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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...
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