Radio Script #1035

Little Talks on Common Things
January 19, 1975

Much interest has recently been shown in Maine’s two remaining Indian tribes on state reservations: The Penobscots near Old Town, and the Passamaquoddys in Washington County. In fact, legislation has already been enacted that should improve the condition of those reservations and eventually raise the inhabitants to higher levels of economy and personal dignity.

The fact remains, however, that too little is known by the general public about Maine Indians today. Because of the diligent work of a Colby student some years ago, I am able today to give you some authentic facts about these survivors of Maine’s
original natives.

In 1966, Miss Andrea Bear, a young lady of Indian descent, was a senior at Colby College. Selected as a Senior Scholar, a very high honor, she produced,after exhaustive research, a long article entitled “Concept of Unity Among Indian Tribes of Maine, New Hampshire and New Brunswick.” She pointed out that in New Brunswick there are now four reservations of about 1,000 Malecite Indians. In Pierreville, Quebec, is a single village of St. Francis Abnakis, and in Maine two reservation of 700 Passamaquoddys, and one of 500 Penobscots.

That all modern Indians in this region were formerly of one nation has long been recognized by scholars. Authorities agree that all Indians from Nova Scotia to the Kennebec once shared a common language and were physically the same people.
Surprisingly Miss Bear points out that today’s St. Francis Indians recognize no relation to the present Indians of Maine, although many of their ancestors left Maine for the St. Francis area before the middle of the 18th century, following the destruction of the Abnaki village at Norridgewock, and the battle of Lovewell’s Pond in Fryeburg.

Nevertheless, the speech of the St. Francis Indians today is almost identical with that of the Penobscots at Old Town.

A Penobscot legend claims that all the tribes between the Saco and the St. John were brothers, with the oldest on the Saco, and the youngest on the St. John. Old Malecite legends mention Mt. Katahdin, which is in Penobscot, not Malecite territory. It was legends like these that kept alive connection between separated groups.

Miss Bear has some valuable information on tribal names. She says: “The problem is complicated by the white man’s use of names rarely, if ever, used by the tribe itself. White people gave them names derived from locations where they lived. For instance, Penobscots for the name of the river. Sometimes the name described a tribal peculiarity. Thus a tribe often had several different names at the same time.

In the old records of early English travelers we find the name of Etchemin for Indians of eastern Maine and New Brunswick. Appearing as early as 1603, the name disappeared from print about 1700. No Indian today is familiar with it. It was first used by Champlain in 1603, who wrote: “Three nations have engaged in this war: Etchemins, Algonquins, and Montanais. These made war on the Iroquois.”

Tarratine became a more common English designation for those eastern Indians, but all the time the name they used for themselves was Micmac, and that is the name favored by Indian researchers today. This is despite the contention of our Maine authority, Fannie Hardy Eckstrom, that the Tarratines were not truly Micmacs.

The French colonists and explorers used still different names for those Indians. The French governor, at his fort on the St. John, wrote in 1694: “There are three Indian nations in Acadia – Canibas, Malecites and Micmacs. The Micmacs begin at the St. John and go inland as far as the Riviere-du-Loup and along the shore, occupying Passamaquoddy, Machias, Mt. Desert, and the Canibas are settled on the Kennebec.”

In the early 17th century, the name Penobscot included Indians at such different places as Pemaquid, Bangor, and Castine. The tendency to name the tribes after the rivers, the Saco, the Canibas or Kennebec, and the Penobscots, means that the same tribal name could at different times have designated different Indian people. Miss Bear tells us that, in 1660, there were at least two Indian villages of mixed tribal origin on the Penobscot river. On the other hand, the Indians at Passamaquoddy seem always to have been Malecites.

It is quite impossible to be sure how many tribes were intended to be encompassed by the name Abnaki. Some authorities believe it was meant to cover all the Indians of New England and New Brunswick. Others contend that it included only those from the Saco to Passamaquoddy and did not include others of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

But of one thing we may be sure: the Indians on Maine’s great rivers – the Saco, the Androscoggin, the Kennebec, and the Penobscot were all so closely related by physical appearance and by language that they were all Abnakis. That was indeed the comprehensive name that included many Maine tribes, such as the Kennebecs, the Norridgewocks, the Penobscots, the Wawenocks and many others.

All English and French early observers were struck by the fact that, unlike many other Indians, the Abnakis knew agriculture. They cultivated the land. From the time of the well known De Creu map of 1660, all tribes from the Connecticut River to the Kennebec were certainly identified as Abnakis.

Miss Bear recognized three distinct cultural areas as revealing of Indian life. She called them the Eastland Woodland Culture, the Northern Hunter Culture, and the Wabanaki Culture.

The first was determined by its northern woods environment. It was marked by hunting, fishing, utensils made of bark or wood, shelters covered with bark or animal skins, birch canoes, and toboggans. And, wherever it was possible, agriculture in this culture was an important form of subsistence. The Northern Hunter was the culture of Indians north of the St. Lawrence, where the climate is harsh and agriculture could play little part. All life was based on hunting – mostly moose, deer, caribou and bear, with some attention to smaller fur animals like the beaver. The hunter must be mobile, finding it easy to get around. Therefore his few possessions were adapted to travel – the canoe, the toboggan, the snowshoe. His implements were limited to bow and arrow, lance or spear, crooked knife, scraper, and awl. Hunting was not individual, but in groups. The social structure was patriarchal, the extended family. The later hunting ground system, prompted by the white man’s eagerness to buy furs was a natural extension of the family hunting group.

The third culture, referred to as Wabanaki, was that of important tribes south of the St. Lawrence -the Micmacs, Malecites, Passamaquoddys, and Penobscots. With these there was less reliance on hunting and more on agriculture. That made them less nomadic and more permanently settled, though they long continued to have separate summer and winter villages, leaving for the latter soon after crops were harvested.

Miss Bear emphasizes that these environmental differences profoundly affected the social organization of the different tribes. Those forced to depend on hunting and fishing had to move with the seasons and necessarily divide into smaller groups related by blood or marriage under the direction of a dominant leader, a family head. Among them developed the family totems, a very special affiliation to some particular animal. Obviously this migratory life was a hindrance to any effective unity among the tribes. Yet the Indian families frequently sought each other’s aid in times of stress, especially when threatened by Mohawk raids, as they were all through the 17th century.

Another contribution to some unity was water. The Indians of the Kennebec, the Penobscot,and the St. John were all river Indians. Contact between them was so obvious that the initial reason for building Fort Halifax at Winslow in 1754 was to
block contact between the Penobscots and Kennebec tribes by way of the Sebasticook River. Miss Bear comments: “The strong feeling of unity among Malecites, Passamaquoddys and Penobscots is largely the result of a culture characterized by semi-migratory life, and by a geography well fitted for travel. Both factors prompted social communication and nurtured cultural homogeneity throughout Maine and New Brunswick.”

What did Miss Bear discover about any unity of language among the tribes? It has long been recognized that language of all Maine and New Brunswick Indians belonged to the great Algonquin family of languages, extending from Newfoundland to Florida, and that differences were dialectical. By the time that white men came, the New England Indians had many dialects, but their resemblances in sound systems and names signified a definite, common origin.

The number of Malecite place names in the Penobscot Valley shows that, at some time, those New Brunswick Indians went as far west as they chose to roam. Place names for the whole area from the Connecticut River to all of Maine are still found in modern Abnaki vocabulary. Modern Abnaki is almost identical with the speech of the Penobscot Indians at Old Town.

Miss Bean summarizes: “In spite of minor distinctions, evidence of linguistic unity among our Indians is impressive. The Penobscot speech today represents a composite of Eastern and Western Abnaki brought to the Old Town area by various migrations.”

And thus we have some relatively new information about Maine Indians gathered by a college girl who was herself an honored descendant of those first natives of Maine.

Year: 1975