One nation two worlds

CHARLESTOWN -- The arrival of the 20th century found the Narragansett Indians with little more than two grassy acres surrounding the tribe's stone church, a pocketful of spending money, and bitter memories.

A total of 324 tribal members had agreed, at the General Assembly's urging, to give up the tribe's land claims in exchange for $15.43 each and citizenship.

"There were one or two holdouts," medicine man Lloyd Wilcox says. "But eventually there was enough whiskey."

The tribe that once ruled vast expanses of Southern New England and, with the Pequots, dominated wampum trade, had effectively been disbanded. Some members scattered to Westerly, Wakefield, Connecticut, but were continually drawn to the church in Charlestown -- the only tribal land never to fall into a "white man's" hands.

HORATIO STANTON was one of those who refused payment.

"What good is it if you're signing away your life?" his granddaughter Alberta Stanton Wilcox says.

Stanton was among the dozens of Narragansetts who made their way along rutted cart paths to gather at the church deep in the Charlestown woods. Built from hand-hewn granite blocks quarried by Narragansetts, it served as a meeting place for tribal members.

Within those walls, Narragansetts prayed and plotted the tribe's future seated on wooden pews that faced the front door, so visitors would not come as a surprise. The women sang hymns as the men met at the council rocks, just outside, near the tribe's sacred spring.

"They claimed to be receiving the message of Christianity, but they were holding tribal meetings," says Wilcox, Alberta's husband.

"Until the turn of the century," he says, "it was not popular to be a Narragansett, or to gather in large numbers."

"They had to do everything very quietly; they couldn't broadcast," Alberta Wilcox says.

Many were poor, digging clams and oysters from coastal ponds and hunting in the forests to put food on the table. The Stantons trapped skunk, mink, and fox, whose pelts could get as much as $1 an inch from "sheisty" fur buyers. The family strove to maintain its "Indianness," Alberta Wilcox says, by living off the land.

Others prospered, purchasing cars, homes and fashionable clothing, adapting to the changed, more regimented world. Wampum had long given way to the "long green."

But some Narragansetts could not forget that they once commanded massive tracts of land. Rhode Island, tribal members say, is soaked in their ancestors' blood.

"Dad always took it for granted that [Charlestown] was ours," Alberta says of her father, Albert Stanton. "He told them, 'this is your property.' "

From soon after detribalization through the 1930s, Narragansett land claims would surface in the courts, at the State House, and in day-to-day life.

The Narragansetts intermittently sought lands stretching from Watch Hill to Warwick, arguing the 1880 detribalization agreement defrauded the Indians. Further, they claimed Chief Ninigret II -- known widely as King Tom -- broke treaties in the 1700s by selling off large chunks of shoreline to pay off his debt.

The General Assembly rejected a Narragansett claim to the coast in 1894. Four years later, in ruling against another shore claim, the Supreme Court found that the tribe no longer existed.

Court rulings and legislative actions did not lessen some Narragansetts' resolve. In 1915, Hattie Bennett, of Narragansett Pier, pleaded to the government for fair treatment. White people were restricting Indians' beach access, she complained to the federal Office of Indian Affairs.

"I hope you will explain how can these white people order us off our own ground," Bennett wrote.

A story in The Providence Daily Journal in 1921 detailed the Indians' efforts: "While there is no immediate cause for a feeling of alarm in Rhode Island, certain signs point to an uprising of what remains of the once powerful Narragansett Indians that roamed this part of the country for years unknown before the arrival of Roger Williams. It is not an uprising that has to do with determination to go upon the war path, but one through which the descendants of the tribe, it is declared, will seek to assert their title to certain lands in Charlestown."

The Narragansetts, the reporter wrote, were interested in a tract of swamp land where they hoped to grow tobacco as well as other sections of the shoreline.

A decade later, the Rev. Daniel Sekator unsuccessfully sought $4 million in damages for lands he argued had illegally been taken from the tribe, including most of Charlestown, West Greenwich, and part of Exeter.

"Although he is in his 78th year he says he does not care to sit idly by in the twilight of his life and let his birthright go unchallenged," The Providence Sunday Journal reported.

THE NARRAGANSETTS benefited from a shift in national Indian policy in the early 1900s. Congress granted all Native Amercians citizenship in 1921, and 13 years later set up procedures for tribes to seek federal recognition as self-governing organizations under the Indian Reorganization Act.

That same year, the Narragansetts incorporated as the Narragansett Tribe of Indians and drafted a constitution. It dictated that the tribe would have a medicine man, or powwow doctor, and Indian scouts to keep order at meetings. Members had to prove they were linked by blood to the 1880 detribalization list. Elections would take place every other year.

Using a horse and cart, Albert Stanton joined other members of the reconstituted tribe in building a stone longhouse at the edge of the former reservation. There, by the light of a single bulb, the Tribal Council continued to plot the return of their lands.

Journal photo / Steve Szydlowski

Alberta Stanton Wilcox's grandfather refused the state's $15.43 payment for tribal land. "What good is it when you're signing away your life?" she says.

TRIBAL LEADERS were paying attention in the 1970s, when the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy filed a landmark land-claims suit in Maine.

The late Lucille Dawson, the Narragansetts' historian, briefed the council about the tribes' efforts to regain 12.5 million acres and billions of dollars in back rent. Dawson, who was Alberta Wilcox's sister, worked with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Lawyers for the tribes argued that Maine and Massachusetts had violated federal law in purchasing the land from the tribes without Congressional approval in the 18th and 19th centuries. They cited the Indian Nonintercourse Act of 1790, a federal law signed by President George Washington that said Indian land couldn't be sold without federal approval.

The same argument applied in Rhode Island.

"Sure as hell what was done to us didn't have federal oversight," Lloyd Wilcox says.

The Narragansetts enlisted the law firm representing the Maine tribes, Pine Tree Legal Assistance.

On a sparkling fall day, Wilcox picked up Pine Tree's lawyers Thomas Tureen and Barry Margolin at Westerly Airport in his 1962 Thunderbird. The group drove to Charlestown and went to work.

In January 1975, the Narragansett Tribe filed suit, seeking the return of 3,200 acres stretching from Route 1 north to Narragansett Trail in Charlestown. The case -- which would become one of a dozen similar suits along the East Coast -- clouded land sales in Charlestown for more than two years.

"We're absolutely prisoners in our homes," said Claire Platt in a 1977 Journal interview. "For the past three years I've felt like I've been maintaining a house that isn't mine."

After more than a year of private talks, a settlement was reached in March 1978 between the tribe, state, town and federal government. It gave a Narragansett-controlled land corporation authority over 1,800 acres in Charlestown. Nine hundred acres had been ceded by the state and the federal government gave $3.5 million to reimburse private land owners for the remaining 900 acres. Under the deal's terms, the land would be bound by state civil and criminal law.

The tribe had a land base.

THE TRIBE'S 1,800 acres, the 1880 detribalization list and the Narragansetts' continuous quest for their ancestral lands would prove crucial in helping the tribe regain yet another prize: federal acknowledgment.

In that same stone longhouse -- referred to by the medicine man as the "citadel" -- tribal leaders began documenting the tribe's history.

They amassed 15 volumes of information, including newspaper clippings, Rhode Island and Colonial records, and tribal documents. Perhaps the most compelling piece of evidence would be the 324 names on the detribalization list created by the General Assembly.

"In 1880, the powers that be, with a flourish of their pens, proclaimed that the tribe no longer existed," Lloyd Wilcox said at the time. "But we never agreed with it, or felt that we'd stopped being a tribe."

The Narragansetts petitioned the U.S. Interior Department's Bureau of Indian Affairs for recognition in 1979.

On April 11, 1983, the federal government affirmed what Wilcox knew all along.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs wrote: "We recommend that the Narragansett Indian Tribe be acknowledged as an Indian tribe with a government-to-government relationship with the United States and be entitled to the same privileges and immunities available to other federally-recognized tribes by virtue of their status as Indian tribes, as well as having the responsibilities and obligations of such tribes."

"Basically, it's letting the world as a whole know what we ourselves always know," said Lucille Dawson at the time. "We've had such a long, hard wait. It isn't any change in ourselves. It's for other people who haven't wanted to acknowledge what we were. They wanted to believe we'd assimilated or disappeared totally, instead of acknowledging that we do, indeed, exist."

So ended a painful chapter in the Narragansetts' history. Federal recognition opened the doors to federal assistance with housing, education and health care.

It also gave the tribe status as a sovereign Indian government. Federally recognized tribes have the power to make policy, set tax rates, and in certain cases, operate gaming under terms set by federal law and precedent.

Indians throughout the country were exercising their rights -- including the Mashantucket Pequots, who in 1986 opened a high-stakes bingo just over the state line.

The Narragansetts were poised to do the same.