November 9, 2026To the Community:
In late September, state Rep. Troy Headrick, I-Burlington, was shoved at a private gathering in Burlington. He had organized the invitation-only meeting at Rock Point with allies of the Abenaki First Nation at Odanak to examine the evidence behind Vermont's tribal recognitions.
When four members of the state-recognized Abenaki Nation of Missisquoi arrived uninvited and were turned away, one of them pushed Headrick backward with both hands. One man was charged with simple assault, and the court will decide that case.
Odanak's council condemned the attack, and Vermont allies asked the Vermont Commission on Native American Affairs to do the same. On Nov. 2, the Commission issued a statement shared with Vermont news media and published by the Waterbury Roundabout. Its statement never names Headrick, the assault, or the arrest. It calls Rock Point proof that “violence begets violence.” That statement deserves an answer, and so does the question beneath it.
Vermont's four state-recognized groups sincerely believe they are Abenaki. But belief is not ancestry, and every serious review of the records in 25 years has reached the same conclusion.
In 2002, Attorney General William Sorrell's office opposed the Missisquoi group’s federal petition, finding that state records described its members’ families as French Canadian. In 2007, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs agreed. Of 1,171 members with completed files, only eight, less than 1%, could show descent from a Missisquoi Abenaki ancestor, and all eight traced to one man from Odanak. By 1800, the Bureau noted, most of the historic Missisquoi had moved north to Odanak.
In 2025, Odanak released a 730-page study by Darryl Leroux of the University of Ottawa tracing five prominent Vermont tribal figures, including three sitting chiefs, back roughly 15 generations. Their ancestry was nearly entirely European.
Vermont leaders answer that census takers misrecorded Native families and that ancestors hid who they were. But hidden ancestry still leaves a trail in baptismal, marriage and land records. That trail is what these studies followed, and it leads to French Canadian families, not to Missisquoi. Odanak and W8linak*, whose citizens descend from the people who actually lived here, do not recognize these groups as Abenaki.
How did Vermont recognize groups the federal government had found wanting? Through a process built to say yes. Under Act 107 of 2010, applications go to the same commission that now declines to name an assault. Its scholarly review panels had to be acceptable to the applicant, and its seats go first to the state-recognized tribes. In at least one case, a reviewing panel included a scholar who sat on a Vermont Abenaki tribal council.
Most telling is who was left out. Odanak and W8linak, sovereign nations descended from the Missisquoi themselves, had no role. A process that lets applicants supply the evidence, helps choose the reviewers, and excludes the living nation whose identity is claimed is self-identification with a state seal on it.
That history explains the Nov. 2 statement. The commission was asked to say plainly that no one should be shoved for convening a meeting, and that people may gather and examine evidence without intimidation. A dozen words would have done it.
Instead, it offered a general opposition to violence and recast Rock Point as one more link in a chain of harm done to its own constituents. Presenting a shove as a reaction to the other side’s words is not a condemnation. It is an explanation, and explanations like this become permission.
A body that is both judge and party cannot referee its own members’ legitimacy, and on the evidence of Nov. 2, it cannot even call a shove a shove.
The Legislature should pass a bill to require independent review panels and bring Odanak and W8linak into the process, and should review the 2011 and 2012 recognitions. The commission should issue the statement it owed: What happened at Rock Point was wrong, and every Vermonter may gather, ask hard questions and follow the evidence without fear.
History is not served by protecting comfortable stories. It is served by records, honestly read, and by the courage to say what they show.
Ryan Geary
Local historian
Waterbury
*The term W8linak uses the traditional Western Abenaki writing system for the name of a federally recognized First Nation located in Quebec, Canada, that is at the center of an ongoing identity and legitimacy dispute with state-recognized Abenaki groups.