Obomsawin: The Myth of Native American Extinction Harms Everyone

Cluelessness about Native people is rampant in New England, which romanticizes its Colonial heritage.

This article by Mali Obomsawin (shared below in its entirety; link here to the online version) appeared in The Boston Globe Septmeber 15, 2020. Her comments at publishing: “Since the Globe published an article a few months back claiming that the Wabanaki are extinct, I bullied them into publishing an article I wrote about the erasure of northeastern Natives You can read it here. I’ll just say that white fragility has too much influence over the editing process, but I did what I could to say what I must.”

In college, I attended a rally my friend organized to discuss the constitutionality of flag burning. Predictably, his newspaper op-ed provoked a group of militantly patriotic New Hampshire locals to attend, in defense of the American flag. During the tense gathering, I began chatting with one of the flag defenders, pointing out that the flag doesn’t represent all Americans or make everyone — for example, Native Americans — feel safe.

To which he responded, “Come on, you can’t go back that far, and there aren’t even any Indians left!”

Unique among ethnic groups in the United States, Native people are told constantly, in myriad ways, that we are extinct, when tens of thousands of us live in this region alone. Public cluelessness about Native people is rampant, especially in quaint, rustic New England, which romanticizes its Colonial heritage from Plymouth Rock to its charming “Colonial” bed and breakfasts. But being told to your face that you don’t exist never gets any less weird.

I’m a citizen of the Abenaki First Nation at Odanak, part of the larger Wabanaki community in what has been designated as the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada. The borders declared in the Colonial era fragmented Wabanaki homelands of the Abenaki, Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Mi’kmaq, and Maliseet nations. To us, our loose borders are marked by major waterways: the Saint Lawrence River (Ktsitekw) to the north, the Hudson River (Muhhekunnutuck) and Lake Champlain (Betobakw) to the west, and the Atlantic Ocean (Sobagw) to the east.

Thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement, the balloon of blissful ignorance encompassing white racism has been popped, at least for now. Native people have also benefited from the racial awakening that many white people are experiencing, as monuments as well as mascots and team names with racial slurs are being challenged.

Like the Black Lives Matter movement, we want more than a costume change for white supremacy: we want a fundamental overhaul and dismantling of its systems. As difficult as it may be, tackling anti-Native racism requires that white people confront the centuries-long project of trying to get rid of us.

Native Americans face deep-seated discrimination in this country. Beginning over 500 years ago, the settler-Colonial attempts at ethnic cleansing have incorporated tactics of systematic land theft, environmental racism, and revisionist history. Today, it’s convenient to believe that Native people are extinct, because it distances white Americans from the legacy they inherit from early settlers — who committed atrocities specifically and uniquely so white people could live and prosper here today — regardless of when your family arrived.

Erasure is the art of collective forgetting, and one of the most effective tools of racism. Crucially, it absolves the United States from addressing injustices festering at its foundation — and the fact that Native people are still here resisting. Erasure nurtures ignorance through systemic miseducation, stereotyped iconography, and popular culture. Because, like the patriot at the rally, it’s much easier to say the flag represents all Americans if “all” selectively excludes the oppressed.

The version of history that many of us learned in school perpetuates the myth of Native extinction: that after several wars, treaties, and diseases, the Indians died off. Disputed land went to the victors, locking Native people into their chapter of natural history, like dinosaurs or dodos. A neatly bookended Native existence.

What do we really know about the land we occupy and our Native neighbors today? How has “collective forgetting” become integral to American culture?

Ojibwe scholar Jean O’Brien’s book on Northeastern Native invisibility, Firsting and Lasting, points to New England’s unique historiography. One of the earliest targets of English and French conquest, the region was a testing ground for settler colonialism. By the mid-1600s, self-appointed amateur historians were curating a national origin story that required tales of Native people being conquered to characterize the burgeoning society. They sought to define New England as “the cradle of the nation and seat of cultural power.”

Constructing timelines of the “first” and “last real Indians,” writers simultaneously conveyed the unquestionable modernity of white people and projected that the Native race would soon “vanish” from this land. The national mythos they cultivated became embedded in the tradition of US history writing and teaching, and still deeply affects how Native people are perceived (or not perceived) in New England today.

As a Wabanaki person educated in Maine public schools, I “learned” of my own extinction in these terms from my white history teachers. In middle school, I learned of “Pierpole,” the “last” Abenaki s my teacher described him f Farmington, Maine, who lived in the late 1700s and sold his land to white people. A state law passed in 2001 required Maine public schools to teach Native American history, but my Advanced Placement US History teacher didn’t even cover the names of the Wabanaki nations, whose land the school occupies.

Without incentive to glorify settler-colonialism, scholars unearth less-censored histories. They identify settlers who “cleared” Wabanaki land through organized violence, biological warfare, Western agricultural practices, and coerced treaties. Some settlers attacked Wabanaki cultures and lifeways through Christianizing missions—Harvard and Dartmouth are two that would go on to become elite American universities. These scholars find contempt for Native humanity at the core of American identity. Without it, the United States could not exist.

Colonial settlers posturing as historians wrote legends for future white generations to be proud of. Why should their descendants monumentalize Hannah Duston, who scalped six Abenaki children and four adults in 1697? Or Christopher Columbus? It suggests that real American patriots did the heroic work of clearing a space for white people, and excuses the genocide it entailed.

The house of cards that is American patriotism rests upon collective amnesia and the advancement of historical myths — because ignorance protects us from shame, and denial bars us from problem-solving. Today, as monuments topple and assumptions about this country falter, many people are more closely examining their biases, finding they’ve been shielded from history by white supremacy in education, government, and historiography.

Time will never cure foundational injustices. Nor will monuments — although questioning them is necessary for telling honest histories. While we work to perceive our neighbors living in different realities than us, and become critical of systemic power, we must understand that allyship is a lifelong re-education. We must investigate the assumptions on which our realities are based, and our own occupation of this land. Ultimately, in a nation built upon racism, erasure, and land theft, we must pursue their antitheses: anti-racism, Indigenous knowledge and leadership, and returning land to Native peoples.

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Mali Obomsawin is a citizen of the Abenaki First Nation at Odanak and contributor to Smithsonian Folklife Magazine. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.

New Abenaki Language School in Vermont

Learning a new language can be both daunting and rewarding. And perhaps no other language school in the U.S. does it better than Middlebury College and its famous Middlebury Language Schools.

That’s why Middlebury’s new School of Abenaki, a pilot program for 2020 which wrapped up recently, promises to become an asset to the school’s overall program in the coming years.

The secret of the internationally acclaimed Vermont language school is its intensive, immersive approach. Students not only learn a new language but they are also live it by being taught the language’s culture underpinnings.

Approximately 20 students lived, learned, and interacted with Abenaki, Vermont’s indigenous language, during June and July.

Link to the original article in The Sun, from The Vermont Eagle.

Kwenitekw – The Long Story

It is a traditional understanding that Creation is continual – the only constant is change. What we see now was once something else, and what may come afterward will only be known when it is here. All that we encounter is made of the same substances… combining, recombining, transitioning, growing, fading. It has all “always been here” and it is still here. We are each a part of everything else in this whole we call Creation, in a very pragmatic manner, and even now there is change underway: things will be different afterward but Creation continues.

To state that something is “exactly this or that” is to not see the situation as it truly manifests itself. This is the mind of separation and objectification – the illusion of control – which, after all, is the process of colonization, and the (literal) force that has been and is having a great effect upon our existence here on this Earth. When we step out of a recognition that we are in a continually evolving relationship with everything around us, we move away from balance and toward increasing disarray and dysfunction. We are no longer fulfilling our roles and responsibilities.

We see the world in part, for at least several reasons. Internally, our individual life lessons color our experience; in other words, we can only understand the world in terms of what we already know of it, and if we encounter something unfamiliar, we either learn from that moment, or not. Externally, our cultures frame our worldview; they provide the tools, including language, by which we make meaning and interpret our intersections with our surroundings. And, on a practical, material level, our degree of perspective is necessarily limited by both the physical location at which we are situated, and by how much attention we devote to the moment. We see what is before us, if we are present there and then, using our full senses – and those need not be limited to the basic five. There are many ways to be “sense-itive.”

All of this suggests that there are multiple, equally valid experiences of existence – many ways of being – and all of these entities are experiencing each other at the same time. There are layers of relationship, always in motion and shifting, seen and unseen, moving between forms and effects, all present at once and energized by the Spirit within. There is no “one objective way of being,” since all is in constant flux and centered on the interactions of that moment. This is not license for carelessness and anarchy, but a call to recognition and responsibility.

This is an Indigenous view of the world. This is why Place is so important. These interactions and overlapping realities are shaped by the ways that the entities of a particular place are relating to each other, in the moment – they are present, together, in that Place. In any other location, there would be necessarily be a different set of actors, interacting in different ways. The dictionary definition of an Indigenous person is “ the original people of a place.” The critical characteristic here is the landscape within which the People (and every other entity there) are connected; the Place is the lens through which they define themselves. They, and the Place, are the same thing. It is no accident that the Abenaki word “tôni” means both “where” and “how.” The setting matters that much.

Quite often, this is the way that Aln8ba8dwaw8gan (the Western Abenaki language) works… A word may evoke more than one meaning at the same time, since there is more than one possible reality, and the language allows for that. A term may have a direct, descriptive significance, and at the same time it may make a metaphorical reference. It can be a launching point for a deeper exploration of significance or suggestion, totemic for an entire story or understanding. That the language structure itself is polysynthetic – combining smaller, individual root words, known as morphemes, to add inflection – means that a single word can express a complex concept.

This is the case with Kwenitekw (KWEN- ee – took – uh, the last syllable almost voiceless), the Abenaki word for today’s Connecticut River. On a pragmatic level, it is usually taken to mean “Long River”. The two morphemes that impart inflection in this word are “kwen-” and “-tekw”, with the “i“ connector. “Kwen-“ is an adjectival modifier suggesting extended length and usually translated as “long” or “tall”, a spatial dimension. And “-tekw” is a bound suffix, used for water in the form of rivers, tides, and waves. At first examination, this results in the straightforward “Long River.” And it is a long river – the longest in the region – flowing southward over 400 miles, from the eponymous series of Connecticut Lakes at the US/Quebec border to the Atlantic Ocean at Long Island Sound. But it doesn’t stop there.

It has been said that the Abenaki did not focus on the idea of the River as an object unto itself, a stand-alone geographical feature. Of course, in the grand web of inter-relatedness, it certainly is not. Rather, it is a unifying presence, a vast watery web of connections, drawing together the rainfall, snowpack, brooks, ponds, vernal pools, marshes and swamps, and tributaries of an 11,260-square-mile watershed. Where today we see a dividing boundary between Vermont and New Hampshire, the Kwenitekw is more inherently the central heart of a vast community of communities, the Abenaki homeland of Ndakinna.

The Abenaki (and the Wabanaki, by extension) see themselves as river-centric people, using the place-based paradigm of indigeneity, applied to their various dwelling places in the lush, well-watered mountains of the Northeast. Scholar Lisa Brooks makes mention of this in her relation of the Native leader Polis, who lived on the Presumpscot River in the early 18^th century. When he travelled to Boston, protesting colonial abuse and usurpation of the Presumpscot, he referred to it as “n’sibo” – “the river to which I belong.” Each band of Abenaki people had their own river, or other body of water, each with its own associated name – which typically became their name for themselves as well. The tributaries of the Kwenitekw provide examples: Wantastekw, Ammonoosuc, Ashuelot, Mascoma, Ompompanoosuc, Nulhegan, Pocumtuk. These places (often at confluences) were centers unto themselves, a network of relations connected by the River, but also by kinship, trade, culture, diplomacy, seasonal gathering, and more, down through the generations.

By allowing these cultural understandings to illuminate underlying concepts of the two constituent morphemes, the name Kwenitekw can evoke something much more encompassing and suggestive than simply Long River. “Kweni-” can also suggest “duration”, as in a continuance – a length of space/time. An ongoing, sustained series of connected moments: a story line. A cognate, perhaps, to what the Aboriginal People of the Australian continent call a dreaming track or a songline. And the suffix “-tekw” more closely means means “flow” as in “water in dynamic motion” – thus, it is used for rivers, tides, and waves – but not lakes, ponds, and bays. Rather, it is water as the essence of life – moving and shifting, transitioning from one place to another – it is imbued with power.

So, while Kwenitekw can be seen to express the “Long River” as a rather straightforward toponym, it can also describe an expansive concept. In sentence form, it might be expressed as “a continuous, connecting flow of spirit-power in transition.” One might think of it as an Abenaki expansion of the expression attributed to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus “No man ever steps in the same river twice…” When this broadened perspective is absorbed, it begins to inform many other concerns, such as relationship, change, presence, responsibility and balance, to suggest a few. This is the way of it.

This essay appeared online in the Mt. Kearsarge Indian Museum blog on March 25, 2020. I encourage you to visit them, in Warner, NH, when you have an opportunity.

Temez8was: Cutter (Harvester) Moon

I was unable to finish this post in a timely manner, within the past, actual month (!) – but in the interests of having a complete cycle, I post it now. Tonight begins the new month, but we will take that up very shortly. I submit this entry as I had begun to draft it mid-month.

The eighth month of the Abenaki lunar calendar is the Cutter (Harvest) Moon, Temez8was, following the preceding seventh month of Temaskikos, the Grass Cutter Moon. This is the time when the first fruits of the summer planting – squash and beans among them,  and the gifts of field and forest – blueberries, blackberries, and their kin, begin to ripen and are ready for harvesting. The month began in this sun cycle with the new moon on July 31, 2019, and we are now just beginning to wax toward  the full moon August 15th, which gives the name.

The month’s name  – similar to the previous – derives from the root tem- (also spelled tam- or simply tm-) meaning “to cut, to sever tranversely, to chop” plus -ezo (or -izo) for moon (kizos) with -was signifying “one who”.

 

We should keep in mind that a moon may have more than one name, depending on the region and the people there, the predominant activities of the season, and evolving realities.  Other names used for this time, equally apropos for the harvest time, are Mijow8gankas ala (or) Michinikizosak – Meal Maker or Eating Moons. Another one is Kawakwenikas, the Gatherer or Wild Harvester, as the voluntary bounty of our Mother is also given freely in late summer, for which we give great thanks. Kchi wliwni, Nigawes – nd’alamizi!

 

Temaskikos: Grass Cutter Moon

 

The hair of our Mother, wlim8gwkil mskiko, sweet grass – literally, “sweet smelling grass” – is one of July’s many gifts. Artwork by Jackie Traverse, Ojibwe

Sweet Grass …is a gift to the people from Mother Earth. It is said to be part of her hair, and the braided strands represent mind, body and spirit. Since sweet grass promotes strength and kindness, it is often used in healing circles and in ceremony to allow positive energy, kind thoughts and kind feelings to surface through any pain and suffering.

My Mother Earth is under the ground, surrounded by rocks known as the grandfathers. Her hair grows through the earth’s surface to allow us to pick sweet grass, providing medicine and a gift for the people. Take only what you need when picking sweet grass – offer Mother Earth tobacco in appreciation for the gifts she gives to us all.

–Jackie Traverse, Anishnaabe-Ojibwe

The seventh month of the Abenaki lunar calendar is the Grass Cutter Moon, following the preceding sixth month of Nokahigas, the Hoer Moon. This is the time when the new sprouts of the year’s planting appreciate some nurturing care, in the competition of their warming rush toward the sun. The month began in this sun cycle with the new moon on July 2, 2019, and we are near witnessing  the full moon which shines in two days, July 16th, and gives the name.

The compounding word derives from three roots: tem- (also spelled tam- or simply tm-) meaning “to cut, to sever tranversely, to chop”, and maskiko (also mskiko), meaning “grass”, and -kos as a combination of “one who” and “moon”.

Now that we are in midsummer, n8winiben, the abundance of the growing season surrounds us. Crops are growing, fruit and nuts are ripening, our other-than-human relations are raising their young. The sweetgrass (Hierochloe odorata) the living hair of our Mother, is long and lush, gleaming and bright green in the meadows. It is time to harvest the strands with gratitude, braiding and drying them in a sheltered place – the sweet scent filling the air and reminding us of our Mother’s continual care.

A moon may have more than one name, depending on the region and the people there, the predominant activities of the season, and evolving realities. Culture is not static, neither is it right or wrong – it is about being appropriate and “in community.” Two other names used for this time, equally apropos for their own reasons, are Sataikas (Blueberry Maker) and Pad8gikas (Thunder Moon). You can readily understand why…

 

Nokahigas: Hoer Moon

The sixth moon of the Abenaki lunar calendar is the Hoer Moon, following the planting moon (fifth moon) of Kikas, the Field Maker Moon. This is the time when the new sprouts of the year’s planting appreciate some nurturing care, in the competition of their warming rush toward the sun. The month began in this sun cycle with the new moon on June 3, 2019, and we are nigh on to the full moon which shines tomorrow, June 17th, and gives the name.

The word derives from two roots: noka- meaning “to soften” as in hoeing the earth, and -higas, a combination of “one who” and “moon”. Another name for this moon is the Strawberry Moon, in appreciation for the delicious earthly gift of the season: it is called Mskikoikas, after the Abenaki name for the strawberry itself, mskikoimens, “the little grass berry.”

And so we enter into Niben, the bountiful season of summer…

This Land Is Whose Land? Indian Country and the Shortcomings of Settler Protest

Mali Obomsawin has hit this one out of the park. She brings these truths home to Ndakinna and holds them up clear, bright, and strong. All I can ask is “Read this through carefully, take it to heart, and share widely.” It is ALWAYS about the Land and the People, inseparable.

Why do so few Americans know about Indian Country? Because the government continues to fight Native nations for land. Because American patriotism would be compromised by a full picture of American history. Because there is no one to hold patriotic historians accountable for writing Native people out of history books. The legal and moral foundation of this country is fragile, and by erasing Native people from the public consciousness, the slippery topic of “whose land is whose land,” (and why and how?), can be sidestepped altogether.

Ignorance is an accessible popular tool: it doesn’t require citizens to take up arms, acknowledge or interact with the intended target, leave their comfort zones, or jeopardize their status. As a weapon, ignorance is cheap, deniable, and nearly impossible to trace. Finally, ignorance is passively consumed and passively reproduced, cinching Native invisibility.

Link to the complete article in Smithsonian Folklife.

Full article as pdf: This Land Is Whose Land

Nebi, Abenaki Ways of Knowing Water

A just-released short film by Vince Franke of Peregrine Productions, LLC, created to support the watershed education programs of Lake Champlain Sea Grant, UVM Extension, the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, and to help preserve these stories for the Abenaki and others. Funding was provided by NOAA, Sea Grant, and an anonymous donor.

Centering on Bitawbagw/Lake Champlain and then water in general, the film is a series of interviews with people in the Native community expressing their understanding of  being in relationship with life-giving water. Each story teller provides their own unique interpretation; I was honored to participate in this group effort with Chief Don Stevens, Chief Roger Longtoe Sheehan, Chief Eugene Rich, Melody Brook, Lucy Cannon Neel, Cody Hemenway, Morgan Lamphere, Bea Nelson, Fred Wiseman, and Kerry Wood.

#WaterIsLife

Direct link to Vimeo here.

Testimony for VT S.68, An Act Regarding Indigenous Peoples’ Day

Video links for ORCA Media/CCTV coverage of Committee hearings – testimony and debate – for S.68  of the 2019-2020 Session.

1. Senate Committee on Government Operations. S.68 – Indigenous People’s Day. Recorded February 28, 2019.

2. House Committee on General, Military, and Civil Affairs. S.68 Indigenous Peoples’ Day recorded April 10, 2019.

 

Elnu Abenaki S8gm8 Roger Longtoe Sheehan on Sacred Sites in Vermont

From the YouTube channel of the “Year of Indigenous Peoples of the Americas” Cultural Initiative, a program of SUNY Empire State College. For this new virtual residency curriculum, a series of videos has been created with indigenous culture keepers sharing various aspects of their people’s understandings.

In this production, S8gm8 Roger Longtoe Sheehan speaks about the Abenaki relationship with the land and rivers of Ndakinna, and how these interactions take place within their worldview. The interview took place in June, 2018 at the Abenaki Heritage Weekend annual event at Lake Champlain Maritime Museum. By request of Vera Longtoe Sheehan, a co-producer of the film, I contributed some still photography from Kchi Pontekw/Bellows Falls, VT for the video.