Dear Tribal Family,

There’s been a tremendous amount of great work that’s taken place at our Tribal Community and Government Center over the past few weeks. I’d like to highlight a few of them in my column that stood out for various reasons.

Last month we made great progress with the Town of Mashpee to further strengthen our government-to-government relationship.  Also, our Powwow Committee has been working tirelessly to organize the traditional home coming of our powwow. Our Housing Department is now accepting housing applications for the initial phase (42 units) of our Meetinghouse Road Housing Development. Finally our tribal body approved our annual operating budget at the May 20 General Membership Meeting.

I want to first talk about the initial work I highlighted above regarding recent actions taken by the Town of Mashpee and their unequivocal support of the Mashpee Wampanoag Reservation Reaffirmation Act and its swift passage.

At their regularly scheduled Board of Selectmen's meeting on May 21, town leaders unanimously approved support of our legislative efforts and affirmed the Inter-Governmental Agreement established in 2007.

Working through any previous concerns over the proposed legislation in such a productive and positive manner is a true testament of the strong commitment between the Town and Tribe.

As I previously stated, it has always been our intent to assure that the agreements made by and to the citizens of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and the citizens of the Town of Mashpee are upheld

Further I applaud the Town of Mashpee's elected Leadership for urging the Committee members of the House and Senate to swiftly act on the passage of this critical legislation on behalf of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe in order to protect our reservation land.

I also want to thank all of the Tribal citizens that attended our May 20 General Membership meeting and cast their budget vote. The approval of the annual operating budget was a show of support for the work we’ve been doing at our Community and Government Center to keep Mashpee moving forward.

I want to thank our Treasurer, Gordon Harris, Tribal Administrator Leslie Jonas, Department Heads and the staff in our finance department for preparing and presenting the annual budget.

We’ve made great progress over the past month and I look forward to continuing to carry this momentum forward to the coming weeks and months. I hope to see you all on the Powwow trail July 6-8 on our ancestral homeland.

Kutâputunumuw;
Chairman Cedric Cromwell
Qaqeemasq (Running Bear)