what might be viewed as progressive policy on Indian rights. Perhaps such sentiments were to be expected of legislators in Connecticut, the first state in the country to establish a Civil Rights commission (in 1943). However, can we say that the legislative debate in 1973 reflected “White consciousness” of the racism that impacted the lives of Native people in the state? Did the legislative debate imply the emergence of antiracism in the state's approach to its relationship with tribal communities?¹⁹ There was a tone of serious commitment in some of the legislators' remarks:

Another described the bill as a way to “bring recognition to an area of our minority population which has gone unheralded and unnoticed for many years.” Such phrases as “our Indians” and “our minority population” might be described merely as patronizing, but a discourse of White supremacy runs more starkly throughout the record of the debate, and on both sides of it. One supporter of the bill prefaced his remarks with “I'm sorry I don't have my feathers this morning.” Another identified himself as “a past Sachem of the approved order of Redmen, where no red men need apply.”²¹ His position: “if after some three hundred years we can't raise the status of the Indian to a first-class citizen … I'll sit down.” This legislator may have been engaged in some examination of his previously held beliefs, perhaps even mocking the White-supremacist organization “Improved Order of Redmen,” which continues to exist today.²² But the transcript of the debate suggests that it was difficult for the legislators to talk about Native people in ways that explicitly condemned and rejected racial ideology and racist ridicule.

The legislators' banter even suggests exuberance, as if some had anticipated such a forum in which to publicly employ caricatures of Indianness and outdo each other in making such comments:

To examine this record today is to gain insight into how deeply embedded racial ideology and outright racism shaped the state's conception of “Indian affairs” at the end of the Civil Rights era, even in the context of what some might deem a “pro-Indian” political agenda.

The discourse of the legislative debate discussed above did not represent a racism new to Connecticut; it was certainly not new to members of tribal communities who sought to live on their reservations in the twentieth century. Chief Big Eagle knew all too well what it meant to be “under the thumb of the Welfare Department,” as he put it, and how tribal members' efforts to maintain their connection to their reservations were routinely thwarted:

From the Times’ perspective, “the Indians won a major victory” by “getting control of the state reservations transferred to the more friendly hands” of the Department of Environmental Protection.²⁴ However, according to Lamb Richmond, the victory lay in collaborations among tribal nations in the state; alliance-building with the United Auto Workers union, the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union, and the Connecticut Civic Action Group; continuous discussions with legislators; and vigilance in using the local press to educate Connecticut's non-Native citizenry. But, she concluded, the fact that another state agency had assumed “jurisdiction over Indian people and Indian land,” allowing tribal communities an advisory capacity only, was a call to Indian people to work toward more revolutionary changes.²⁵

In 1969, renowned scholar Vine Deloria Jr. – known by many as “the leading indigenous intellectual of the past century”²⁶ – wrote that the Indian civil rights initiatives developed under the Johnson administration constituted “a minor adjustment in the massive legal machinery that had been created over a period of three hundred years.”²⁷ He argued that the White civil rights agenda for Indian people would not deter exploitation of Indian homelands or Indian people, nor would it compel White people to confront the fact that “[land] has been the basis on which racial relations have been defined ever since the first settlers got off the boat.”²⁸

Deloria's argument is pertinent to my analysis of the routine state-level enforcement of racist ideology. In December 1971, an internal Connecticut dep memo announcing the change underway in the state's administration of Indian Affairs stated that “the Welfare Department looks upon this as essentially a land management, rather than a people management problem, since there are not too many Indians in the State.” The dep official added, in parentheses: “Of course, one may take the view, with General Custer, that even one Indian is too many Indians.”²⁹ The remark is deeply sinister, endorsing racist violence with a humorous tone. The depth of its destructive power is evident in how comfortably it was expressed – and presumably condoned – in a governmental memo now housed in the State Archives. The archive serves to distance the author of the memo and the state agency from accountability in the present, but research conducted in the late twentieth century as part of tribal communities' petitions for federal acknowledgment exposes many such archival records to scrutiny. These records remain important to analyses of state-sponsored racism, and to documentation of the transformational work accomplished by Native peoples defending their rights and forging their futures in the twentieth century.

The archival records of “Indian Affairs” in Connecticut contain egregious examples of racist ideology targeting tribal communities at their most vulnerable. In 1939, for instance, when the State Park and Forest Commission (pfc) was the “overseer” of “the Indian reservation population,”³⁰ the legislature held a hearing on a bill introduced by a Representative from Groton, “An Act Concerning Certain Land” (H.B. No. 347). The bill proposed to permit the Park and Forest Commission to sell “a portion of the reservation of the eastern tribe of the Pequot Indians” to “three white families” whom the state had allowed to lease the land.³¹ The White families were described as “campers” who lived on the reservation “just in the summer,” but who were nonetheless industrious and deserving of the land because they had “built cottages and good fireplaces.” The White campers clearly used the reservation voluntarily to vacation, but claimed the pfc increasing their leasing fee “placed a burden” on them. The Groton Representative insisted that the Whites “did not think the land worth that much money,” because “it is rocky and of no value except for camping purposes.” When asked if the pfc had “authority to sell this land,” the Groton Representative replied: “This land is held in trust as an Indian Reservation. There are a few Indians living there, and they earn most of their livelihood by working for the white people … by doing odd jobs for them.” As the Chair continued to raise questions, the Groton Representative suddenly changed his assessment of Eastern Pequots on the reservation:

There are no Indians, only six colored families living there. So far as the so-called Indians are concerned, they derive more benefits from the white people, who rent the land, than from any other source. I am at a loss to see any objection to the passage of this bill. The only opposition would be the desire to preserve the land for our fast declining race, but the white people are offering a fair price for this area.³²

Another Representative asked: “Are these Indians pure blooded Indians?” A Representative from Southington replied: “I should say not. Their hair is quite curly.”

Racialization operates here as a ruthless political strategy, which is the essence of White supremacy. A government official, speaking on the record, shifts in an instant from acknowledging the presence of Indians to insisting there are no Indians living on the reservation. The insertion of “colored families” into the narrative is intended to justify dispossession and erase Indianness, serving the political motive to exploit the reservation for profit.

Nevertheless, the Eastern Pequots persist as a tribal nation, and their homeland – the 224-acre reservation in North Stonington, established in 1683 – remains central to their struggles to defend their rights as a Native people. The very presence of tribal communities on their reservations has always been both a symbol and an enactment of defiance: in ceremonial contexts, in everyday attempts to make a living on reservation land (even when working for White vacationers who sought to take the land), and in continuous efforts to establish residence on that land in the face of racist policies and practices.

It is no surprise that state opposition to federal recognition in the late twentieth century became a domain of racialization, perpetuating a White-supremacist discourse that promoted an interwoven anti-Indian/anti-Black racism, so publicly expressed in the 1993 Trump remark and the Hartford Courant cartoon. The racialization of Native identities and tribal communities in Connecticut's management of Indian Affairs in the twentieth century cannot be detached from the long histories of violence against Native peoples, just as the ongoing history of White-supremacist ideology in the United States has shown itself to be steeped in a tradition of violence. Non-Natives, even those who are committed to antiracist research, may never fully comprehend the violence done to Native peoples by White supremacy and state-sanctioned racist practices. But antiracist researchers can work to expose and track the routine ways in which racialization and its violence operate, while also recognizing and writing about the power of Indigenous defiance.

In 2004, then Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal referred to Golden Hill Paugussetts' federal acknowledgment effort as a “doomed quest” that had officially been laid “on its deathbed.” The grandiose terminology of righteous victories over purportedly “doomed” Indian tribes runs through the state's antirecognition discourse, which is grounded in an ancient colonial quest of self-legitimization – the very basis of White supremacy.³³ Nonetheless, the Paugussetts continue to resist the state's attempts at erasure. In a 2014 Connecticut Public Radio report about the Paugussetts, Chief Big Eagle's daughter and Golden Hill Paugussett Clan Mother Shoran Piper gave a tribute to her father: “‘[He] never, never gave up,’ she said. ‘Always fought, and continued to fight for his people.’”³⁴ The report featured a photo of Piper surrounded by her three children, at home on the one-quarter-acre Golden Hill Reservation. Whether or not the photographer knew it at the time, that 2014 image of the Piper family evokes the 1974 New York Times photo of Chief Big Eagle, rooted in and overseeing the Golden Hill Paugussett homeland.

The United States must confront the racialization of tribal communities. In this essay, I have analyzed its destructive, tenacious fallacies, particularly the idea of “racial purity,” which has been deployed to measure the presumed “dissolution” of Indianness and deny Native rights. Antiracist research is essential to documenting histories of tribal recognition struggles and the ways in which White supremacy has operated to undermine tribal communities. The need for this research in the United States is as urgent now as it was in Connecticut in 1939, 1974, and 1993. As sociologist France Winddance Twine has written, antiracist research requires grappling with “the particular dilemmas racial ideologies and racialized fields generate for researchers,” and with what it means to work in “racialized fields of power specifically as antiracists.”³⁵ Thus, antiracist methodology calls for academics, educators, and advocates to acknowledge the ways they are enmeshed in struggles against racialization and White supremacy, as well as the potentially transformational impact of their research.

Commitment to justice lies at the core of scholarship focused on the rights and futures of tribal nations. Indigenous principles and knowledges that sustain community life, including relationships to ancestors and to land, must be respected as central to analyses of self-determination and resistance to racialization. For non-Native academics, commitment to learning from tribal communities, including attending and participating in conferences at tribal colleges, is crucial. Politically engaged, community-based, and antiracist research initiatives require support from conventional academic institutions, and perhaps also a fundamental transformation in their priorities.