On a crisp morning in early January, Rep. Sherry Gould stands outside the State House before her first day in the Legislature. The newly-elected lawmaker from Warner says she’s the first enrolled member of an Abenaki tribe to be elected to the New Hampshire Legislature.
“When we walk inside [the State House], the flags are all up,” Gould says. “There's no flags of any of our tribes. That'll be one of my goals.”
Within a few weeks of starting her first term, Gould filed a resolution to give her tribe — the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation — state recognition in New Hampshire.
Under the language of the resolution, which would have made the Nulhegan Band New Hampshire’s first recognized tribe, the group would become eligible for federal housing funding for tribes and the right to sell arts and crafts as “Indian-made,” among other benefits
Gould’s bill stalled in the House about a month later. But her new public role, and her effort to win official recognition for her tribe, have shined a new light on a longstanding controversy around the question of who has the authority to represent the Abenaki community.
For years, leaders of Odanak First Nation, an Abenaki nation based in Canada with historic ties to Northern New England, have spoken out about the Nulhegan Band and another New Hampshire-based group claiming to represent Indigenous peoples, the Cowasuck Band of the Pennacook Abenaki People. Odanak First Nation asserts many members and leaders of those groups have no Abenaki ancestors.
Odanak is one of two Abenaki First Nations formally recognized by the Canadian government. The tribe’s historic homeland stretches across the Canadian border into New England, with members currently living in New Hampshire and Vermont, though they are not formally recognized by the U.S. government as a tribe.
Leaders at Odanak First Nation say people who claim to represent Abenaki people but who lack any authentic connection to the tribal nation — historical or contemporary — are harming the Abenaki community.
“If this definition of indigeneity that can reach back 400 years and exploit an ancestor that may have been Indigenous . . . if that is going to drive the discourse and representation of Indigenous people, then anyone — many, many people — can claim to be Indigenous,” said Mali Obomsawin, a citizen of Odanak First Nation, who grew up in New Hampshire and now lives in Maine. “And the actual communities who have lived through colonization and all of the traumas of residential school displacement, we get silenced yet again.”