Hmm... well... as someone who's been involved in native land claim issues, what I will say off the top of my head is this:

1) Natives from back east in the north-east region were among the first to adopt European technology, and they tend to be the Europeanized in their habits, not the least of which is how and when to get in on a financial deal.

2) Even in the sub-arctic and the plateau and pacific-north west regions, where the natives have not had contact with Europeans for as long, they've got a keen sense for commerce, and how to use aboriginal land-claim issues to wring some money out of a deal.

3) Band politics are viscous, and every band with a land claim tends to be dominated by one or two families.

Which means:

Given that these are natives from the north-west region, it's unlikely that they've really been paying so much attention to their old religions.

The last to hang onto their old ways were the plains Indians, and they have managed to keep a softened-down version of the Sun Dance going, but it's nothing as seriously extreme as the original form of the Sun Dance.

Even if they had been hanging onto some sort of ceremony, it's very unlikely that an ability to watch an unobstructed view of sunrise across the Sound was a key part of it, otherwise there would already be an understanding that on such-and-such days when they are having their ritual, sailors are not to be sailing across the Nantucket Sound on such-and-such days between the hours of such-and-such... has there ever been any such understandings?

It's sounding thin... they're playing on white guilt and sentiment, and what they really want is for someone to figure out who the leading family of the band is, and to go talk to them and make a deal to cut them in on some of the profits from the windmills.

If it was me, I'd just go the reserve, ask to talk to whoever's in charge, sit down, and talk turkey, and make a deal, and there's lots of ways to get something back for cutting them in... i.e. if they really look in that direction so much, then they can keep an eye out for trespassing saboteurs, or they can be hired and trained to do some of the basic maintenance, etc. etc. yadda yadda.

So many people never think to do what native Americans are world class at... and that's *talk trade*.

The only gotcha is something that's always backfired on *them*, and that's that when you make a deal, you've made a deal, so you stick with it, and they got snookered time after time after time by whites who would not stick to their side of the deal.

To them, it's a common-sense issue, such that, if you've made a deal, then you've made a deal, and that's it. The notion of making a deal and breaking it is twisted thinking, and the wonder always is, why did you waste time making a deal when you had no intention of sticking to it... we could have have just gone to war...

But the natives didn't understand that the reason so many of those early white settlers were here was because the rational aspects of European society found itself dealing with hooligans who had *no* common sense nor sense of fair play, and so those hooligans were told by the rationals to get the heck out or stay and get hung, and so the irrationals hopped boats to the Americas, and played the games of double-dealing, that would have got them hung in Europe, on natives who didn't figure out until too late what kind of trash they were dealing with.

Make a deal with the band, and *stick* to it, and everyone will get along okay.