Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing from New England ed. by Siobhan Senier (review)

It is difficult to fit into the short space of a book review the magnitude of what Dawnland Voices is and does for American Indian literature and history. This anthology is organized into ten sections, chronicling the ten Nations indigenous to what is now referred to as New England—Mi’Kmaq, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Abenaki, Nipmuc, Wampanoag, Narragansett, Mohegan, and Schaghticoke. These ten, interrelated sections write and right cartographies and histories beginning as early as 1640 and include contemporary pieces from writers as young as ten. Each section contains no less than seven and as many as twenty-six authors, spanning three centuries. The introductions to each section alone give the reader a wealth of details regarding Native peoples to this area.

As well as writing histories, this significant volume is informative regarding contemporary decolonization work. Some of the pieces directly address decolonization, while others more implicitly so. The multiplicity of contributors includes scholars, prolific writers, chiefs (some of whom are women), community leaders, members of military families, petitioners, award-winning authors, students, authors from the same family, artists, and musicians. Dawnland Voices provides a space for many first-time writers, as well as hauntingly beautiful pieces from their ancestors. The collection cracks open the category of literature, the first work being the magnificent piece of beadwork adorning the cover, as well as a wampum reading, a pictograph and its descriptive narrative, recipes, short stories, poetry, petitions, calls to action, and letters to colonial leaders. Dawnland Voices eloquently asserts itself into the frustrating tenet that there just aren’t any Native authors from New England. One wonders how this tenet could be possible, given the sheer number of authors in this volume, but then is reminded of the sophisticated forms of erasure that are described by the authors themselves.

Dawnland Voices does many things, one of which is to center Indigenous concepts of time and disrupt the linearity and forgetful nature of settler-colonial time. Taken together, the pieces in Dawnland Voices enact narratives that exist in the past and the present and that shape the future. Juana Perley (Maliseet), introducing her grandfather Henry Red Eagle’s short story, The Red Man’s Burden, speaks of “the frustrations and difficulties that many Native Americans faced then as well as today” (114). Authors write in a tense that seems lacking in the English language, only remotely captured in the phrase “continue to.” This collection of authors speaks intergenerationally onto the land and landscape, describing how multiple generations have learned from the land for numerous generations, knowledge that will carry into the future.

Often the reader encounters complex perspectives on life, love, and loss. In Clay Pots and Bones, Lindsay Marshall (Mi’Kmaq) writes a lamentation, asking to know why the changes took place, making familiar land foreign. Larry Spotted Crow Man (Nipmuk), from his first book, Tales from the Whispering Basket, identifies self and community in the face of a history of colonial literature that defines Indigenous peoples: “One thing about Indian people is that they know how to have a good time and laugh, even when life is at its toughest” (419). Spotted Crow Man then describes how the abundance of surrounding Nipmuk storage baskets, medicinals, and aromas of food are interrupted by the colonizing knock at the door that could mean (has meant) children or land, stolen.

There are many reclamations of land and landscape, reclamations of cartographies that throw into tumult US and Canadian settler-state maps. Authors enact memory, describing the relationships contained in Native names for places such as Meductic, Molian (Montreal), Pithiganitegw (River Nicolet), Kubek (Quebec), and Koattegw (Pine River). Trudie Lamb Richmond (Schaghticoke), in Why Does the Past Matter? Eunice Mauwee’s Resistance Was Our Path to Survival, challenges the inaccuracies present in settler colonial historical accounts of the Housatonic River:

Most did not recognize the importance of how these communities in the Housatonic River Valley...