Mascoma Bank to Drop Native American Logo

Centuries after he is believed to have lived and more than 50 years after he was adopted as the symbol of Mascoma Bank, Chief Mascommah will disappear from the Upper Valley. The Lebanon mutual bank will no longer use as its logo an image that depicts the chief of the Squakheag Native American tribe spearfishing from a canoe.

The change accompanies an across-the-board program to update Mascoma Bank’s marketing materials that will encompass a newly designed abstract logo and color scheme. The aim is to position the bank as a certified “B Corporation” emphasizing Mascoma’s social responsibility and commitment to the community.

A silhouette of Chief Mascommah, whose Squakheag tribe was part of the Abenaki nation, has been Mascoma Bank’s logo since the 1960s.

Read the full article by John Lippman in the VTDigger, picked up from the Valley News.

More from Mascoma Bank on their name origins here.

Note: I would take a good deal of this background with a grain of salt.

East To Monadnock

From the peak of Bedegwajo/Round Mountain in West Brattleboro, VT, a line of sight running 27 miles due east to Menonadenak/Menadenak/Monadnock in New Hampshire crosses directly over the ridge of Wantastegok Wajo/Mt. Wantastiquet, on the east bank of the Kwanitekw/Connecticut River.

Wantastiquet

This story strikes close. I live in Brattleboro, Vermont, in the Sokwaki homeland. It’s the largest population center in the southeast corner of the present state of Vermont. It is known for having a distinctive “personality” – a diverse, tolerant, liberal town in a liberal state. But even Brattleboro seems to have turned its back and forgotten the people that belong to this land, and, for the most part, abandoned that close relationship with this wondrous landscape.

Looking upriver on the Kwanitekw, the Connecticut River, with the northern end of Mount Wantastiquet to the east, and the confluence with the West River, Wantastekw, just around the bend.

If you live here, you cannot escape the fact that this border town, nestled on both sides of the “Y” formed by the meeting of the West River and the Connecticut, is dominated and defined by the steep mass of Mount Wantastiquet to the east (elevation 1351′). Rising abruptly on the far bank of the river, on the New Hampshire side, its forested flanks form a steady yet subtly shifting backdrop to the comings and goings of the brick-faced Main Street. A good deal of the 4-mile-long ridge is protected public land, which thankfully keeps it in red, white, chestnut, and scrub oak; mountain laurel; white, red, and pitch pine; and rough ledge outcroppings frequented by hawks and hikers. Its name often trips up the visitor, but it is pronounced exactly as it is spelled. For the record, the mountain has had several different monikers since European settlement: Chesterfield Mountain (after the NH town within whose borders most of its bulk lies), Rattlesnake Mountain (after the population of timber rattlers that frequented its talus slopes), West River Mountain (more on that momentarily), and the current identifier, Wantastiquet. It is gratifying that the latter name has persisted, as it is very close to the Sokoki placename for this landmark.

A side channel of the West River, Wantastekw, in late spring.

The challenging spelling, of course, derives from its Abenaki origin but here the story takes a turn, as often happens with transliteration of native names. The mountain is, in fact, named after the tributary river which meets the main stem at its base, so by learning the source of the name we come to understand both features. Now called the West River (and thus the West River Mountain extrapolation), the Western Abenaki know it as Wantastekw; consequently, the long mountain which faces its confluence with the Kwanitekw is Wantastegok Wajo. We’ll work our way through the meanings… Conventional wisdom has it that “West River” is a simplification of the assumed meaning of “Wantastiquet,” usually given as “river that leads to the west.” Unfortunately, that translation is substantially off-base. Working with the original form Wantastekw, let us note the Abenaki word for “west” is ali-nkihl8t and no form of that noun appears here. More to the point, Western Abenaki linguist Jesse Bruchac has lent some clarity to the meaning of wantas- :  wan- (the root inside wantas-) can mean “forget or lost.” In this case: wantas = “a lost or misplaced thing” and tekw = flow (the ending -tekw is a commonly encountered Western Abenaki bound morpheme for “flow,” as in the moving water of a river). As an illustrative aside, it is interesting to note that wantastasid = “one who gives bad traveling directions.” Gordon Day recorded its meaning rather concisely: “literally: lost river, i.e. river on which it is easy to get lost or easy to lose the right trail.”  As for Wantastegok Wajo (the mountain itself), the -ok ending is a common bound locative suffix meaning “at the place of” and wajo is a free morpheme for “mountain.” Put it all together and we have “the mountain at the place of the lost river.” It’s not the river which is lost, but rather the unfamiliar traveler.

Also, it is fair to mention that there are a number of other citations of  the river’s original name Wantastekw being translated as “waters of the lonely way,” which hearkens much closer to the true meaning than today’s West River. And in a broader sense, a further extension of the usage of the name Wantastekw is the understanding that it was used by the Sokoki (and probably the earliest Europeans) to refer to the immediate locality we now know as Brattleboro. In this case, the proper Abenaki form would be Wantastegok, which would mean simply: “at the place of the lost river.”

A broad reach of the lower Wantastekw at dusk. 

So then, this begs the question: why was it so easy to lose one’s way? The river served as one of the main cross trails over the mountains to Otter Creek and Bitawbakw (Lake Champlain). Following its course to the headwaters, one travels northwestward 54 miles through Windham County, passing through Wantastiquet Pond in Weston, then a corner of Windsor County, before ending in Mount Holly in Rutland County. Over the ridge to Mill Creek a couple miles and Otter Creek is a clear route north and west to the expanse of Lake Champlain. The watercourses dwindle and fork many times, and the crossover at the drainage divide of the watershed would be anyone’s guess, although the trail was probably blazed by its earliest users. Was it a more difficult route to trace than the other watery Green Mountain cross trails (among them the Black, White, and Wells Rivers)?  Maybe I’ll  try to recreate it one day… a journey made by many generations.

Arrow Hill

On a mountaintop in Surry, New Hampshire, above the Ashuelot River, a large flat boulder sits in a clearing. Pecked and hammered into the surface of the stone is the image of a curved bow, with the bowstring drawn back into a sharp V and a three-feathered arrow, aiming southeast. Below the bow is a grid of three long horizontal lines, crossed by three short vertical lines, tilting in the direction of the arrow.

Marge Bruchac  Sokoki Homeland from Monadnock: K’namitobena Sokwaki, 2006.

The origin of this provocative wonder is, by nature, uncertain. Some believe it was carved by the original people of this land – the Western Abenaki band called Sokwakiak (or their ancestors). This southernmost group of the W8benakiak, people of the Dawnland, have inhabited this New Hampshire region of mountains, rivers, and lakes for time immemorial, a part of their homeland known as N’dakinna. Others have said the image is the more recent historic work of a Surry farmer named William Mason, which seems odd at the least. Anthropologist and historian Marge Bruchac makes further reference to historian Samuel Wadsworth’s account which seems to qualify the site as pre-dating the European presence in these hills, well before Mason.

Spring runoff courses down the granite bedrock of the trail.

 The last signpost to the peak.

Arrow Hill lies in the extreme southwest corner of the heavily-forested Cheshire County town of Surry, northwest of its better-known neighbor of Keene. It is a part of the Indian Arrowhead Forest Preserve, held by the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire’s Forests. The poised arrow etched into the boulder’s granite face points almost due southeast. I have heard that many hills in southwestern NH have such carvings, all directed toward a very special place, Mount Monadnock; I don’t yet know whether this is true. There is a line of sight cleared toward the prospect (although now overgrown) and in the winter you can see that singular  peak in the distance.

The sightline to Monadnock, brushing up but still visible in winter.

There are other lines engraved in the stone to the west side, a series of straight rays, some parallel, some oblique and crossing the others. Their significance is unclear and might be a subject for further investigation. The shallow relief  of the petroglyph is difficult to photograph, so I added a few more needles of the koa (white pine) towering overhead into the grooves to clarify the shape. Another reason the outline can be a challenge to distinguish is the fact that the granite inside the bow has been partially flaked off. One would hope that this was at least the work of the freeze/thaw cycle, and not vandalism, although I fear the latter since the neighboring lines are intact with no gaps in the surrounding matrix. Several other photographs located online also show the damage,

A pattern of graven lines immediately to the west of the drawn bow with its arrow.

A quick look at the Aln8ba8dwaw8gan (Western Abenaki language) etymology of the modern place-name Monadnock: Gordon Day says that “menonadenak” translates to “smooth mountain”, and there is also some credence to the idea that it could be from “menadena” meaning “isolated mountain,” working with the root “mna” or “mena” for island. The current popular explanation is that it translates as “one that stands alone,” which is not far from the latter derivation. Joseph Laurent held that it derived from “moniadenak” or “m8nadenak,” literally “money mountain” or more figuratively “silver mountain.” This seems questionable if it is true that “moni” did not come into use until late encounters with the European currency system. Significantly, however, this Abenaki-derived name “monadnock” has become the defining geologic term for any such type of mountain, anywhere in the world: a single peak rising alone from its surrounding plain.

 

Red Pine I

A mature grove of red pine, pasaakw, thriving atop Black Mountain in Dummerston, Vermont.

Written history tells us that when the British first ventured up the Kwanitekw in the early 1700s, they found a glorious stand of yellow pine covering Kchi Mskodak, the Great Meadows of Putney, Vermont. George Sheldon’s History of Northfield (MA) recounts “The Indians had not burnt over the country above West River; and the meadows in Putney and vicinity were covered with a magnificent growth of yellow pines.”  This fertile floodplain, encompassing 500 acres of well-drained sandy loam, projects eastward toward New Hampshire nearly a mile, with the Connecticut River sweeping in a broad arc around its fertile expanse. Today, we think of yellow pine as a group of North American species found from the mid-Atlantic states southward. Consequently, this description seems completely incongruous – until we recognize the intricate and evolving bond between a language and a people.

Red pine derives its common name from the more or less reddish cast to its loose, flaky bark, often with more color toward the top or crown.

It turns out that “yellow pine” was the eighteenth-century British settler’s vernacular for the red pine, Pinus resinosa; a web search turns up the fact that Northern Yellow Pine is, in fact, a term still used for salvaged, antique red pine which had been harvested back in those days. Red pine is notably denser and thus harder than its more common cousin white pine, and was used for flooring and shipbuilding extensively; early on, it was eagerly sought out by the European settlers and then, in keeping with colonial attitudes, clearcut. The stand at Kchi Mskodak certainly caught the attention of the merchants in New London, Connecticut, already a well-established center for shipbuilding. In 1732, a party of seventy men was sent upriver to cut the tall, arrow-straight pines for the use of the King’s Navy – it was British law that all such trees were Royal property. Accounts indicate that the trees were cut and floated down the river continuing into the following year. Save for Massachusetts’ frontier outpost 16 miles downriver at Fort Dummer (at the south edge of what is now Brattleboro, Vermont), this was an exceedingly rare venture into the northern unknown by the English interlopers.

As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?

Alexis de Tocqueville 1831

On the other hand, the native people, the Abenakiak,  knew this place and its grove of trees well. In the Western Abenaki language, this stalwart of the forest was called “pasaakw” – PAH-sah-ahk-wah – with two morphemes, pasa + akw combining in prototypical Algonquian polysynthetic style. The suffix -akw is seen often in the naming of trees, meaning a rigid object, or perhaps more specifically in this instance, a “woody stem.” The prefix pasa- is a bit trickier: it seems to translate loosely as “swollen.” To bolster that approximation, the more common descriptive prefix psa- means “to be full of.” This generates a compounded word that means “swollen tree” or “tree full of” and conjures the meaning behind the naming. My thanks – wliwni! – to Jesse Bruchac for his help in extracting the origins of this word; I will be citing his insight often.

In Red Pine II, we will look at the relationship between these two original inhabitants of N’dakinna, the land of the Sokoki, the southernmost band of Abenakiak. Whence the name pasaakw? How did these two relate to one another? How did the coming of the new people impact this affinity? What was the nature of this divide?