Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing from New England

Introduction

275 Introduction Lisa Brooks The petitions, prose, and poetry in this chapter originate from the waterways of Ndakinna, “our land” in the Western Abenaki language, from the survivors of hundreds of years of resistance and resilience in the lands now most commonly known as northern New England and southern Quebec. While part of the larger Wabanaki—people of the dawn, people of the east—“Abenaki” is the term that came to be used most frequently for (and by) those Native families who inhabited the vast network of waterways from Lake Champlain, the western “lake between” Wabanaki and Iroquoia, to the Kennebec River on the west, and north to the mission towns of Odanak and Wolinak on the St. Francis River, as well as to multinational towns above Kwinitekw and Kennebec such as Menassan and Megantic. The people and places of the Abenaki “home country” are connected by these waterways. It is no surprise that the central character in this chapter is the “long river” Kwinitekw, the Connecticut River that flows from its protected headwaters in northern New Hampshire through the countries of Koasek and Sokwakik, and all the way south through Mohegan country to the sea. While today it is the boundary between New Hampshire and Vermont, a river inundated with dams, old mills, and both industrial and agricultural pollution, it was once a superhighway of the eastern country, one of the most fertile places in the world, a cradle of agriculture that hosted numerous falls for bountiful salmon. It is a river that gathered families together. Kwinitekw remains a place lodged deeply in oral histories, in fishing and planting stories, and in collective memory. As the river begins its long recovery, its history and its songs are also being reclaimed and reimagined, including, as you shall see, by the writers who have made it their touchstone. It may be fitting that one of the first pieces in this chapter, the Petition at No. 2, emerges from a time when Abenaki people were just beginning to use writing as a tool to defend, protect, and reclaim the river of their birth. 276 abenaki Abenaki people fought fiercely for more than a century against English expansion into their homelands. Following the capitulation of their French allies, devastating losses due to warfare and disease, and the divisive politics of the American Revolution, Abenaki families remained in mission villages in Quebec, in the marshes and uplands of old villages and new colonial towns, and in groups of extended families who traveled old north country routes, gaining subsistence in the old way, through hunting, trapping, fishing, gathering, and trade, as well as day labor, logging, and small-scale farming. As Abenaki hunter Tahmunt Swassen told Henry David Thoreau, his hunting territory spanned an expanse from the northern Maine woods, where they then were sitting by a fire, to the Adirondacks and north to Quebec. Tellingly, Thoreau revealed in The Maine Woods, Swassen could “write his name very well” and was concerned with a law he had recently read that recognized Wabanaki hunting rights in Maine. Many of the ancestors of the writers contained herein traveled those same routes. While some remained very close to home, many families took the old superhighways of Kwinitekw, Molôdomek (Merrimack), and Kennebec south in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, returning to old villages or traveling to Massachusetts and Connecticut to seek jobs, holding a persistent sense of northern New England and/ or southern Quebec as home. The late twentieth century has been a time of reconnection, with families moving back up north to renew ties with the families who remained. It has also been a time of reconstruction, as we put the pieces of the puzzle back together, exchanging our family stories. Writing has been an important tool in this process of recovery. Piles of documents and boxes of family photos fill so many living room corners, and they have been brought out time and again at kitchen tables, weaving images and written words into oral histories. The pages of those writings are stained with coffee, maple syrup, and macaroni stew, the lasting evidence of our interactions. Mothers, fathers, and grandparents now tell ancient stories at those tables to their children, nearly forgetting they first learned them from reading the books of stories gathered and relayed with great care by Joseph Bruchac. The language work of Henry Masta and Joseph Laurent, for years passed around as worn photocopies, now weaves its way through the poetry of...