Land, lineage, and legitimacy

by Timothy Page

A Ceremony on Covenant Hills

In late July 2026, tribal and church leaders gathered at the edge of a pond in Cabot, for a ceremony most participants described as long overdue. The United Methodist Church formally returned 270 acres of land to the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation, with church leaders calling the transfer a milestone in restitution and reconciliation. The New England Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church deeded the 270.5-acre Covenant Hills Christian Camp back to the Nulhegan Band, which it described as the property’s original caretakers.

The deed transferred to the tribe’s nonprofit arm, Abenaki Helping Abenaki, capping a process of dialogue that had begun in 2023, after decades in which the land served as a joint Methodist and United Church of Christ camping ministry before those programs were suspended in 2015 and the property became a private retreat and rental facility. Framed by the conference as an act of “spiritual and moral” repair, the return fits a broader pattern of American religious institutions confronting their historical role in dispossessing Native communities.

But in Vermont, a land acknowledgment or a land return is never just a local story about a camp changing hands. It lands directly on top of one of the more bitter and unresolved disputes in contemporary Native American politics: whether the people receiving that land — Vermont’s four state-recognized Abenaki tribes — are who they say they are.

Who Are Vermont’s State-Recognized Tribes?

Vermont granted state recognition to four groups in 2011 and 2012: the Elnu Abenaki, the Nulhegan Abenaki, the Koasek Traditional Band of the Koas Abenaki Nation, and the Abenaki Nation of Missisquoi. None of the four hold federal recognition, which carries a much higher evidentiary bar. The federal government has found “serious questions about the existence of a tribe of Abenakis in Vermont who are a continuation of the historic Abenakis,” and denied federal recognition on that basis.

Vermont’s own bar was set lower and, crucially, was lowered further during the runup to recognition. In the years before the 2011–2012 recognitions, members of the groups seeking status pushed for, and won, the removal of genealogy as a strict requirement for tribal membership, meaning individuals could be recognized by the state as Native American or Abenaki without demonstrating direct descent from a historic Indigenous ancestor. Some advocates said they feared their personal genealogical information could be exploited, invoking Vermont’s own history of eugenics-era policies targeting people identified as Abenaki, and state lawmakers responded by allowing groups to trace membership in a shared kinship group through “other methods” instead of strict genealogy. The resulting 2010 state standard requires only that a substantial number of an applicant’s members are related by kinship and can trace that kinship “through genealogy or other methods,” a notably looser test than the federal standard, which requires continuous identification as a distinct Native American community back to at least 1900.

Vermont’s process also specifically excluded citizens of Odanak First Nation, a Quebec-based Abenaki nation that had denounced the Vermont groups years earlier.

The Northern Challenge

That exclusion has fueled a cross-border fight that has only intensified. Odanak and its sister nation Wôlinak are the two Abenaki communities with federal recognition in Canada, and their leadership has for years rejected the idea that Vermont’s bands are authentically Abenaki at all.

Rick O’Bomsawin, chief of the Abenakis of Odanak, has repeatedly denounced the Vermont groups as frauds, telling the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues that self-proclaimed groups from Vermont were stealing Odanak culture, identity, and traditions in a way that jeopardizes the nation’s sovereignty over its ancestral territory. Odanak’s objections are not new. The nation’s formal denouncement of the groups that would become Vermont’s state-recognized tribes dates to 2003, even though Odanak had initially been supportive of those same groups.

The dispute escalated sharply in the fall of 2023, when investigative journalism amplified the genealogical case against the Vermont tribes. Vermont Public’s three-part series “Recognized” drew on interviews with elected officials, tribal members, genealogists, and historians to question the historical basis for what it termed the “self-proclaimed Vermont Abenaki,” and VTDigger published its own detailed investigation around the same time. A parallel review by New Hampshire Public Radio of records and genealogies for regional leaders, including one Vermont state-recognized tribe, found no documented connection between those leaders and the federally recognized Abenaki nations in Quebec.

The genealogical offensive reached a new scale in October 2025. Odanak representatives unveiled a 730-page report tracing roughly fifteen generations of ancestry for five prominent leaders of Vermont’s tribes — including Nulhegan chief Don Stevens, Missisquoi chief Brenda Gagne, and Koasek chief Shirly Hook — arguing the research proved those individuals lack Native heritage. Odanak councillor Jacques Watso used the findings to renew calls for Vermont to formally reexamine its 2011–2012 recognitions, arguing that false claims have let illegitimate groups claim rights that belong to authentic Abenaki people.

Central to the northern nations’ case is the word “pretendian” — shorthand, increasingly common in both U.S. and Canadian Indigenous politics, for people who falsely claim Native ancestry. Speakers at a 2022 University of Vermont panel, including Odanak delegation members, said many of the members of Vermont’s groups are “pretendians,” and the same charge has recurred at multiple Vermont panels since. Odanak has pressed the point with peer-reviewed scholarship as well as public events. Darryl Leroux, a University of Ottawa professor whose research focuses on how some white settler descendants have adopted Indigenous identities, published a peer-reviewed article, “State Recognition and the Dangers of Race Shifting,” concluding that many members of Vermont’s groups have French-Canadian ancestry with little to no documented connection to actual Abenaki forebears. A group calling itself Abenaki Heritage, aligned with the Quebec councils, has cited that research directly, asserting in an open letter that Leroux’s work shows roughly 98 percent of members of Vermont’s four self-proclaimed groups have no Abenaki or other Indigenous ancestry at all, and arguing that documented genealogy — not oral tradition or self-identification — is the only legitimate basis for claiming Abenaki identity and its associated rights.

Odanak has also taken its campaign beyond panels and reports and into public messaging and direct pressure on Vermont institutions. In April 2024, the nation purchased a billboard in New York’s Times Square declaring “STOP Indigenous Identity Fraud!” and naming Odanak and Wôlinak as the “sole guardians” of Abenaki identity. Since 2023, Odanak’s leadership has written to dozens of Vermont organizations urging them to end partnerships with the four state-recognized tribes and work instead with Odanak and Wôlinak, and by late 2024 several of those organizations told reporters they were pausing or reconsidering their collaborations with the Vermont bands in response. Chief Rick O’Bomsawin has taken the campaign to international bodies as well, telling the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues that self-proclaimed groups from Vermont were engaged in a theft of Odanak’s culture, identity, and traditions that undermines the nation’s sovereignty over its ancestral territory of Ndakina.

Odanak’s leadership has generally dismissed evidence Vermont tribes point to in their own defense. When Vermont advocates raised a document from the Abenaki Alliance concerning Hydro-Québec, Odanak’s general manager Daniel Nolett called it a “smoke screen” rather than genuine proof of Indigenous ancestry. Nolett has also indicated Odanak’s interest is not purely symbolic: he has said Odanak First Nation would be interested in making its own land claim on the U.S. side of the border, though he acknowledged such a claim would face very long odds.

Odanak’s push has drawn support, and comparison, from scholars who study Indigenous identity disputes more broadly. Kevin Bruyneel, a Babson College professor and member of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, has noted that “pretendianism” debates have long been a fixture of Canadian politics and said he wasn’t surprised to see them center on Vermont.

Those calls have found only limited traction in Montpelier. A bill introduced by Rep. Troy Headrick that would have created a task force to review the validity of the state’s prior tribal recognitions went nowhere in the legislature.

The Vermont Tribes Push Back

Leaders of the state-recognized bands reject the challenge on both factual and philosophical grounds.

On the facts, Chief Stevens has said the genealogical record does exist, but was never made fully public. He has said that he and other band members submitted genealogical records to the state during the recognition process, but that this information was kept confidential to protect members’ privacy and shield them from personal attacks, and he has characterized the loudest critics as a small group of outsiders rather than ordinary Odanak citizens. Vermont tribal leaders have also argued that the sharpest criticism comes less from everyday Odanak members than from Odanak’s political leadership.

On the philosophy of the dispute, Stevens has argued that no single nation has the authority to police another group’s Indigenous identity. He has compared Odanak’s claim to sole authority over Abenaki identity to arguing that only Montreal, and not the whole of Quebec, could speak for French-Canadian people, given that history includes multiple Abenaki communities and tribes.

Others frame the dispute as a conflict between two entirely different ways of proving who you are. More broadly, defenders of the Vermont tribes have argued in the debate’s public back-and-forth that a demand for paper genealogical proof is itself a colonial standard — one that families living a subsistence lifestyle would rarely have satisfied, given that Vermont Abenaki families have historically relied on oral tradition rather than formal documentation. Framed this way, reliance on oral tradition is a matter of principle rather than an evasion of scrutiny.

Anthropologist Margaret Bruchac, who has studied the region’s Abenaki communities, has similarly questioned the entire premise of outside adjudication of identity. She has argued that no genealogist, historian, or tribal nation has an inherent right to dictate anyone’s ancestry, identity, or tribal membership.

Why the Fight Keeps Escalating

Part of what makes this dispute so persistent is that real stakes now ride on the outcome. Odanak has reportedly worked to drive a wedge between Vermont’s state-recognized tribes and the conservation and environmental organizations that have partnered with those tribes for years, putting some of those groups in an uncomfortable position. Vermont’s state-recognized tribes have, in recent years, become partners of choice for universities, environmental nonprofits, and now religious institutions seeking to make amends for historical dispossession — exactly the kind of partnership that produced the Covenant Hills land transfer. If Vermont’s tribes are not who they claim to be, critics argue, then land, funding, and cultural authority meant for genuinely Indigenous communities are instead flowing to people with no ancestral claim to it. If they are legitimate, then continued attacks amount to a second dispossession layered on top of centuries of the first — denying communities recognition on top of everything else they have already lost.

The University of Vermont has hosted multiple panels on the dispute, part of a broader statewide conversation about how the 2011–2012 recognitions were reached in the first place. Rich Holschuh, who chairs Vermont’s Commission on Native American Affairs — the body tasked with protecting Native heritage in the state and made up largely of members of the four recognized tribes — has publicly pushed back on the tenor of the criticism, at one point contrasting the tribes’ outstretched hands with the more combative posture of critics.

An Unresolved Question

Nearly three years after the “Recognized” series first amplified the dispute, and more than a decade after Vermont’s original recognitions, the core question remains unsettled by any authority both sides accept. The state of Vermont has shown little appetite for revisiting decisions it made in 2010–2012. The federal government has already ruled against federal recognition once. Odanak and Wôlinak have no formal power to overturn a state’s recognition of a tribe, only the platform to keep contesting it. And Vermont’s state-recognized bands continue to operate, partner with institutions, and now receive land, whatever the genealogical reports from the north conclude.

What the Covenant Hills transfer shows is that the practical consequences of this fight are no longer abstract. Land, once returned, does not un-return itself while a genealogical argument plays out in reports and radio series. Institutions deciding who to partner with, and governments deciding whose claims to credit, are making choices about a question that historians, genealogists, and tribal leaders on both sides of the U.S.–Canada border have not been able to settle among themselves.