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Western Abenaki Woman from the contact period
Born: ~1585?
Died: ?
Religion: Western Abenaki
Ethnicity: Western Abenaki
Primary residence: Winoskik
At the time of Samuel de Champlain’s visit to the lake in 1609, many Western Abenaki families lived along the eastern shore of the lake called Petonbowk, or “Waters that Lie Between,” with the largest villages located near the mouths of the Otter Creek, and the Winooski, Lamoille, and Missisquoi Rivers.[1]
We do not know the particular stories of any individual Abenaki woman from the time, but one such woman must have lived at Winoskik, near the lower falls on the Winooski River. She likely gathered the wild leeks that grew along the flood plain and gave the village its name, “At Wild Onion Land.” Her village consisted of wigwams and longhouses around a central village fire. Nearby, fields of corn stretched along the flood plain towards the lake, where bark and dugout canoes sat ready for transport. The lake was the frontier, across which was the territory of the Mohawk Iroquois, long-term enemies of the Western Abenaki and their Algonquin allies. This conflict was the one that Champlain was caught up in during his visit to Petonbowk. To the north lived the St. Lawrence Iroquois, and to the east and southeast, the Cowasucks and the Sokokis in the Connecticut River Valley.
She lived with her extended family, and in a larger village like Winoskik, among many other families, too. At home, where mats she wove from cattails and bulrushes served as walls and flooring, she was equal in status to her husband.[2] When they were first married, they chose to live with her family, simply because her family had a larger longhouse, better set up to accommodate another family group. She also participated in the decision making of the village, where all adults enjoyed a degree of equality.
On a spring morning, she would tie on her deerskin wraparound skirt or a strap dress with a deerskin fringe, pull on her moccasins, and braid her hair on top of her head. If she still felt a chill in the air, she would pull on a loose poncho and detachable sleeves, or her cloak, which had a pointed hood. Finally, she might put on her leather belt, and her bracelets and anklets of copper, shell beads, leather, or quillwork, many of which she had made herself, and decorated with a distinctive double-scroll pattern.[3]
She had also made her clothing and moccasins, from the hides that she scraped with her kit of awls, scrapers and needles, from the moose and deer the family had brought back from their hunting territory. Each Abenaki family spent February in their hunting territory, a roughly twenty square mile area, delineated from other territories by familiar trails, and with a tributary of the Winooski river running down the center of it.[4]
Now that it was spring, they had returned to their village near the lake, with a good deal of meat preserved. Responsible for much of her family’s food supply, she tapped maple trees to make syrup, by using a long, hollowed out elderberry twig and a birch bark pail. She collected groundnuts and spring greens into handmade ash baskets. At the end of the spring, she planted corns, beans, and squash, the staple crops of her village.
Throughout the summer, she balanced these food sources with the plants, berries and nuts she collected, the small game she snared, and the fish and fowl that the men in her family were largely responsible for bringing home. At the end of the summer, she harvested corn and gathered chestnuts, beechnuts, black walnuts, and butternuts. She picked the last berries to dry, or to bake into breads made with cattail flour. By wintertime, she had collected and dried corn, sumac, raspberries, blackberries, elderberries, grapes, chokecherries, and nuts, which she stored in baskets and bark lined pits.[5] She also kept her family healthy, collecting medicinal plants and grinding or drying them to make teas and poultices. She was sure to pass this knowledge, which she had learned from her mother, on to her children, along with the many other stories she learned and told.
Though there was no significant European settlement in Vermont for more than one hundred years after Champlain’s visit to the lake, her village surely felt the effects of European contact. She herself did not travel farther than the family’s hunting territory, but news traveled as far as 500 miles in New England, and members of the villages along the eastern shore would likely have known about the presence and reputations of both the French and the English, long before they met. By 1617, several serious epidemics had likely already decreased the population drastically, and would continue throughout the seventeenth century, severely challenging her ability to heal and survive diseases to which her village had never before been exposed. European trade goods also made their way into her life, such as iron knives and hatchets, brass needles and engraving tools, and manufactured cloth.[6] As contact with the French increased, her granddaughters may have become Catholics, as the French established a mission at Missisquoi in 1743, or moved north to Missisquoi or to the mission villages along the St. Lawrence River during the many wars of the next two centuries. Still, her descendents maintained her knowledge and remembered many of the stories she had taught them, to this day.
[1] Curriculum, Lake Champlain Maritime Museum, 5-7. The Woodland period was roughly from 1000 BCE to 1000 CE.
[2] Wiseman, Frederick M. The Vermont 1609 Champlain Baseline: Replicated Early 17th Century Materials with Documentation: A Report to the Vermont Lake Champlain Quadricentennial Commission, 2007, 1-67.
[3] Melody Walker, member of El-nu Abenaki tribe, correspondence, Fall 2008.
[4] Haviland and Power, The Original Vermonters, Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1981, 155.
[5] Haviland and Power, 148-202.
[6] Haviland and Power, 204.
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