A steady stream of gray incense-like smoke with the scent of pine wafted from the grass lawn on the Shutesbury Town Common as Rolf Cachat-Schilling said a prayer blessing in a native language, to ward off evil intentions. A group of half a dozen people slowly lined up to be part of the ceremony.
Rolf Cachat-Schilling sings a Native American chant with a drum during a Native American ceremony across the street from Shutesbury Town Hall. Chris Goudreau photo
“We came here to do a memorial service, partially for our departed who we’re concerned are going to be dug up or their resting places are going to be damaged without properly assessing whether there’s people there or not,” said Cachat-Schilling of Shutesbury, who is part Nipmuc and part St. Regis Mohawk and a member of the Native American Inter-Tribal Council of Western Massachusetts.
The native community in Western Massachusetts has expressed criticisms and concerns about a solar project affecting a 30-acre piece of land called the Wheelock Track, owned by W.D. Cowls Inc. of Amherst, and located at Pratt Corner Road. The site is considered sacred due to native remains believed to be on the premises. At least 10 acres of woodlands would be cleared for the project to make way for a 6.2-megawatt solar project developed and leased by Chicago-based Lake Street Development.
However, the developers and landowners argue that there’s no proof the land was used for native burial grounds.
Cinda Jones, president of W.D. Cowls, said the claims are “bogus” and believes the project has been villainized by anti-solar activists.
“It’s heartbreaking to hear that Indian burial sites and structures are not being respected,” she said. “These claims are so heart wrenching that some well-meaning folks who you’re talking with don’t even consider the unsound source of their information and the reality that the stories are completely fabricated in order to stop a solar project,” she said.
Marnin Lebovits, principal for Lake Street Development, said Shutesbury residents who have a “not in my backyard” mentality have hounded the project at every step in the permitting process during the past two years.
“There’s a few vocal people that are on the project site area and that’s unfortunate that they’re using this as a claim … It’s a shame they’re using the Native Americans in this manner,” he said.
This isn’t the only energy development project that would be built on suspected indigenous sacred sites. In Sandisfield, Kinder Morgan subsidiary, Tennessee Gas Company, is developing the $93 million Connecticut Gas Expansion Pipeline Project, which has destroyed native ceremonial stones to make way for the pipeline.
In Sandisfield there have been at least 70 anti-fossil fuel activist arrests for trespassing on pipeline construction sites since early May. Most recently, 10 people were arrested by state police on Sept. 13, including native water protectors who previously protested at Standing Rock. Many people who have been arrested are affiliated with New England-based anti-fossil fuel group, the Sugar Shack Alliance.
These issues have made people in the native community of Western Massachusetts feeling like their history is being disregarded and erased.
‘A form of genocide’
There are no reservations in Western Massachusetts despite centuries of native history in this portion of the region, Cachat-Schilling said. He thinks the refusal to acknowledge the state’s indigenous population plays into the idea that his ancestral history continues to be erased. Since the 1930s, the federal government has de-listed at least 350 Native American tribes across the country.
“It’s a form of genocide because all those people lose their ability to identify themselves as Native Americans under most circumstances and they’re not respected,” he said. “The media, generally speaking, doesn’t pay much attention to anybody who’s part of the tribe, but the fact of the matter is that over 70 percent of Native Americans don’t live on a reservation or don’t have a tribal membership.”
Cachat-Schilling said he considers the solar project a desecration of native burials and pointed out that he doubted an historic cemetery would be treated the same way.
Turtle effigy in New England. Courtesy of the Narragansett Tribe
“Every time our burial grounds are found, they’re dug up,” he said. “There hasn’t been a case that I know of where they found a native burial ground and it wasn’t dug up in one fashion or another. That never happens to European burial grounds … More often, it’s looters who clean them out for private collections. And this state has never prosecuted anyone for that.”
Cachat-Schilling said he learned about his native ancestry growing up. His grandmother, who was born in 1898, didn’t mention her heritage often. He learned about his native culture, traditions, and language from his grandmother’s sister who was a medicine woman.
“She taught me about medicine ways. She used to bring me to these sacred places and tell me about the ceremonies that go on there and what their meaning is to us,” he said. “From the time I was 12 until I was 20 when she died, she spent a lot of summers teaching me about the religion. She taught me to speak Nipmuc. She was an amateur linguist who knew bits and pieces of a lot of languages. She taught me all the different ceremonies.”
Tasondra Jardine, 32, of Chicopee, is the community coordinator for the Inter-Tribal Council for Western Massachusetts, which has brought native descendants of at least 20 different tribes such as Blackfoot, Mohawk, Algonquin, and Lakota, together in a unified inclusive group.
A Native American ceremonial stone grouping in New England. Courtesy the Narragansett Tribe
“A lot of the history is hidden away,” she said. “For some families it was a great shame to be part Native American. That was a part of history that no one talked about. They didn’t want to tell you anything about your history. Sometimes people don’t find out until somebody passes on and they see pictures of their great great grandmother and they’re in full regalia.”
She said her ancestry is African American, Creole, Scottish, Blackfoot, and Cherokee.
“It’s very difficult sometimes to be able to trace it back to a certain tribe. Each different tribe has a certain amount of native blood that they would require for you to become a registered member of their tribe,” Jardine said. “Just knowing that you’re part Cherokee or part Blackfoot is not enough to them … It can be very difficult or traumatic to know this or have been taught the old ways and not being able to prove it.”
Jardine said she connected with her indigenous ancestry from a young age.
“One year I did an entire presentation on Pocahontas,” she said. “I think I was in fourth grade. I dressed in full regalia and I did my presentation. Of course, the Disney movie came out shortly after and they were like, ‘Oh, you were wrong. You presented this wrong.’ And I was like, ‘No, they only showed the part where the Disney princess sailed off with the prince, but that’s not actually how it went.’ I was trying to explain to them the difference between history as it’s written and history as it’s happened. Unfortunately, history is often written by what’s considered the victors. Something that’s a mass genocide gets turned into and written off as this beautiful little movie with happy endings. People were torn away from their homes. My family walked the Trail of Tears. For me, it was much more than just a movie.”
Make way for the gas pipeline
One issue central to the native community in New England are sacred ceremonial stones along the path of the Tennessee Gas pipeline that are hundreds, if not thousands of years old. In Sandisfield, most of the stones that were identified have been destroyed, though some were preserved by Kinder Morgan.
“The eastern tribes utilized the ceremonial stone features a part of their ceremonies calling to the spirit of our mother, the Earth, to bring balance and harmony,” Narragansett Indian Tribe Deputy Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Doug Harris said. “From that, we interpret that it’s a place where someone may have been killed either by an animal or another human. That area, although a person’s remains may have been taken elsewhere for burial or cremation, would have been greatly traumatized in spirit. In order to bring balance and harmony back to that traumatized area one of the forms was to make prayer in the form of stones calling on the spirit energy of our mother, the Earth.”
Sara Hughes, a spokesperson for Kinder Morgan, confirmed that 13 of 73 ceremonial stone features were relocated. The remaining 60 ceremonial stones were destroyed.
“We were required to relocate 13 after adapting our construction approach to accommodate and avoid the majority of the structures,” she said. “The stone features that remained in place have been protected with signage and fencing during construction activities, and are being closely monitored on a daily basis … The features have been securely stored and will be moved back to their original location and orientation when project restoration occurs. We expect to complete the restoration process and place the project into service by Nov. 1.”
Harris said he was given the opportunity to monitor the process, but refused because he considered it sacrilege.
“They would document them, store them, and then reconstruct them,” he said. “They seemed to feel that this was acceptable and I explained to them that once they dismantle them, that is desecration. All their reconstruction is a replica work of art, not a spiritual stone feature.”
Anne Marie Garti, an attorney representing the Narragansett Indian Tribe, said FERC did not allow the Tribe’s Historic Office to examine the sites under the National Historic Preservation. FERC gave the go ahead for the project to Tennessee Gas, a subsidiary of Kinder Morgan, before that took place.
“The Narragansett Indian Tribal Historic Preservation Office requested rehearing of an order when the staff person at FERC gave the pipeline company an order to proceed,” she said. “And that order, we believe, was not legally issued because the steps that were supposed to have taken under the National Historic Preservation Act had not taken place. FERC had said they would make sure that all the stuff had taken place before the project could proceed when they issued their original order in March 16, 2016. There were all these conditions, one of the conditions was compliance with the National Historic Preservation Act.”
The tribe isn’t seeking damages, but wants a re-hearing to make sure that a mistake such as this never happens again, Harris said.
“What we want to draw attention to in the future must happen, otherwise tribal rights are abrogated and the law means nothing, if in fact it is not practiced,” he said. “We are essentially drawing FERC’s attention and the public’s attention to the fact that the National Historic Preservation Act has not been followed and therefore the rights of the tribe has not been allowed. That should not be the standard operating procedure going forward.”
Garti said FERC typically waits until a pipeline is completed before a re-hearing takes place.
“And then they go in and try to say that it’s moot; that it no longer matters, but the courts don’t buy that because it’s very hard to get an injury just thrown out of court like that … It’s been taking about a year.”
The ancient culture of the Americas is something that everyone in the country should be willing to preserve, not just people with Native American ancestry, he said.
“There is a responsibility of not only tribes to step forward and to point to these issues, but the public in general — our partners in sustaining and protecting that of which is antiquity,” Harris said.
Native Americans tangle with solar site
At the projected Lake Street solar array site, there’s evidence that there aren’t native remains on the site, but no one knows for sure. Proponents of Lake Street’s solar array in Shutesbury and town officials say there’s enough proof that there isn’t native remains on the site, but the local Native community disagrees.
Two separate teams of archaeologists certified with the U.S. Department of the Interior conducted surveys of the site and found no evidence of burial sites or stones associated with Native American cultures, Jones said.
“In my strong opinion, the claim is a fabrication created to stop our tenant’s solar project, which has been permitted,” she said. “So this point is so moot. Do native Americans believe there are burial sites on the solar parcel? I say, ‘No.’ I say they think it’s possible because other people have told them they think there are.”
More than a dozen activists attended the ceremony across the street from Shutesbury Town Hall in support of indigenous rights. Chris Goudreau photo
Cachat-Schilling and four other plaintiffs filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against members of the Shutesbury Planning Board and the developers in August 2016, which states that Native Americans and members of the Syncretic Church and their families were banned from accessing the sacred worship sites on the property.
“The Lake Street principals were notified by Narragansett and Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribal Historic Preservation Offices of suspected Native American burials on the lot for which Lake Street submitted a solar array application,” the complaint reads. “Lake Street responded by immediately banning all Native American representatives and all members of the Syncretic Church and their families, friends, associates.”
Jones said she discussed having Narragansett Indian Tribe Deputy Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Doug Harris and other tribal historic officers examine the site, but learned that Harris was not qualified.
In the 2013 Massachusetts Land Court case of Cox v. Considine Development Co., which involved a ceremonial stone known as ‘Indian Rock’ in Canton, Harris provided an affidavit that was stricken down.
“With no qualifications whatsoever, Harris’s Affidavit also contains statements that are within the purview of an engineer, not a Native American historian,” the case reads.
Harris said the judge in this case did not contact him to defend his affidavit and had no knowledge that it was struck down before the Valley Advocate submitted a request for comment.
“I have been advised that it was the result of an attorney’s lack of proper procedure on how to present Tribal expertise in a hostile legal environment that my affidavit was disallowed,” he said in a written statement. “The case in question centered on the preservation of a huge balanced boulder in Canton, a ceremonial stone known locally as ‘Indian Rock.’ I was asked to render a written opinion regarding the significance of the huge balanced boulder in its accompanying ceremonial stone landscape and the likely impact of constructing a road down alongside it to access a proposed housing development … The judge who heard the opposing attorney’s challenge of my credentials did not contact me to allow for a defense of my written statement or my credentials.”
Jones described the lawsuit as ridiculous, noting that she didn’t ban Native American people as an ethnic group from the site.
“Individuals have no constitutional right to pray on someone else’s land,” she said. “Similarly some who are individually trespassed from my property are claiming ‘free speech.’”
The lawsuit argued that the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights in regards to equal protection for freedom of religious expressions has been violated. It also cites the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, the U.S. Department of Interior’s rules about native sites and land deeds with indigenous peoples in Hampshire County, which would allow the plaintiffs to access the site for religious purposes even though it is privately owned.
However, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Mastroianni wasn’t buying the case and dismissed it on Aug. 15.
Cachat-Schilling said Mastroianni ignored the more than 300-year old land deeds reservation rights because of it’s age, but doesn’t think it’s legal precedent should affect the document’s validity.
“He said that there were land reservation rights, but that could potentially apply to a lot of people … Basically he’s saying, ‘That could open a can of worms that I don’t want to deal with.’”
The solar project continues to move forward in Shutesbury with most of the permits for the project having been secured, Shutesbury Planning Board Chair Deacon Bonnar said.
Eric Johnson, director of archaeological services at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, reviewed data from archaeological services hired by Lake Street to determine whether native burials existed at the site. He concluded that there’s not much evidence of native burial grounds.
“The evidence of soils, forest processes, and the configurations of the mounds themselves are characteristic of ‘pillow and cradle’ topography, which is a common natural feature of forests in places like the project area,” Johnson’s concluding comments read. “The soil characteristics also argue against the features being graves, because of the extreme difficulty of digging a grave in these soils. I do understand that this evidence will not convince everyone who is concerned about this project. I recommend that these features be reviewed by an individual who is part of a New England Native American community and is qualified to assess traditional cultural properties. The special permit conditions stipulate that this is the responsibility of the applicant.”
Bonnar said he wishes a tribal heritage preservation officer could have examined the site, but the board’s hands were tied on this issue.
“The developers and landowners prevented that and we were advised by our town counsel that we could not require it,” he said. “That was not a forceable condition. So, in that situation we relied on archaeologists rather than the tribal preservation officers. And this is something we regretted.”
The project would likely be approved, Bonnar said.
Chris Goudreau can be reached at [email protected].
