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Penobscot Nation Plans to Distill Vodka, Sell it to Casinos

The Penobscot Indian Nation has obtained federal permits to process, bottle and ship its own line of vodka that it plans to market to tribal casinos nationwide.

State regulators have yet to approve the plan, which is being eyed skeptically by some members of the tribe. And one former chief says the Penobscots’ ruling council could be violating tribal law if it attempts to build a distillery on Indian Island.

Little is known about the specifics of the vodka distillery initiative. Penobscot Chief Kirk Francis did confirm to the Bangor Daily News that the tribe has sought federal and state permits to operate a distillery at 31 Wabanaki Way on Indian Island, but he refused to comment further on an enterprise that he said didn’t even exist.

Some tribal members are calling for more details.

“Enough information has been released where everybody is talking about it, so I think it would be really good for tribal administration, tribal government to be upfront and be more open about what they are doing. It would just ease, I think, a lot of the potential rumors,” says Barry Dana, a former Penobscot chief who lost an election to Francis two years ago.

Dana says he’d like answers to a number of questions before the tribal council gives the final go-ahead for a subsidiary of the tribe’s parent company, Penobscot Indian Nation Enterprises, to move forward. He’d like to know who the major investors are, what the financial exposure to the tribe would be should the enterprise fail, and how many trucks per day would be negotiating the island’s narrow streets.

There are also concerns among tribal members, who want assurances that the tribal casinos will actually purchase the Penobscot Nation’s vodka and some sense of what kind of financial return the tribe can expect.

“It would be good to get the information,” Dana says.

Pine Distilling, which is headed by Chief Kirk Francis’s father, would oversee the bottling and rectifying process to create a brand of vodka called p8gui (ba-gui), a word in the Algonquin language that Dana says means “pure” or “clean”.

Because the tribe’s state permit application has the distillery operation located on the island, Dana says the council will have to take some kind of action to allow it, by exempting it from tribal law that bans alcohol from the island reservation.

“If the tribe, as a general membership, decides that they want to go with vodka and sell it to the casinos across the country, just have the plant not on the reservation. That would be a simple fix to this and I think a lot of people would feel better about it,” he says.

Dana says that he would prefer that the tribe’s business ventures did not include addictive substances, a position that tribal member Lisa Montgomery says she has heard from other Penobscots.

Montgomery has been circulating petitions to bring the issue back before the tribe in the form of a general meeting to discuss banning alcohol production on the island.

“To be able to bring this to a discussion where we could influence any policy of businesses happening on the reservation, we do have to address it from the tribal side with laws and ordinances that would occur there,” she says.

Montgomery says she has almost enough to signatures to bring the issue to a general meeting, which could be scheduled next month. Calls to Chief Francis and other tribal leaders were not returned.