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CURRENT READ.
When Gluskabe, the legendary culture hero of the Penobscot tribe at the center of countless stories handed down through generations, hears that people today are still telling his tale, he laughs, overjoyed that “still, they remember me,” as the story goes.
It only made sense, that Penobscot language master Carol Dana, along with collaborators Margo Lukens, a University of Maine English professor, and Conor Quinn, a University of Southern Maine linguistics professor, would name their new book — a collection of some of the powerful, imaginative and often very funny Gluskabe stories, in both English and in Penobscot — after the hero’s delight at being remembered.
“Still They Remember Me: Penobscot Transformer Tales, Vol. 1,” published last month by the University of Massachusetts Press, is the first of Dana and company’s planned two volumes of stories in Penobscot and English.
Its primary purpose is as a teaching tool for Penobscot people who wish to relearn their language, though it has immense scholarly value as well.
“This is a way to help young Penobscot people who are growing up Anglophone to find their way back to Penobscot, and hopefully understand it and internalize it a little more easily,” Lukens said. “Beyond that, I know there will be lots of people who use it for Native American literature classes, and there will be academics that will want to read it. In that sense, it’s for anybody who wants to know more about Penobscot stories and culture and identity.”
Penobscot language historian Carol Dana holds a copy of the book she wrote with Margo Lukens and Conor Quinn. Credit: Linda Coan O’Kresik / BDN
Dana’s decades of work with the Penobscot language began in 1982, when she was a young scholar studying with Frank Siebert, an eccentric and often deeply problematic self-taught linguist who had spent most of his life studying the Penobscot language.
Though his relationship with the Penobscot people could be adversarial and paternalistic, Siebert did develop the writing system for Penobscot that was officially adopted by the tribe — an invaluable tool for language preservation. The last fluent Penobscot speaker, Madeline Shay, died in the 1990s, but people like Dana and others are keeping it alive through scholarly work and through classes and workshops held on Indian Island.
Among Dana’s many projects was, in 2015, a collaboration with Lukens and theater artist Amy Roeder that adapted some of the Transformer Tales — as told by tribal elder Newell Lyon to anthropologist Frank Speck in 1918 — into short plays. Those plays ended up being performed in 2016 by the Penobscot Theatre Company’s Dramatic Academy, in both Bangor and at Acadia National Park, as part of its centennial celebrations.
The plan for “Still They Remember Me” came directly out of the experience of seeing onstage the stories of Gluskabe, his grandmother Monimkwe’su and the clever, wise and sometimes mischievous animals. Dana said that, initially, she and some fellow speakers of Penobscot and of Maliseet, another Wabanaki language that is very similar to Penobscot, would just get together to talk and listen and make sure they had everything correct.
“We’d gather, we’d have a meal, and we would tell the stories. We were doing winter storytelling, which is how it was always done,” Dana said. “It was like a way of celebrating. This is our culture. This is how these stories were transmitted.”
Once all the stories were in order, Dana and Lukens enlisted the help of Conor Quinn, who works with Siebert’s writing system and who is working with other colleagues on an updated full dictionary of known words in the Penobscot language, which they hope to see published sometime in 2022. Quinn had actually already translated a few of Lyon and Speck’s stories utilizing Siebert’s writing system, just for fun.
“As a teaching tool, these stories are a lot easier to read and make a lot more sense than a dictionary, if you’re reading Penobscot for the first time,” Quinn said. “When the dictionary comes out, I think it will be much more interesting to people now that there’s a text they can reference.”
Penobscot language historian Carol Dana (right), along with UMaine professor Margo Lukens signs a copy of their book to give to a friend. Credit: Linda Coan O’Kresik / BDN
For this first volume, these tales are about Gluskabe when he was younger, and the next volume will showcase stories from when he’s older. They tell of Gluskabe stalking a great moose, attempting to control the wind and how he learned to make canoes and navigate the river successfully. Land — mountains, ocean, forest and especially the sacred Penobscot River — is as much a character in the story as people are.
The book is printed in a landscape format, to accommodate the long, descriptive Penobscot words that would otherwise be cut off if printed in a portrait format. Quinn said it has the added benefit of allowing those who are studying the language to draw pictures and take notes in the blank spaces. The book is free to members of the Penobscot Nation, and $24.95 for everyone else.
The phrase “transformer tales” — a name given by early 20th century anthropologists to many types of different indigenous stories across North America — has resonance far beyond its academic meaning. Gluskabe literally transforms everything, from the landscape to the conditions under which the people that follow him — the Penobscot — will have to live and survive and thrive.
Dana hopes that, countless centuries after such tales were told by Penobscot people over a meal on long winter nights, they continue to have the power to transform.
“I hope this will transform how people see us,” Dana said. “I read somewhere a long time ago that if you want to get to know a people, you study their folktales. These are our folktales. If you get to know our stories and what our values are, you will understand us.”
It only made sense, that Penobscot language master Carol Dana, along with collaborators Margo Lukens, a University of Maine English professor, and Conor Quinn, a University of Southern Maine linguistics professor, would name their new book — a collection of some of the powerful, imaginative and often very funny Gluskabe stories, in both English and in Penobscot — after the hero’s delight at being remembered.
“Still They Remember Me: Penobscot Transformer Tales, Vol. 1,” published last month by the University of Massachusetts Press, is the first of Dana and company’s planned two volumes of stories in Penobscot and English.
Its primary purpose is as a teaching tool for Penobscot people who wish to relearn their language, though it has immense scholarly value as well.
“This is a way to help young Penobscot people who are growing up Anglophone to find their way back to Penobscot, and hopefully understand it and internalize it a little more easily,” Lukens said. “Beyond that, I know there will be lots of people who use it for Native American literature classes, and there will be academics that will want to read it. In that sense, it’s for anybody who wants to know more about Penobscot stories and culture and identity.”
Penobscot language historian Carol Dana holds a copy of the book she wrote with Margo Lukens and Conor Quinn. Credit: Linda Coan O’Kresik / BDN
Dana’s decades of work with the Penobscot language began in 1982, when she was a young scholar studying with Frank Siebert, an eccentric and often deeply problematic self-taught linguist who had spent most of his life studying the Penobscot language.
Though his relationship with the Penobscot people could be adversarial and paternalistic, Siebert did develop the writing system for Penobscot that was officially adopted by the tribe — an invaluable tool for language preservation. The last fluent Penobscot speaker, Madeline Shay, died in the 1990s, but people like Dana and others are keeping it alive through scholarly work and through classes and workshops held on Indian Island.
Among Dana’s many projects was, in 2015, a collaboration with Lukens and theater artist Amy Roeder that adapted some of the Transformer Tales — as told by tribal elder Newell Lyon to anthropologist Frank Speck in 1918 — into short plays. Those plays ended up being performed in 2016 by the Penobscot Theatre Company’s Dramatic Academy, in both Bangor and at Acadia National Park, as part of its centennial celebrations.
The plan for “Still They Remember Me” came directly out of the experience of seeing onstage the stories of Gluskabe, his grandmother Monimkwe’su and the clever, wise and sometimes mischievous animals. Dana said that, initially, she and some fellow speakers of Penobscot and of Maliseet, another Wabanaki language that is very similar to Penobscot, would just get together to talk and listen and make sure they had everything correct.
“We’d gather, we’d have a meal, and we would tell the stories. We were doing winter storytelling, which is how it was always done,” Dana said. “It was like a way of celebrating. This is our culture. This is how these stories were transmitted.”
Once all the stories were in order, Dana and Lukens enlisted the help of Conor Quinn, who works with Siebert’s writing system and who is working with other colleagues on an updated full dictionary of known words in the Penobscot language, which they hope to see published sometime in 2022. Quinn had actually already translated a few of Lyon and Speck’s stories utilizing Siebert’s writing system, just for fun.
“As a teaching tool, these stories are a lot easier to read and make a lot more sense than a dictionary, if you’re reading Penobscot for the first time,” Quinn said. “When the dictionary comes out, I think it will be much more interesting to people now that there’s a text they can reference.”
Penobscot language historian Carol Dana (right), along with UMaine professor Margo Lukens signs a copy of their book to give to a friend. Credit: Linda Coan O’Kresik / BDN
For this first volume, these tales are about Gluskabe when he was younger, and the next volume will showcase stories from when he’s older. They tell of Gluskabe stalking a great moose, attempting to control the wind and how he learned to make canoes and navigate the river successfully. Land — mountains, ocean, forest and especially the sacred Penobscot River — is as much a character in the story as people are.
The book is printed in a landscape format, to accommodate the long, descriptive Penobscot words that would otherwise be cut off if printed in a portrait format. Quinn said it has the added benefit of allowing those who are studying the language to draw pictures and take notes in the blank spaces. The book is free to members of the Penobscot Nation, and $24.95 for everyone else.
The phrase “transformer tales” — a name given by early 20th century anthropologists to many types of different indigenous stories across North America — has resonance far beyond its academic meaning. Gluskabe literally transforms everything, from the landscape to the conditions under which the people that follow him — the Penobscot — will have to live and survive and thrive.
Dana hopes that, countless centuries after such tales were told by Penobscot people over a meal on long winter nights, they continue to have the power to transform.
“I hope this will transform how people see us,” Dana said. “I read somewhere a long time ago that if you want to get to know a people, you study their folktales. These are our folktales. If you get to know our stories and what our values are, you will understand us.”
PREVIOUS READS.
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https://www.thegatheringsbook.com/
In a world that requires knowledge and wisdom to address developing crises around us, The Gatherings shows how Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples can come together to create meaningful and lasting relationships.
Thirty years ago, in Wabanaki territory – a region encompassing the state of Maine and the Canadian Maritimes – a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals came together to explore some of the most pressing questions at the heart of Truth and Healing efforts in the United States and Canada. Meeting over several years in long-weekend gatherings, in a Wabanaki-led traditional Council format, assumptions were challenged, perspectives upended, and stereotypes shattered. Alliances and friendships were formed that endure to this day.
The Gatherings tells the moving story of these meetings in the words of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants. Reuniting to reflect on how their lives were changed by their experiences and how they continue to be impacted by them, the participants share the valuable lessons they learned.
The many voices represented in The Gatherings offer insights and strategies that can inform change at the individual, group, and systems levels. These voices affirm that authentic relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples – with their attendant anxieties, guilt, anger, embarrassments, and, with time, even laughter and mutual affection – are key to our shared futures here in North America. Now, more than ever, it is critical that we come together to reimagine.
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Available in Maine libraries.
Available for sale at: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300244328/our-beloved-kin and at independent Maine booksellers
Companion website: https://ourbelovedkin.com/awikhigan/index
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Available in Maine libraries.
Available for sale at: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9780803246867/ and at independent Maine booksellers.
Companion website: https://dawnlandvoices.org/
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Available for sale at: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300244328/our-beloved-kin and at independent Maine booksellers
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Available in Maine Libraries.
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Available in Maine Libraries.
Available for sale at independent Maine booksellers.
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The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast
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Available in Maine libraries.
Available for sale at: www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-common-pot and at independent Maine bookstores
Savage Kin
by Marge Bruchac
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This book reconceptualizes the intimate details of encounters with Native interlocutors who by turns inspired, facilitated, and resisted the anthropological enterprise. Like other texts focused on this era, Savage Kin features some of the elite white men credited with salvaging material that might otherwise have been lost. Unlike other texts, this book highlights the intellectual contributions and cultural strategies of unsung Indigenous informants without whom this research could never have taken place.
These bicultural partnerships transgressed social divides and blurred the roles of anthropologist/informant, relative/stranger, and collector/collected. Yet these stories were obscured by collecting practices that separated people from objects, objects from communities, and communities from stories. Bruchac’s decolonizing efforts include “reverse ethnography”—painstakingly tracking seemingly unidentifiable objects, misconstrued social relations, unpublished correspondence, and unattributed field notes—to recover this evidence. Those early encounters generated foundational knowledges that still affect Indigenous communities today.
Savage Kin also contains unexpected narratives of human and other-than-human encounters—brilliant discoveries, lessons from ancestral spirits, prophetic warnings, powerful gifts, and personal tragedies—that will move Native and non-Native readers alike."
Women of the Dawn
by Bunny McBride
Women of the Dawn tells the stories of four remarkable Wabanaki Indian women who lived in northeast America during the four centuries that devastated their traditional world. Their courageous responses to tragedies brought on by European contact make up the heart of the book. ø The narrative begins with Molly Mathilde (1665-1717), a mother, a peacemaker, and the daughter of a famous chief. Born in the mid-1600s, when Wabanakis first experienced the full effects of colonial warfare, disease, and displacement, she provided a vital link for her people through her marriage to the French baron of St. Castin. The sage continues with the shrewd and legendary healer Molly Ockett (1740-1816) and the reputed witchwoman Molly Molasses (1775-1867). The final chapter belongs to Molly Dellis Nelson (1903-1977) (known as Spotted Elk), a celebrated performer on European stages who lived to see the dawn of Wabanaki cultural renewal in the modern era.We now have a website to support The Gatherings: Reimagining Indigenous-Settler Relations: https://www.thegatheringsbook.com/
On it, we post upcoming events, archive past events, articles, etc., and will continue to develop the "More From the Authors" page.
While there, you can also "follow us on Facebook and Instagram."
Thanks so much for your ongoing interest and support,
by Shirley Hager and Mawopiyane
https://www.thegatheringsbook.com/
In a world that requires knowledge and wisdom to address developing crises around us, The Gatherings shows how Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples can come together to create meaningful and lasting relationships.
Thirty years ago, in Wabanaki territory – a region encompassing the state of Maine and the Canadian Maritimes – a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals came together to explore some of the most pressing questions at the heart of Truth and Healing efforts in the United States and Canada. Meeting over several years in long-weekend gatherings, in a Wabanaki-led traditional Council format, assumptions were challenged, perspectives upended, and stereotypes shattered. Alliances and friendships were formed that endure to this day.
The Gatherings tells the moving story of these meetings in the words of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants. Reuniting to reflect on how their lives were changed by their experiences and how they continue to be impacted by them, the participants share the valuable lessons they learned.
The many voices represented in The Gatherings offer insights and strategies that can inform change at the individual, group, and systems levels. These voices affirm that authentic relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples – with their attendant anxieties, guilt, anger, embarrassments, and, with time, even laughter and mutual affection – are key to our shared futures here in North America. Now, more than ever, it is critical that we come together to reimagine.
Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Phillip's War
By Lisa Brooks
A compelling and original recovery of Native American resistance and adaptation to colonial America. With rigorous original scholarship and creative narration, Lisa Brooks recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and Native resistance during the “First Indian War” (later named King Philip’s War) by relaying the stories of Weetamoo, a female Wampanoag leader, and James Printer, a Nipmuc scholar, whose stories converge in the captivity of Mary Rowlandson. Through both a narrow focus on Weetamoo, Printer, and their network of relations, and a far broader scope that includes vast Indigenous geographies, Brooks leads us to a new understanding of the history of colonial New England and of American origins. Brooks’s pathbreaking scholarship is grounded not just in extensive archival research but also in the land and communities of Native New England, reading the actions of actors during the seventeenth century alongside an analysis of the landscape and interpretations informed by tribal history. Lisa Brooks is professor of English and American studies at Amherst College. She is the author of The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast.
Available in Maine libraries.
Available for sale at: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300244328/our-beloved-kin and at independent Maine booksellers
Companion website: https://ourbelovedkin.com/awikhigan/index
Dawnland Voices: Indigenous Writing from New England and the Northeast
Edited by Siobhan Senier
Dawnland Voices calls attention to the little-known but extraordinarily rich literary traditions of New England’s Native Americans. This pathbreaking anthology includes both classic and contemporary literary works from ten New England indigenous nations: the Abenaki, Maliseet, Mi’kmaq, Mohegan, Narragansett, Nipmuc, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Schaghticoke, and Wampanoag. Through literary collaboration and recovery, Siobhan Senier and Native tribal historians and scholars have crafted a unique volume covering a variety of genres and historical periods. From the earliest petroglyphs and petitions to contemporary stories and hip-hop poetry, this volume highlights the diversity and strength of New England Native literary traditions. Dawnland Voices introduces readers to the compelling and unique literary heritage in New England, banishing the misconception that “real” Indians and their traditions vanished from that region centuries ago.
Available in Maine libraries.
Available for sale at: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9780803246867/ and at independent Maine booksellers.
Companion website: https://dawnlandvoices.org/
Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Phillip's War
By Lisa Brooks
A compelling and original recovery of Native American resistance and adaptation to colonial America. With rigorous original scholarship and creative narration, Lisa Brooks recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and Native resistance during the “First Indian War” (later named King Philip’s War) by relaying the stories of Weetamoo, a female Wampanoag leader, and James Printer, a Nipmuc scholar, whose stories converge in the captivity of Mary Rowlandson. Through both a narrow focus on Weetamoo, Printer, and their network of relations, and a far broader scope that includes vast Indigenous geographies, Brooks leads us to a new understanding of the history of colonial New England and of American origins. Brooks’s pathbreaking scholarship is grounded not just in extensive archival research but also in the land and communities of Native New England, reading the actions of actors during the seventeenth century alongside an analysis of the landscape and interpretations informed by tribal history. Lisa Brooks is professor of English and American studies at Amherst College. She is the author of The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast.
Available in Maine libraries.
Available for sale at: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300244328/our-beloved-kin and at independent Maine booksellers
Companion website: https://ourbelovedkin.com/awikhigan/index
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
By Robin Wall-Kimmerer
Named a “Best Essay Collection of the Decade” by Literary Hub. As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.
Available in Maine libraries.
Available for sale at: https://milkweed.org/book/braiding-sweetgrass and at independent Maine booksellers.
The Rights of Nature: The Case for a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth
By David Boyd
“The Rights of Nature: The Case for a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth" gathers the unique wisdom of indigenous cultures, scientists, environmental activists, lawyers, and small farmers in order to make a case for how and why humans must work to change our current structures of law to recognize that nature has inherent rights. It includes essays and interviews from esteemed thought leaders such as Maude Barlow, Vandana Shiva, Desmond Tutu, Cormac Cullinan, Edwardo Galleano, Nimo Bassey, Thomas Goldtooth, and Shannon Biggs.
Available in Maine libraries.
Available for sale at: https://canadians.org/rightsofnature and at independent Maine booksellers.
Companion website: https://therightsofnature.org/tag/david-boyd/
Anoqcou: Ceremony is Life Itself
By gksidtanamoogk
Available in Maine libraries and at independent Maine booksellers.
An Upriver Passamaquoddy
By Alan Sockabasin
Drawing on his memories and an oral tradition, Allen Sockabasin returns to his Passamaquoddy village of Mud-doc-mig-goog, or Peter Dana Point, near Princeton, Maine. When Allen was a child in the 1940s and 1950s, his village was isolated and depended largely on subsistence hunting and fishing, working in the woods, and seasonal harvesting work for its survival. To the outside world, they lived in poverty, but Allen remembers a life that was rich and rewarding in many ways, and he explains why preserving the Passamaquoddy traditions and language is so critical to his people's survival in modern times.
Available in Maine libraries and at independent Maine booksellers.
Changes in the Land
By William Cronin
Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize.
Changes in the Land" offers an original and persuasive interpretation of the changing circumstances in New England's plant and animal communities that occurred with the shift from Indian to European dominance. With the tools of both historian and ecologist, Cronon constructs an interdisciplinary analysis of how the land and the people influenced one another, and how that complex web of relationships shaped New England's communities.
Available in Maine libraries and at independent Maine booksellers.
Companion website: https://changesinland.wordpress.com
Neither Wolf nor Dog
By Kent Nerburn
Against an unflinching backdrop of 1990s reservation life and the majestic spaces of the western Dakotas, Neither Wolf nor Dog tells the story of two men, one white and one Indian, locked in their own understandings yet struggling to find a common voice. In this award-winning book, acclaimed author Kent Nerburn draws us deep into the world of a Native American elder named Dan, who leads Kent through Indian towns and down forgotten roads that swirl with the memories of the Ghost Dance and Sitting Bull. Along the way we meet a vivid cast of characters — ranging from Jumbo, a 400-pound mechanic, to Annie, an eighty-year-old Lakota woman living in a log cabin with no running water. An unlikely cross between On the Road and Black Elk Speaks, Neither Wolf nor Dog takes us past the myths and stereotypes of the Native American experience, revealing an America few ever see.
Available in Maine Libraries and at independent Maine booksellers
We Talk, You Listen
By Vine Deloria
"We Talk, You Listen" is strong, boldly unconventional medicine from Vine Deloria Jr. (1933–2005), one of the most important voices of twentieth-century Native American affairs. Here the witty and insightful Indian spokesman turns his penetrating vision toward the disintegrating core of American society. Written at a time when the traditions of the formerly omnipotent Anglo-Saxon male were crumbling under the pressures of a changing world, Deloria’s book interprets racial conflict, inflation, the ecological crisis, and power groups as symptoms rather than causes of the American malaise: “The glittering generalities and mythologies of American society no longer satisfy the need and desire to belong,” a theory as applicable today as it was in 1970.
Available for sale at: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/bison-books/9780803259850/ and at independent Maine booksellers
Available in Maine Libraries.
Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change
By Sherri Mitchell Weh'na Ha'mu Kwasset
A narrative of Indigenous wisdom that provides a road map for the spirit and a compass of compassion for humanity. Drawing from ancestral knowledge, as well as her experience as an attorney and activist, Sherri Mitchell addresses some of the most crucial issues of our day, such as environmental protection and human rights. Sharing the gifts she has received from elders around the world, Mitchell urges us to decolonize our language and our stories. For those seeking change, this book offers a set of cultural values that will preserve our collective survival for future generations.
Available for sale at: https://sacredinstructions.life/books/ and at independent Maine booksellers
Available in Maine Libraries.
Dancing On Our Turtle's Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence
By Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Many promote Reconciliation as a “new” way for Canada to relate to Indigenous Peoples. In Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence activist, editor, and educator Leanne Simpson asserts reconciliation must be grounded in political resurgence and must support the regeneration of Indigenous languages, oral cultures, and traditions of governance.
Simpson explores philosophies and pathways of regeneration, resurgence, and a new emergence through the Nishnaabeg language, Creation Stories, walks with Elders and children, celebrations and protests, and meditations on these experiences. She stresses the importance of illuminating Indigenous intellectual traditions to transform their relationship to the Canadian state.
Challenging and original, Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back provides a valuable new perspective on the struggles of Indigenous Peoples.
Available for sale at: https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/9781894037501/leanne-simpson/dancing-our-turtles-back-stories and at independent Maine booksellers
Available in Maine Libraries.
The Nightwatchman
By Louise Erdrich
Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award winning author Louise Erdrich's grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington DC, this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant use, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.
Available in Maine Libraries.
Available for sale at independent Maine booksellers.
Notes on a Lost Flute
By Kerry Harding
Not without controversy, Hardy brings together his expertise in forestry, horticulture, and environmental science to tell us about New England when its primary inhabitants were the native Wabanaki tribes.
Available at Maine libraries and independent Maine booksellers.
The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast
By Lisa Brooks
Lisa Brooks demonstrates the ways in which Native leaders—including Samson Occom, Joseph Brant, Hendrick Aupaumut, and William Apess—adopted writing as a tool to reclaim rights and land in the Native networks of what is now the northeastern United States.
She shows that writing was not a foreign technology but rather a crucial weapon in the Native Americans’ arsenal as they resisted—and today continue to oppose—colonial domination.
Available in Maine libraries.
Available for sale at: www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-common-pot and at independent Maine bookstores
Savage Kin
by Marge Bruchac
"In this provocative new book, Margaret M. Bruchac, an Indigenous anthropologist, turns the word savage on its head. Savage Kin explores the nature of the relationships between Indigenous informants, such as Gladys Tantaquidgeon (Mohegan), Jesse Cornplanter (Seneca), and George Hunt (Tlingit), and early twentieth-century anthropological collectors, such as Frank Speck, Arthur C. Parker, William N. Fenton, and Franz Boas.
This book reconceptualizes the intimate details of encounters with Native interlocutors who by turns inspired, facilitated, and resisted the anthropological enterprise. Like other texts focused on this era, Savage Kin features some of the elite white men credited with salvaging material that might otherwise have been lost. Unlike other texts, this book highlights the intellectual contributions and cultural strategies of unsung Indigenous informants without whom this research could never have taken place.
These bicultural partnerships transgressed social divides and blurred the roles of anthropologist/informant, relative/stranger, and collector/collected. Yet these stories were obscured by collecting practices that separated people from objects, objects from communities, and communities from stories. Bruchac’s decolonizing efforts include “reverse ethnography”—painstakingly tracking seemingly unidentifiable objects, misconstrued social relations, unpublished correspondence, and unattributed field notes—to recover this evidence. Those early encounters generated foundational knowledges that still affect Indigenous communities today.
Savage Kin also contains unexpected narratives of human and other-than-human encounters—brilliant discoveries, lessons from ancestral spirits, prophetic warnings, powerful gifts, and personal tragedies—that will move Native and non-Native readers alike."
Women of the Dawn
by Bunny McBride
Women of the Dawn tells the stories of four remarkable Wabanaki Indian women who lived in northeast America during the four centuries that devastated their traditional world. Their courageous responses to tragedies brought on by European contact make up the heart of the book. ø The narrative begins with Molly Mathilde (1665-1717), a mother, a peacemaker, and the daughter of a famous chief. Born in the mid-1600s, when Wabanakis first experienced the full effects of colonial warfare, disease, and displacement, she provided a vital link for her people through her marriage to the French baron of St. Castin. The sage continues with the shrewd and legendary healer Molly Ockett (1740-1816) and the reputed witchwoman Molly Molasses (1775-1867). The final chapter belongs to Molly Dellis Nelson (1903-1977) (known as Spotted Elk), a celebrated performer on European stages who lived to see the dawn of Wabanaki cultural renewal in the modern era.We now have a website to support The Gatherings: Reimagining Indigenous-Settler Relations: https://www.thegatheringsbook.com/
On it, we post upcoming events, archive past events, articles, etc., and will continue to develop the "More From the Authors" page.
While there, you can also "follow us on Facebook and Instagram."
Thanks so much for your ongoing interest and support,
UPCOMING READS.
CONFIRMED: Gatherings
By Shirley Hager and Mawopiyane
https://utorontopress.com/us/the-gatherings-3
CONFIRMED: Penobscot Transformer Tales by Carol Dana, Margo Lukens, Conor Quinn (due to be published in May, and available via Gulf of Maine Books)
POSSIBLE:
Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance
By Edgar Villanueva
Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists and the Origins of American Slavery
By Margaret Ellen Newell
Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier
By Ian Saxine
By Shirley Hager and Mawopiyane
https://utorontopress.com/us/the-gatherings-3
CONFIRMED: Penobscot Transformer Tales by Carol Dana, Margo Lukens, Conor Quinn (due to be published in May, and available via Gulf of Maine Books)
POSSIBLE:
Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance
By Edgar Villanueva
Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists and the Origins of American Slavery
By Margaret Ellen Newell
Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier
By Ian Saxine
