The Eastport attorney who started the case that led to the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act and then, supporters believe, was framed by state officials on a felony marijuana charge in 1968 to end his efforts was finally pardoned by the state on January 7. Donald Gellers, who died in 2014 in New York at age 78, was a strong advocate for the Passamaquoddy Tribe through community organizing and his lobbying for changes to existing laws while he worked as a lawyer in Eastport for eight years, starting in 1963.
     In issuing the posthumous pardon, Governor Janet Mills stated, "While this pardon cannot undo the many adverse consequences that this conviction had upon Mr. Gellers' life, it can bestow formal forgiveness for his violation of law and remove the stigma of that conviction. Let it also remind us of these guiding truths: That, when enforcing the law, proportionality is an essential component of fundamental fairness, and that fundamental fairness is the essential moral and legal promise that a thoughtful government makes to its people. And that history will long judge whether and how that promise is kept."
     Mills' statement acknowledges that "there is merit" to the claim that the state had sought to thwart Gellers' "outspoken political and legal advocacy" for the tribe. She points out that even the chief of the Maine State Police stated at the time that a felony charge for small personal possession of marijuana was severe; that his arrest and trial were all handled by the state's top officials, "a unique level of attention to a small personal possession case"; that the state allowed Gellers to leave the country rather than serve his sentence following his felony conviction, which was all that was needed to disbar Gellers and end his advocacy in Maine; and that the penalty for the co-defendant, Al Cox, who was the one in actual possession of the six marijuana cigarettes, was only to forfeit the $500 bail that was posted for him. While Cox simply forfeited the minimal bail, Gellers "was deprived of his entire livelihood."

A story about justice
     Mary Creighton, a former Pleasant Point tribal councillor who was a friend of Gellers, says, "I know for a fact that he was framed." She says that a tribal member who has since passed away would talk after Gellers' arrest about how he had placed marijuana cigarettes in the pockets of Gellers' vest, which was in his closet, while Gellers was in Boston filing the initial land claims case for the tribe. The tribal member said he had been working with people in the state government to frame Gellers, since the state "didn't want to lose the land that the Passamaquoddys laid claim to," Creighton says.
     Creighton adds that Gellers had helped her with a custody case and became a friend of the family. "I'd always known Don to be a gentleman. He was a decent person."
     Another tribal member, Dwayne Tomah, notes that Gellers' story is riveting. "It's about justice, it's about equality and demonstrating that doing the right thing is so important. Despite the pressures applied and his life being threatened, he rose above all that and sought justice for the Passamaquoddy people. He set the standard for providing justice for indigenous people." Tomah says that Gellers "exposed the corruption going on within the state," which included taking the tribe's lands and resources, mishandling its monies and abusing the rights of the people. "That's the reason why the state was so involved in this case. They wanted to make it difficult for him to continue the legal battle to right the injustices levied against the tribe."
     Madonna Soctomah, a former tribal representative, says she was moved by how Gellers' life was so changed by the arrest and conviction. "It gripped me in what the impact was on a human being's life in such a tragic way, when he intended to do something that might have been beneficial to the Passamaquoddy Tribe. It altered the rest of his life tremendously. It just brought me to such a feeling of tragedy for any human being who tried to do anything with good intent."

Advocacy for the tribe
     In a letter that Gellers wrote in February 1979 to request some payment for his work for the tribe, which he had never received, he related what he and tribal members went through during the years leading up to the land claims case. While practicing law in Eastport, he had worked for seven years in the 1960s as the tribe's lawyer, "alone, all of that time, against the whole State of Maine."      He wrote that he "was dealing with a people that had known so many defeats that hope, itself, was a victory." He noted that tribal members "died of malnutrition and burned up in their shacks. Getting arrested for anything meant getting convicted. Living meant begging the welfare Indian agent for groceries and clothes, having children taken from parents and placed for adoption in non-Indian homes, not voting for the legislature or serving on juries, and occasionally talking about land and treaty rights that no one ever respected. I stopped all that, and stopped it peacefully."
     While he was the father of the land claims effort that led to the 1980 settlement with the state, Gellers also accomplished much else for the tribe, including having the state legislature: create the Department of Indian Affairs; allow the tribe to make on-reservation ordinances, to reduce police harassment; approve a new Maine Indian Housing Authority Act that allowed the tribe to operate their own housing authorities; and pass a law giving tribal members the right to hunt for their own sustenance on reservation lands and to govern their hunting, fishing and trapping. He also got the federal government to allow the state's tribes to have their own anti-poverty program, which allowed for school children to have hot lunches and breakfasts. He helped tribal members get federal small business loans, set up a tribal newspaper and secured court returnings of tribal children taken from their families and defended tribal members in court.
     His efforts, though, meant that he had "acquired enemies because of my involvement" in helping the tribes, he wrote in the letter. He noted that his life was first threatened by a wealthy Eastport man who showed his law office clerk two bullets, saying they were for Passamaquoddy Chief George Francis and him, unless they stopped pressing the land claims case. "I wrote the man's lawyer, Oscar Whalen, who refused to answer me, even when I telephoned him about it."
     Another morning he awoke to find a sign on his lawn saying he was a communist, and the following week there was another sign with a swastika. He confronted State Rep. Kenneth Mills of Eastport about the signs, and while Mills did not say he had placed them, he "never denied it," wrote Gellers.
     Gellers lived in the Hobbs house, which also served as his office at the corner of Shackford and Middle streets in Eastport. The house may have a history in the fight for equality in the U.S., as local legend says it was as a safe house for the Underground Railroad, with a secret room built in the foundation to hide runaway slaves seeking their freedom in Canada.
     The house also was the location where the state ended up arresting Gellers. He alleges that the state used a tribal member and a "buddy" posing as an "armed Mafia gunman" who was actually a state police officer to set him up on the marijuana charge. The two had gone into his house and came and went for several days while Gellers was away. When Gellers returned, he found the two in his living room. They then called in "a squad of state policemen," who burst in and arrested Gellers for possessing six marijuana cigarettes.
     Gellers ended up being convicted on a felony charge of "constructive possession" of marijuana and was sentenced to two to four years in state prison, although no one had "ever gone to the state penitentiary" for possessing marijuana, he noted.
     The attorney who ended up taking over the land claims case from Gellers, Tom Tureen, swore to an affidavit that stated that a member of the Maine Attorney General's Office admitted that the AG's office sought to prevent the land claims suit from being heard in court and prosecuted Gellers for the marijuana violation, subjecting him "to terroristic measures never employed on anyone else."
John Kelly, who had been an assistant attorney general at the time of Gellers' arrest, is currently one of three members of the Governor's Board on Executive Clemency that recommends to the governor whether a pardon should be granted. During the board's proceedings on October 17, he recused himself from involvement in the Gellers pardon application. He has not responded to an inquiry concerning why he recused himself.

History now corrected
     In his letter to the board, Robert Checkoway, the Freeport attorney who petitioned for Gellers' pardon, working pro bono for Gellers’ family, wrote, "From a humble law office in Eastport, petitioner Don Gellers became the first lawyer ever to take up the cases and causes of Maine's Indians, fighting the establishment and prevailing culture. In the space of about 10 years between his move to Maine in the early 1960s and his forced departure he campaigned in court and the broader community for equality for natives, their right to public accommodations and to recognition by the federal government, and pioneered the effort to recover compensation for centuries of improper land transfers, which had divested them of their aboriginal holdings. His effort helped end the archaic and oppressive management of the Indian agent system and gradually turned the entire state from a pattern of oppressing and excluding our original peoples to one of recognition and closer to equality. The land claims case he started became the first of several other successful suits by other eastern tribes."
     Checkoway noted that Gellers was "an avowed counterculturalist" and had admitted using marijuana, "but the facts of his arrest just days after he returned from Massachusetts to file the original Indian land claims case created a strong public impression that the conviction was motivated by the state's desire to remove him from the case."
     Checkoway wrote that, following the conviction, Gellers, who was Jewish, was allowed to leave Maine and go to Israel rather than go to prison. He served in the Israeli Army, fighting in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, during which he was wounded, and then pursued religious studies. After returning to New York, he became a rabbi, and until his death in November 2014 he served without compensation as the religious official of the Moroccan Jewish Organization of New York.
     According to Checkoway, "Gellers remarried twice after returning to New York and fathered a daughter by his second marriage. When that marriage dissolved, lawyers for his ex-wife used the record of his Maine conviction to deny him custody of the girl. Unable to protect her, she fell into addiction and died young. The conviction for possession of marijuana in Maine had the ironic and tragic extended effect of preventing him from saving her from the danger of more serious drugs."
Following the issuing of the pardon on January 7, Checkoway stated, "The corrected history will now record that Don Gellers -- Rabbi Tuvia Ben‑Schmuel Yosef -- was a courageous advocate for civil rights, not an outlaw. The state of Maine considers him a citizen hero, a person who devoted his whole life to help others and make the world and our part of it a better place, and now without any demerits."
     He added, "The lawsuit brought by an unruly lawyer in Washington County 50 years ago which threatened to upend centuries of legal structures and land ownership was not, in the end, a threat too great for our own system to handle. Even after settling the fundamental legal issues of land transfer and ownership we still have a long way to go to meet our indigenous hosts with real fairness, but it can be done. Just ask what Don Gellers would do."