A Virtual Exhibit Curated by Cora Dow,
Bowdoin College, Class of 2024
Supervised by Aimée Keithan, Ph.D., former Museum Services Manager, PHC
Mainstream American education largely teaches a single story of early American history that doesn’t actually tell the story of early Americans. Instead, it centers on Europeans. Histories are in need of tellings that challenge this story and our perceptions of Indigenous people by focusing on the history of those who have stewarded and thrived in coastal Maine for thousands of years.
In the sixteenth century when Europeans began arriving in the area, they encountered Indigenous nations with millennia of complex and nuanced history, institutions, technology, languages, and society, which continued to change after European settlement.
In Northern New England, these nations are collectively known as the Wabanaki. They include the four federally recognized tribes of Maine: the Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, Micmac, and Penobscot. The Abenaki, who are not federally recognized, are also included. Abenaki people have owned coastal and inland Maine to New Hampshire and Vermont for thousands of years.
Unfortunately, we may never know what Abenaki people in the Pejepscot region called themselves before Europeans arrived, but they were at various times referred to as the Anasagunticook, the Androscoggin Indians, the Almouchiquois, the Pejepscot, the Etchemins, the St. Francis Indians, the Eastern Abenaki, and other names. Throughout this exhibit, the Wabanaki people who live in the Pejepscot region, or the long, rocky rapids part of the Androscoggin River near Brunswick, are referred to as Abenaki.
By centering the history of Abenaki people and highlighting how their work and actions have shaped this region, this exhibit adds crucial context to the story of this area. Items crafted by Abenaki people show specialized skills and established culture, and maps, letters, weapons, and other items made by Euro-Americans are considered from a different perspective.
While looking through this exhibit, think about what story you learned about the place you live in, and whose perspective it was told from. Consider who is left out of that story and how their version of events could be different.
Click through the sections below to view the exhibit. The “View This Section” tabs expand to present the text for that section, along with a link to view items in PHC’s collection related to its content. Below those tabs are additional items from other collecting institutions that relate to the topics covered. We are grateful to these sister institutions for sharing these items with us.
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Abenaki people have lived in Wôbanakik, their land, since the Frost Monsters, or glacial beings, withdrew 13,000-16,000 years ago. Alnôbak, the Abenaki people, lived in communities moving between seasonal camps along coasts and into the interior of the land that became New England. Some archaeologists speculate that at that time, the climate of southern Maine was similar to Labrador today and people did not live here year-round. They likely visited to harvest caribou, mammoths, rabbit, belugas, walrus, harp seals, and seabirds.
As Aki, the earth, warmed, communities grew and Alnôbak managed forests and cultivated resources such as berries, nuts, birches, spruce roots, milkweed, and nettle. They hunted deer, moose, waterfowl, and seals, and fished in rivers, along the coast, and on the ocean using plummets, weirs, and spears. Alnôbak traveled hundreds or even thousands of miles to utilize productive fishing grounds and trade for materials and items such as metals, soapstone, and precious stones. They first traveled using heavy dugout canoes and log ships. Around 3,000 years ago, Abenaki people began to build elegant birchbark canoes, which turned rivers into highways allowing frequent travel between the coast and inland Maine.
Abenaki people adopted ceramics technology around the year 700 BCE for cooking, storing, and transporting foods. One thousand years later, they started using bows and arrows to hunt large game, seabirds, and fish. Around the same time, Abenaki people around Brunswick and further south began growing corn, squash, and beans.
Contrary to the picture that most Americans grew up with, Abenaki culture, society, and technology is dynamic and constantly developing.
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The first European traders and colonizers to arrive in the Northeast encountered the villages that grew around these practices. Around 1500 A.D., Europeans began to arrive in the Northeast. What is now Brunswick was at this time a major Abenaki village located at the lowest falls of the Androscoggin River. Abenaki people here on the coast were some of the first people in Maine to interact with Europeans.
The lucrative beaver trade greatly changed the existing politics and economy of the region, altered the Wabanaki people’s seasonal rhythms, and threatened their territorial alliances. When Europeans began establishing settlements, the newcomers exhausted local food resources and sometimes even stole Abenaki stored food supplies. Some Europeans, including George Weymouth, the first Englishman documented traveling up the Androscoggin River, kidnapped Indigenous people and sold them into slavery in Europe.
Although Europeans visited the area around Brunswick throughout the sixteenth century, not until 1607 did the English establish a colony at Popham Beach. While this group interacted with Abenaki people in Pejepscot, the first European to settle in what is now Brunswick was Thomas Purchase in 1628. Following this first settlement, more Europeans began to buy land from Abenaki people and settle in the area. They benefited the trade economy, but some aggressively tried to acquire Abenaki land and resources.
Certain epidemic diseases had a devastating impact on Abenaki communities. When the French explorer Samuel de Champlain visited the mouth of the Saco River in 1605, he described the village “Chouacoit” as a “thriving settlement of cornfields.” Following Champlain’s visit, attacks from the northern Micmacs and a series of epidemics killed 75-90% of the people who lived in coastal southern Maine. By 1616, the once populous village of Chouacoit was “in a manner left void of inhabitants.” According to Dr. Frederick Wiseman, these deaths are still remembered with a reluctance to discuss them in detail. Any description of these events cannot do justice to the strength of the Abenaki people who survived, rebuilt their communities, and maintained their traditions and society following unimaginable tragedy.
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The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in America were marked by extensive violence against Indigenous people. The first of these wars, King Philip’s War, began in 1675 when English sailors, convinced that “all Indians could swim naturally like animals,” toppled a boat carrying the family of the leader Squando, killing his child. In Brunswick, simmering tensions over resources flared into open violence between Abenaki people and Thomas Purchase, whose unscrupulous trading practices had caused previous conflicts.
In spite of the disruption and depopulation caused by epidemics, Wabanaki leadership won King Philip’s War in southern Maine. However, they could not prevent an influx of English settlers following the conflict. One example of repeated escalation of violence at the hands of settlers took place near Brunswick a decade after the close of King Philip’s War. In 1688, New England Governor Edmund Andros ended a peace treaty by building a fort adjacent to the Pejepscot falls to forcefully claim access to key fishing grounds for English settlers. When the Abenaki gained control of the fort in 1690, Andros ordered Colonel Benjamin Church to bring 300-400 men from Massachusetts for the…
… killing, destroying, and utterly rooting out [of] the Enemy wheresoever they may be found.
~ Benjamin Church and Henry Martyn Dexter in The History of the Eastern Expeditions of 1689, 1690, 1692, 1696, and 1704, against the Indians and French, 1867.
The Abenaki people left Fort Andros before Church’s arrival, so he continued up the Androscoggin until he reached the Abenaki fort at Great Falls in Lewiston, which was led by Worumbo and Kancamagus. Although nearly all the Abenaki occupants of the fort were women and children, Church’s men took the families of leaders hostage, killed most of the other occupants, and destroyed the stockade, wigwams, stores of corn, weapons, and canoes.
Growing numbers of English settlements steadily encroached on Abenaki land and resources, generating conflicts throughout the eighteenth century. Abenaki leaders used diplomacy to control this encroachment and maintain sovereignty of their land. Even land sales included language specifying that Abenaki people retained rights to use and travel on the land in question. However, Abenaki people did use violence in response to settler violence, which included scalp bounties, organized to forcefully remove the Abenaki from their land.
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During the warring years of the mid-1600s through the American Revolution, many Abenaki people moved away from conflict and into safer, remote regions, before returning to their traditional lands during stretches of peace. According to the Euro-American historical narrative, following the end of King Philip’s War in 1676, Indigenous tribes in the region “wasted away,” as evidenced by diminishing numbers who traded or met with the English. It is likely, though, that concerns for their safety drove the Abenaki away from the Maine coast; the English were encouraged to use violence against Indigenous people with impunity.
Abenaki people remained in Maine despite their alleged “disappearance.” Many joined established Wabanaki communities, lived at the edges of white communities, or identified as white. Beginning in the nineteenth century, some craftspeople adapted Wabanaki art to meet the demand for souvenirs from New England tourists. As Abenaki people “disappeared” from white society at the end of the eighteenth century, visitors and residents of Maine viewed them as part of a romantic past.
White societal perceptions of Indigenous people in the 1800s were based on a simplistic and crude racial stereotype. Stereotypes dehumanize people, and archeologists and hobbyists thought nothing of exhuming and looting Wabanaki graves. True Indigenous history and culture was and is ignored in the name of “progress.” The dehumanization of Indigenous people pervaded American culture, from history books to school plays.
Slowly, the stereotypes about Indigenous people are beginning to be replaced by a more accurate understanding of history and culture. Following a long history of marginalization, Abenaki people have asserted their culture and history and as a result, Wabanaki culture in Maine has become more visible. Groups like the Dawnland Alliance in Androscoggin County and events such as art festivals provide opportunities to celebrate and share Abenaki culture. More recent organizations like Wabanaki REACH, the Abenaki Arts and Education Center, the Musée des Abénakis, Abbe Museum, and Ne-Do-Ba offer resources for learning about Abenaki culture, art, and history.
RESOURCES & FURTHER READING
This exhibit featured images and resources provided by:
Baker, Emerson W. “Finding the Almouchiquois: Native American Families, Territories, and Land Sales in Southern Maine” Ethnohistory 51, no. 1 (2004): 73-100.
Church, Benjamin, and Henry Martyn Dexter. The History of the Eastern Expeditions of 1689, 1690, 1692, 1696, and 1704, against the Indians and French. Boston, J.K. Wiggin and Wm. Parsons Lunt, 1867.
Clayton, W. Woodford. History of Cumberland Co., Maine. Philadelphia, Everts & Peck, 1880.
Congdon, Isabelle. Indian Tribes of Maine: With Particular Reference to Indian Activities in the Regions Around the Present Locations of Bath and Brunswick. Brunswick Publishing Company, 1961.
Ghere, David. “The “Disappearance” of the Abenaki in Western Maine: Political Organization and Ethnocentric Assumptions.” American Indian Quarterly 17, no. 2 (1993): 193-207.
LeCompte, Nancy. Alnôbak: A Story of Indigenous People in Androscoggin County. Androscoggin Historical Society, 2001.
Wiseman, Frederick. Voice of the Dawn: an Autohistory of the Abenaki Nation. University Press of New England, 2001.
Wiseman, Frederick. Reclaiming the Ancestors: Decolonizing a Taken Prehistory of the Far Northeast. University Press of New England, 2005.
Spiess, Arthur. “Early Contact Period Context.” The Maine Archaeological Society Bulletin 34, 2 (1995): 1-20.
Spiess, Arthur. “Maine Coast Prehistory and Paleoenvironmental Review.” Archeological Review, 2020.
Stewart-Smith, David. “Pennacook-Pawtucket Relations: The Cycles of Family Alliance on the Merrimack River in the 17th Century.” Papers of the Algonquian Conference 25 (1994): 445-468.
Wheeler, George Augustus and Henry Warren Wheeler. History of Brunswick, Topsham, and Harpswell, Maine, Including the Ancient Territory Known as Pejepscot. Boston, Alfred Mudge & Sons, Printers, 1878.
This exhibit would not have been possible without the edits, support, and advising of Dr. Aimee Keithan, former Museum Services Manager at PHC, and Dr. Patrick Rael, Professor of History, Bowdoin College.
I am also grateful to Dr. Bonnie Newsom, Dr. Micah Pawling, Dwayne Tomah, and Rebecca Poulson for proofreading and editing drafts of the exhibit, Theresa Secord for connecting me to scholars, and to Fred Koerber for his insight and advice.
Finally, thank you to Larissa Vigue Picard, Sarah Sharpton, and other staff and volunteers at the Pejepscot History Center for their work publishing the exhibit online, and transcribing, uploading, and scanning items in the collection.
About the Curator
Cora Dow is in the Class of 2024 at Bowdoin College. She researched, wrote, and chose collection items for this exhibit in collaboration with Pejepscot History Center as part of an independent study for her major in History and Visual Arts and Education minor. Cora is originally from Sitka, Alaska.