The Penobscot Dance of Resistance: Tradition in the History of a People, and: Katahdin: Wigwam’s Tales of the Abnaki Tribe (review)

The Penobscot Dance of Resistance focuses on the cultural history of one of the major native peoples in the present state of Maine. By delineating the story of this one specific group, the Penobscot, Pauleena MacDougall joins those scholars who trace the individual cultural threads of particular peoples that form the rich tapestry of American history. Too many works purporting to deal with Native Americans weave together shoddy stories based on bits of fluff gathered from multiple distinct cultures. The documentary research essential to understanding each native culture and its history, as well as its interactions with other native groups and with various European polities, requires considerable effort. MacDougall’s goals are to be lauded, but her execution leaves much to be desired.

MacDougall’s excellent prologue offers a summary of her interest in the Penobscot. She specifically cites James Axtell’s warning that scholars should master the documentary record and “not . . . bow to political pressures” (p. 7, quoting “A Moral History of Indian-White Relations Revisited,” The History Teacher 16:184, 1983). MacDougall, however, reveals from the outset that she will generalize from the Penobscot data to all Native American peoples, with the “hope that [from such effort] we can learn more about the reality of the Native American experience” (p. 13). The book began with MacDougall’s “dissertation, ‘Indian Island, Maine: 1780–1930,’ [and] here extends back in time” (p. 13). The long first chapter, however, begins after World War II and focuses on recent Penobscot political activism. This opening, and the structure of the book as a whole, is remarkably similar to Neil Rolde’s Unsettled Past, Unsettled Future (Tilbury House Publishers, 2004), a much more journalistic account of the “Maine Indians.”

Chapter 2, “Land, Power, and Reverence: Core Teachings That Sustain Resistance,” provides only a pastiche of references to folktales and literature, mostly as recorded by Frank Speck and Frank Siebert. MacDougall neglects to consider other renditions of these folktales (but see her more effective comparative work, reviewed below). A historical summary continues here and into chapter 3, including a discussion of the belief that disease epidemics “left [the Penobscot] particularly vulnerable” (p. 55). MacDougall notes some population figures (p. 84) but fails to reference Dean R. Snow’s elegant work (“Microchronology and Demographic Evidence Relating to the Size of Pre-Columbian North American Indian Populations,” Science 268(5217):1601–4, 1995). Chapter 4, “War Dance: Shifting Strategies in the Dance of Resistance,” never addresses the strategies used nor how and when they shifted. Although “land” is included in the title of chapter 2, early land sales are briefly noted only here and in the context of modern native land rights. MacDougall’s discussion of these rights is based on only one secondary source (p. 80, n. 44). MacDougall makes no mention of the extent of early land sales and ignores much of the important work of Harald Prins and Bruce Joseph Bourque, among other available sources.

Penobscot participation in the American Revolution is summarized in chapter 5, “Liberties and Lands,” but MacDougall omits historical developments critical to understanding land dealings after 1785. Her depiction of Penobscot resistance to the acculturative processes through religious means (chapter 7) focuses on the retention of Catholic rather than native rituals. MacDougall also suggests that formal schooling was a mechanism for cultural conservation, although most scholars have seen it as a major agent of change. Chapter 8 focuses on Penobscot efforts to retain political sovereignty in the fifty years after Maine became a state in 1820. The final two chapters review traditional skills of hunting...