The Intervale, Intervale, NH, as it looks today, 2008

This photo shows Mt. Washington across the broad intervale in Intervale, NH, less than a half mile from the small Abenaki village, once called Pigwacket, where Stephen and Manuel Laurent lived for a time. The Intervale, when I was a child, was a broad, lush meadow where cows grazed and on summer evenings we could sneak down and watch deer grazing with their young fawns.

I moved to Intervale, NH, when I was 6 years old. The postmaster at that time was Manuel Laurent. His brother, Stephen, was the postmaster in Jackson, NH. These two brothers were Abenakis and sons of Joseph Laurent, former Chief of the Abenakis at St. Francis (Odanak). The Abenakis are also called the Wabenaki (Wobanki or Wabanki which translates to ‘people of the dawn’ or ‘people of the rising sun” meaning from the east). Stephen and Manuel lived in Intervale in a small encampment of Abenakis that included their wives, children and extended family. They were remnants of a group that had lived there for many years who were referred to as the Pigwacket band of Abenakis. Their village was named Pigwacket after the mountain of the same name (the mountain is also called Pequawket and Kearsarge). There had been Abenakis living here, I was told, for many centuries and that it was known as a warm, sheltered place with ample resources. The ‘intervale’, itself, is a beautiful, broad, flat, alluvial plain, a grassland or meadow, bordered by the Saco River and a place where the deer were plentiful. John Josselyn who visited New England from England in 1638 and again in 1663 identified Pigwacket in his book New England's Rarities Discovered as the village where Darby Field (referenced in Andrew Riely's paper) stopped in 1642 to hire guides to assist him in his ascent of Mt. Washington. Field is credited with being the first non-native to climb the peak. Josselyn quotes Field as saying there were about 200 Abenakis living at Pigwacket at that time.

Stephen often took me with him on short trips into the woods. Sometimes the Abenaki women would be my babysitters when my mother was away and I would go with them to the rocky summits of nearby mountains like Moat, Cranmore, Kearsarge (the same as Pequawket, Pigwacket), and Mt. Stanton to pick blueberries. We would spend whole days sitting right in the blueberry bushes, moving gradually across the mountainsides filling birch bark baskets and shiny galvanized pails with blueberries. The women gossiped endlessly switching to Algonquian when the gossip got particularly juicy to keep me from blushing.

Stephen told me that the Abenaki word for ‘white man’ was ‘awarnoch’, pronounced ‘awarnoots’ but that it doesn’t translate literally as ‘white man’ He explained that it is a condensation of two separate phrases: “Who is this guy?” and “Where did he come from?” Which makes total sense. You’re a person used to seeing others like you. You are living where you always lived with people you accept as being ‘the ones', those who have always been there. This is your place. Your people have lived her for thousands of years. So you’re walking along and “ka-bam” there is this really strange, ugly, pasty white, human-looking ‘thing’ walking up the trail towards you. It’s earth shaking. In your surprise you turn to your chum and exclaim ‘awarnoch’, or “Who-from?” Steven explained that a lot of Abenaki words are condensations like awarnoch and it makes sense. All languages evolve and re-evolve similarly. Language is, after all, alive.

Stephen recounted stories describing yearly summer encampments near the present day Weirs on Lake Winnpesaukee where Abenakis from near and far came and spent weeks and months socializing, catching and drying fish, collecting and processing zillions of acorns to make flour, cooking pemmican, making winter clothing and equipment, and maybe finding wives and husbands. Members of the Nausets, an Abenaki band living on and near present day Cape Cod, have also told me of large pre-contact summer gatherings on the Cape that were social and practical, where a lot of work was done including winter food and clothing preparation and where a lot of the natives came to gamble on their favorite Lacross teams. They took Lacross seriously. Games went on for days. I’m not sure if this part is true, but one source told me that the games were played on rough fields that were sometimes a mile long.

As I said it would be nice to have a time machine and have a first hand account of what the landscape really looked like 10,000 years ago and have a better idea of who lived her and how they lived. For instance, what was the landscape really like and was it so different from the landscape today? Stephen and others described a vast forest of old growth trees through parts of central New Hampshire and central and northern Vermont. On the north side of Mt. Kearsarge, behind where my family lived in Intervale, loggers went in during the winter of 1951, and cut down and hauled out white pine trees that were five feet in diameter and probably eighty feet tall. They were massive, beautiful trees. When Stephen saw them he said “that’s what all the forests used to look like.” Stephen had also heard descriptions of red and white oaks growing along the Lake Winnipesaukee shoreline that were six feet in diameter and seventy five feet tall. That had to be at least five hundred years, or more, after the Wisconsinan glacier, though, and probably closer to the time of first contact. Even in the best of conditions it would take hundreds of years for an oak to grow to those dimensions. In Vermont and upstate New York the forest were described by Champlain to be “park like’ meaning with massive, tall trees standing far apart and with an immense canopy of interlacing limbs and dense foliage overhead blocking the sunlight, like a Gothic cathedral, with the forest spreading out mile after mile. The distance between trees and the absence of underbrush made it easy to hunt there. Stephen thought the natives may have set fires to burn out the underbrush to encourage more game. For their own part the Europeans set out to completely destroy the ancient American forests immediately upon arrival .

Roger's Ledge, Kilkenny Wilderness, from the south, 2007

This is a picture of Roger’s Ledge in the Kilkenny Wilderness. It's visible for miles and when you get to the summit there is a huge rewards waiting. (see the next photo) I was visiting in Labrador a few years ago, working with some members of the Innu (French-speaking Montagnais) community there in their attempts to block a huge Hydro-Quebec hydroelectric dam on one of the big rivers in Labrador. I was staying with an Innu woman, a friend of mine, who was married to an Inuit-Eskimo man. (Innu, like ‘Inuit’ means simply “First People”). One morning in mid-March we climbed a small whale-backed mountain near their village to watch the sunrise above the horizon for the first time after the long winter. We got to the top of the mountain and there was this astonishing view of the ocean still locked in ice and behind us the dark interior of Labrador, all greys, blacks and white from the rock, ice and remaining snow. We stopped and caught our breaths and the husband suddenly said, “urgaghook” or at least that’s what it sounded like to me. She smiled and nodded. I thought maybe he'd coughed. “Did he just say something?” I asked. “Oh, yes,” she replied. “He just said ‘It’s good to get up to high heights and look out over long distances.” Urgaghook!

Roger's Ledge and the view south across the Kilkenny to the Presidential Range

Standing on top of Roger’s Ledge and looking south towards the Presidential Range across the Kilkenny makes me think in detail about who those first people were who traveled here and resided in this gorgeous land, this astonishingly beautiful place. Their artifacts, estimated to be 11,000 years old, have been found at several sites just a seven or eight miles from here pointing to the time the Wisconsinan glacier had just melted back towards the north from the Kilkenny, heading back to Labrador and points North. The urge to climb to a height of land, a hill or mountain must be universally human with the reward being the deep satisfaction of seeing out over great distances, to get a sense of where you are, and, of course, be able to look out beyond the farthest ranges and try to imagine what’s out there, to wonder who else is out there and where they're from.

A small lake and mountain in the Kilkenny Wilderness close to where human artifacts were found that dated back 11,000 years

It’s mostly conjecture and the piecing together of a few facts to create a picture of who was inhabiting the Kilkenny ten, or eleven, thousand years ago. The artifacts don’t say a lot. This is close to the time of the Clovis Culture in the Southwest of which we also know little. Innu and Inuit hunters have told me stories that go back to a time when the people were so new in the land they learned to live observing animals. In one story they shared their teachers are wolves and crows (ravens in some versions) who teach them how to caribou. At any rate, who ever lived here in New England and southern Canada that long ago must have come a long distance to get here. It would mean, too, that whoever arrived here right at the heels of the Wisconsinan glacier had to be closely related to those first humans who came across to the western hemisphere.

In an evolutionary, Darwinian sense, they were opportunists and generalists. They would have been hunters, nomads, skilled in all ways of contending, following game, large animals probably, maybe even mammoths, large bison, and mastodons, and not carrying a lot of extra baggage. It's likely that they migrated from the northwest entry point swiftly across the continent staying close to the front edge of the melting glacier.

They may very well have been ancestors to the Abenaki and Iroquois. Maybe a handful of those first Pleistocene people settled and made the northeast their home. They spread out quickly, in just a thousand years or so, and developed unique cultures using a common language. They were not ‘hunters and gathers’ per se. As they settled they developed a sophisticated “agricultural” practice in which they cataloged the wild animals and plants that were most useful to their needs. They knew exactly where the plants grew and could find them as needed. Ginseng and Goldenseal are two examples of plants they relied on heavily because of the plants’ antibiotic qualities. They altered areas to create environments more favorable to some plants and game animals, deer primarily, that were more commonly used as food and medicine. They made decoys out of grass and wood that they painted to look like common game birds, like ducks and geese. They may even have built fences to corral animals and used fire to clear out underbrush in the forests to aid hunting. In some cases they learned how to propagate and grow cultivars from wild plants. Jerusalem artichoke is one example

During one of Champlain voyages to America he wrote that at the mouth of the Saco River he visited an Abenaki (probably Penobscot) village that was enclosed by a palisade of logs, like a fort, that was organized around a number of activities including boat building, fishing and whaling, and growing corn and vegetables. He describes how the village preserved food through the winter months by placing it in trenches four feet deep (below the frost line) covered with tight mats woven from sea grass and the trenches were backfilled with very dry beach sand. Corn, Jerusalem artichokes, several varieties of squash and beans, and wild parsnips or carrots they cultivated that could all be preserved for months with little spoilage. They also dried meat and fish and preserved some fruits like blueberries in pemmican, their winter staple.

Iona, Mohawk Clan Mother, Seed Keeper, Onondaga, Ontario, 1999

I worked a bit with some Iroquois on their reservations in New York State and Canada on some food and agricultural projects and principally with a woman named Iona who is a clan mother and seed keeper for the Iroquois. When I first met Iona she was in tears. It was early evening and we were walking along a narrow lane on her farm on our way to a field where she grows out her seeds every year. She was responsible for seeds that the Iroqouis have had for more than a thousand years and she had close to a hundred varieties representing the pure strains of ancient cultivars. She was crying, she told me, because she was afraid and sad because she believed she was losing her indigenous knowledge, that her people were forgetting the “old ways” and that this knowledge was lost forever.


From my own perspective talking to Iona over days and weeks it was clear to me that she had not lost her “knowledge”. It was like she feared the knowledge was “lost” because she saw the younger generation in its ambivalence about that knowledge and the way of life it is represents. They’re willing to let it go. It has very little meaning to them. Some of them told me, “I don’t want to know how to make a pair of snowshoes, or a bow, or a decent arrowhead. What would I do with them?” One of Iona’s interns, a young Seneca woman, said “I didn’t think much about it for a long time. I listened to what the older people were saying about the old ways, like how the outside world was intruding and weakening the position and power of women in the bands, that the clan mothers were no longer on equal footing with the chiefs. It didn’t interest me until I took the internship here with Iona working with the seeds, the plants, then I wanted to know everything about the old ways. Iona has given me a lot. She’s a very wise soul.”

(I'm adding this bit on January 17, 2009 as I just finished re-reading Henry Thoreau's The Maine Woods and I found this quote: “Our Indian said that he was a doctor, and could tell me some medicinal use for every plant I could show him. I immediately tried him. He said that the inner bark of the aspen [Populus tremuloides) was good for sore eyes; and so with various other plants, proving himself as good as his word. Acording to his account, he had acquired such knowledge in his youth from a wise old Indian with whom he associated, and he lamented that the present generation of Indians ‘had lost a great deal’”. He wrote that in 1857, 150 years ago but it certainly resonates with my discussions with Iona and her intern.

Chief Lehman, Onondaga, Ontario, 1998

Stephen’s stories, told over the years, were congruent with Iona’s and those of her chief who she introduced to me simply as Chief Lehman who is Mohawk. He and I had long discussion about the native life prior to the occupation and subjugation of native cultures by the Europeans. Stephen who died a few years ago was a scholar as is Chief Lehman. Both have spent a great deal of time studying the “old ways”, the time before time, the time that has passed since the last glacier melted. They have compared the native culture here in eastern North America to cultures in other parts of the world that have been in continuous existence for thousands of years and point out that the natives of northeastern America have had a relatively stable existence over a long period of time. There have been classic, long-ranging conflicts between bands in every section of the country, as in the northeast between the Abenakis and the Iroquois, who have fought and waged wars over land and hunting rights, particularly where they bump up against each other in western Vermont. A lot of the fighting occurred after Europeans arrived and was politically motivated. For the most part, though, the two bands have had a remarkably long history of peaceful co-existence and both developed rich, complex cultures.

Their technology and science were direct adaptations to the local environment. They were brilliantly astute, practical and versatile. Their bows were unique in the world. The Abenaki bows were short so they could be maneuvered in thick forests and brush. The Abenaki had other machines in addition to the bow. They had drills, saws, levers, ropes that they used effectively like block and tackle to increase efficiency of work. Near Putney, VT, there is a prehistoric stone structure, an enclosure with a large stone slab roof, which is assumed to have had multiple functions over time, including a calender of sorts and a refuge, but, like other native stone works, it is apparent that the natives were good engineers and had the means to lift an enormous amount of weight.

In science, in addition to medicine, including some knowledge of internal human anatomy, and their vast knowledge of plants, they understood weather, animal behavior, the stars, navigation, etc. Their craftsmanship was sometimes astounding both in practical applications and the development of aesthetic ‘lines’. Take, for instance, the birch bark canoe. A well made birch bark canoe is an astonishing bit of craftsmanship and engineering as well as a work of art. Stone carvings, decorated birch bark baskets and boxes, carved drums and earthenware pottery, achieve a high level of art that is sought by museums. I have seen wampum belts, made from small, intricate beads carved from sea shells that are stunningly beautiful. I've seen full regalia hand sewn from white deerskin, elaborate pieces of clothing and moccasins, decorated with beads and dyed porcupine quills that are also stunningly beautiful, as are some of elaborately carved drums and smoking pipes. It’s true that the best carving came with the introduction of steel knives after European contact but it does not detract from the fact that natives achieved a well defined, original artistry.


That leads me to what will appear as a huge generalization and idealization of native life but it is also consistent with my experience living and interacting with native peoples in North and South America, Kenya, and Nepal. It's this: my perceptions of the native people who lived here over all that time, those millennia since the glacier melted, came to me through Stephen, Manuel, their wives and children, the Abenaki, the Iroquois, Iona, Chief Lehman, the Cree and the Innu, and all the glimpses they afforded me of their way of life including their wonderful sense of humor, their knowledge and wisdom and from the breath of that experience what tells me the most about them is the way they treated me. When I was in the woods with Stephen, or picking blueberries on top of a mountain with the Abenaki women on those august afternoons beneath the towering thunderheads listening to them gossip I was accepted without conditions. In a long house ceremony given for me at Onondaga I was also accepted without conditions, in other words, with enormous respect. I didn’t have to charm anyone, cut off parts of myself to fit in, or believe anything I didn’t want to. I was accepted for who I was, another human being, and I realized in the long house that I had yearned for that feeling all my life. Any culture that has that self-respect, that sense of congruence and the capacity to create that ‘space’ among it’s people has a lot to lose, and it is sad, it’s a real tragedy in this aspect of the “Commons”, in that their culture still has so much to offer.

I'm adding this quote from Henry Thoreau's book The Maine Woods on 1/17/09 because I just read it again for the first time in decades and, along with the passage I quoted above, I was struck by this one as well: “Pointing southeasterly over the lake and distant forest, he observed, ‘Me go Oldtown in three days.’ I asked how he would get over the swamps and fallen trees. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘in winter all covered, go anywhere on snowshoes, right across lakes.’ When I asked how he went he said, ‘First I go Ktaadn (Mt. Katadin), west side, then I go Millinocket, then Pamadumcook, then Nicletow, then Lincoln, then Oldtown,’ or else he went a shorter way by the Piscataquis. What a wilderness walk for a man to take alone! None of your half-mile swamps, none of your mile-wide woods merely, as on the skirts of our towns, without hotels, only a dark mountain or a lake for guide board and station, over ground much of it impossible in summer.”

That was in 1857 when Maine was quite different than today and the distance from where Joe Polis, Thoreau's Penobscot guide, was standing it was about 130 miles as the crow flies to Old Town, Maine. In that country that is a long way to go in three days! So the guide's reflections were the result of experience, he had definitely made that trip before, and he was not simply bragging. He was offering Thoreau insight and Thoreau was as delighted with this kind of insight as I have been and continue to be.

There is something really, really precious in all of this. I think that is why I go on and on like this about the native peoples of this part of North America. Represented by Iona, the Cree poet and friend of mine, Margaret Sam Cromarty, and Stephen Laurent, there is someting enormously important about these people in the way that they lived here and preserved this land. When you think of Joe Polis walking around the clock in mid-winter from the wilds of western Maine to the coast one also thinks of people moving through, over, and around the White Mountains in a constant stream for those millenia, going from St. Francis to the coast through Crawford Notch, or Zealand Notch, snowshoeing across the Pemigewasset, following the Israel and Androscoggin Rivers, stopping to make arrow points on Mt. Jasper, fishing in the Saco, hunting deer on the Intervale, all that activity, those lives, these mountains, this land, a half million sunsets and sunrises. It's quite striking and lovely at the same time. There is profound beauty here on so many levels, that's the way I see it.

Sunset over Mt. Cabot, Kilkenny, from Cates Hill, Berlin, NH 1968