One wonders what the motivations were in 1876 to redact this portion of Maine's constitution.
The motivation is very obvious - they wanted to conveniently forget their treaty obligations.
https://www.mainememory.net/sitebuilder/site/3283/page/5208/...
The 5-4 ruling, Gorsuch writing for majority, is a really interesting read: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/18-9526_9okb.pdf
Essentially, both liberals and conservatives can agree that... if the United States entered into a treaty... and the United States government never explicitly overrode that treaty... then it still stands.
Which, fair, but still nice to see recognition even when the question has repercussions for the eastern half of Oklahoma, the state is opposed, and the facts are inconvenient.
I think it would be more accurate to say that liberals and Gorsuch, who is uncharacteristically liberal on native american issues, can agree. Gorsuch's footnotes do a good job imo of making clear that the four conservative dissenting votes have very little respect for the treaties and promises made.
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
It's satisfying to raise issues above the partisan or ideological divide, but if the people that call themselves conservative consistently find ways make the law protect their own while restraining others, as four of them try to do here, then its naive to assume that the issues are really transcendent of that.
> The Articles also required that its terms and conditions “be incorporated into, and become and be a part of any Constitution, provisional or other, under which the Government of the said proposed State, shall, at any time hereafter, be administered; subject however, to be modified, or annulled by the agreement of the Legislature of both the said States; but by no other power or body whatsoever."
They couldn't remove the sections because the terms of their statehood had them inherit obligations from Massachusetts that supersede their state constitution.
> In 1967, Maine’s first Indian affairs commissioner, anthropologist Edward Hinckley, discovered Maine had received $30,000 from Massachusetts in compensation, but the state never actually set aside new land for the tribes.
If you're Mass. and you created those articles for a reason then I wouldn't find it surprising if you didn't want to help Maine throw them out after they've already violated your will at least once.
All of that is secondary to the fact that they did renege on their promises repeatedly and unabashedly for the next century. Hiding the sections from print could have been an attempt to stop legal challenges before they started, it could have just been out of spite. Who knows, maybe they were very eco-friendly and were worried about all that wasted paper! I find it quite silly to extend such extreme benefit of the doubt to the state government that we already know wanted to escape those treaties and successfully did so before, during, and after passing this amendment.
If you created those articles, you were probably dead by 1870, and definitely dead by 1967. Any generation of lawmakers would have been willing to renegotiate the terms if it benefited them.
>find it quite silly to extend such extreme benefit of the doubt to the state government that we already know wanted to escape those treaties and successfully did so before, during, and after passing this amendment.
I said that the US at that point cared so little about honoring treaties with Native tribes that I doubted they'd bother formally amending a constitution to do so. That's not giving them the benefit of the doubt.
I see where you are coming from here, but I see actions like this as one of many that contribute to creating the environment where they can pursue the goal of violating the spirit of the law. They probably could have gotten away with much the same without any one anti-native action including this one, but the collective effect is a government system and electorate that endorses and upholds an unjust status quo.
There was a 1874 court case where Granger claimed he owned the land by a deed granted the same year Massachusetts signed a treaty with the Passamaquoddy Tribe. The court decided for Granger. Under the treaty obligation, "it was Maine’s duty to compensate the Passamaquoddy for the value of the lost land, and to pay the Tribe's court costs and damages—neither of which happened."
Maine couldn't simply change its constitution as the Articles of Separation requires "bars Maine from altering the Articles of Separation without the consent of Massachusetts and requires their inclusion in the Maine Constitution."
To be clear, it appears there is no smoking gun which explicitly says this is the reason, but the people involve knew, or likely knew, about the case when developing the 1876 change.
There is a 2022 paper on the topic titled “‘It May Be Questionable’: Granger v. Avery and the Redaction of Article X, Section 5 from the Maine Constitution“ at https://www.academia.edu/60751074/_It_May_Be_Questionable_Gr... which may have more.
> If the constitutional commissioners who proposed the 1875 suppression of Section 5 intended to ensure the state’s obligations were forgotten, they were successful. Rather than protecting the Indians’ trust lands, Maine authorized some tracts to be flooded by dams, others to be annexed for the laying out of highways, and thousands more acres transferred to white owners. In no case was compensation given to the Indians, in violation of treaty obligations. In 1893, Maine courts even ruled that the Passamaquoddy tribe didn’t exist because it lacked sovereign powers.
https://www.pressherald.com/2015/06/01/legislation-would-put...
"The forgetting" has nothing to do with the constitutional change. Most people don't know or care about the contents of their state constitutions.
Redaction wasnt useful legally or generally in the violation of indian treaties.
https://www.mainememory.net/sitebuilder/site/3283/page/5208/...
What exactly is the meat of this conspiracy theory. That The judges were duped with misleading constitutions? That it was some sort of government psyop to influence public sentiment in the long run by distributing misleading documents?
This essay is a good summary of the situation
https://www.academia.edu/60751074
The whole thing is worth reading, but I'll copy and paste a relevant portion here.
> It is likewise remarkable that the court did not rule on Granger until after the legislature agreed to the put the redaction before voters and that final judgement did not come until after voters had given the redaction final approval, ensuring that the part of the constitution con-taining Maine’s responsibilities regarding Native treaties was no longer being printed right when Maine became liable for paying the tribe for its lost treaty land and covering the costs of safe-guarding that land. After the redaction officially took effect on January 1, 1876, Maine never compensated the tribe for the fifteen islands it lost due to the ruling. It also charged Granger’s damages to the Passamaquoddy Trust Fund in defiance of the unprintable Article X, Section 5. In 1878 the Committee on Indian Affairs strongly suggested that these actions violated the terms of Article X, Section 5, but the government remained silent. The redaction of Article X, Section 5 all but authorized the existing and ongoing practice of disregarding Maine’s constitutional obligations regarding Wabanaki treaties made with Massachusetts.