Cross-Cultural Collaboration: Native Peoples and Archaeology in the Northeastern United States

10. Green Mountain Stewardship: One Landscape, Multiple Histories

10. Green Mountain Stewardship One Landscape, Multiple Histories 96K>9 B A68N 6C9 9DCC6 GD7:GIH BDD9N he traditional Western Abenaki homeland encompasses a large geographical area consisting of what is now the entire state of New Hampshire, all of Vermont (excepting a portion of Bennington County), north-central Massachusetts, west-central Maine, and parts of Quebec Province in Canada. Within this area, both historically and contemporarily , exist a number of bands of Abenaki people. The Connecticut River is the geographic center of this homeland, lying between the White Mountains to the east and the Green Mountains to the west. In south-central Vermont, the Green Mountain National Forest (gmnf) has domain over a significant portion of this mountainous landscape. While many values are shared by Abenaki and gmnf personnel, others are not, since such values are embedded in different histories and worldviews . Issues of repatriation and site protection have been a matter of consensus among all Abenaki groups, including one common representative, until recently when the Missisquoi Abenaki elected to have a separate voice in these areas. The rest of the Abenaki Nation in the United States remains in consensus. In order to protect sites and places within the gmnf that are significant to Abenaki people, while actively managing these federal lands for the larger public good, there needs to be an appreciation and accommodation of these cultural differences by both parties. T Lacy and Moody  This chapter reflects on the collaborative work of the gmnf and the Missisquoi Abenaki, the only Abenaki band seeking federal recognition at this time. Efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect sites and to share crosscultural understandings have been ongoing since the late 1980s. The authors —David Lacy, the gmnf archaeologist since 1986, and Donna Roberts Moody, the Abenaki Repatriation Coordinator since 1995—address the challenges, successes, and prospects for continued collaboration. The first half of the chapter takes the form of a dialogue in which the tribal voice and the gmnf voice are differentiated by italicized and regular typeface , respectively. Our Dialogue In the Beginning We are the Abenaki. Our ancient stories, especially our Creation stories, de- fine us as a people in this land. They connect us to the past and provide us with a sense of place. They connect us to our Ancestors and provide an identity as to who we are. And so we are told that in the beginning Creator made beings of stone. These beings were large, clumsy—destroying everything in their path—and cold-hearted. In disappointment, Creator cast aside these ones. Creator then took his huge bow and, nocking an arrow, shot that arrow into an Ash tree. That Ash tree split open and from the heart of the Ash walked the first Abenaki man and woman, side by side. The Green Mountains in Vermont are one arm of the Appalachian Mountains, testament to millions of years of mountain building and the crumpling effect of tectonic processes. Eons of weathering and four geologically recent glacial epochs have resulted in a relatively low, rolling topography , with mineralogically complex bedrock underpinnings overlain by a blanket of glacial till. Today’s forest—northern hardwoods, giving way to spruce-fir at higher elevations—is the most recent in a long line of vegetative mosaics that have found this landscape hospitable over the last 11,000 years or so. Once upon a Time We are told by our ancient stories that we, the Abenaki people, have been here in this place we call N’dakinna, “our land,” since the beginning of time. Green Mountain Stewardship  We have stories that speak of the great ice covering the land and the great flood that followed. Archaeologists tell us we have been in this land for 10,000 to 12,000 years. This time line has evolved from their excavations and explorations of our ancient villages, sacred sites, and the graves of our Ancestors. They talk about a land bridge thousands of miles away. They are wrong, but they never asked us where we came from, and how or when we arrived here. Vermont was once alleged to be largely unoccupied until European colonization —an idea promoted in public school textbooks and town and state histories until the second half of the twentieth century (Calloway 1990; Day 1965; Haviland and Power 1994). Archaeological work over the last generation, however, has indeed established that there is a continuous Native American...