se price. This gave the tribe almost $30 million in cash and $23 million to be paid off in installments over 20 years. The tribe used some of the money for social welfare programs, built a Community Center at Indian Township and distributed the rest to individual tribe members. Each Passamaquoddy received about $2,000 a year over about five years until the entire lump sum profit was gone. The Passamaquoddy kept ownership of the scrubber technology, which uses waste products to convert acidic emissions into salable by-products and could have become the tribe's next big money-maker. The Department of Energy and the Spanish buyers of the plant have since agreed to fund the construction of a $9.6 million prototype scrubber at the Maine plant (Cohen 1). Of the Passamaquoddy's other investment, the radio station was sold at a loss, and only Northeastern Blueberry and the trunk-liner factory remain in tribal hands (Waldman 2).The Passamaquoddy Indians were the first tribe to go shopping for investments, and this made them a symbol for other Indian tribes. Dozens of the nation's 500 federally reorganized Indian tribes have, in recent years sharpened their business skills and begun to aggressively persue the kinds of deals and joint ventures with corporations, new factories to be built on reservations, and control the mining and drilling on their lands. The Mississippi Choctaws' five auto-parts factories and one greeting-card operation not only have raised tribal employment to more than 80 percent, it has also made the tribe one of the state's fifteen largest employers of workers. Other tribes, such as the Salt-River Pima Maricopa, of Arizona, New Mexico's Jicarilla, Apache, and the Devils Lake Sioux, of North Dakota, have likewise built well-managed tribal enterprises (Coben 2). Through a combination of bad advice, bad judgement and bad luck, the Passamaquoddy and the Penobscot investment never made enough money to lift the tribes out ...
