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115 Gabriel Acquin (1839–1901) Gabriel Acquin founded the St. Mary’s Reserve in New Brunswick and became famous as a guide, hunter, and performer. Among the many dignitaries he hosted in his homeland was the Prince of Wales in 1860; Acquin later traveled to England, exhibiting his canoe and wigwam. Acquin’s legacy is complicated. Historian Andrea Bear Nicholas has called his “a classic case of the colonized striving to imitate the colonizer in language, manners, and preferences, often to excess,” contending that “by his excesses in abandoning traditional values of conservation, he contributed also to the demise of the ancient Maliseet way of life.” Other Maliseet artists, however, have honored him, including the poet Mihku Paul (represented in this volume) and Martin Sabbatis, who produced a short animated film about Acquin for Fredericton’s Cultural Capitals of Canada celebration in 2009. It seems important to include Acquin in a consideration of Maliseet literary history, given ethnographer Garrick Mallery’s discussion, below, of his uses of awhikhigan, or birch-bark writings. Pictograph From Picture-Writing of the American Indians, by Garrick Mallery. Drawing courtesy of Chrestien Charlebois. [This figure], scratched on birch bark, was given to the present writer at Fredericton, New Brunswick, in August 1888 by Gabriel Acquin, . . . who spoke English quite well. The circumstances under which it was made and used are in [his] words, as follows: “When I was about 18 years old I lived at a village 11 miles above Fredericton and went with canoe and gun. I canoed down to Washademoak 116 maliseet Lake, about 40 miles below Fredericton; then took the river until it became too narrow for canoe; then ‘carried’ to Buctoos river; followed down to bay of Chaleur; went up the northwest Mirimachi, and ‘carried’ into the Nepisigiut. There spent the summer. On that river met a friend of my time; we camped there. “One time while I was away my friend had gone down to the river by himself and had not left any wikhe’gan for me. I had planned to go off and left for him this wikhe’gan, to tell where I would be and how long gone. The wigwam at the lower-left hand corner showed the one used by us, with the river near it. The six notches over the door of the wigwam meant that I would be gone six days. The canoe and man nearest to the wigwam referred to my friend, who had gone in the opposite direction to that I intended to travel. Next to it I was represented in my own canoe, with rain falling, to show the day I started, which was very rainy. Then the canoe carried by me by a trail through woods shows the ‘carry’ to Nictaux Lake, beside which is a very big mountain. I stayed at that lake for six days, counting the outgoing and returning. As I had put the wikhe’gan in the wigwam before I started, my friend on his return understood all about me, and, counting six from and including the rainy day, knew just when I was coming back, and was waiting for me.” ...

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