Canoe Indians of Down East Maine

By William A Haviland

The story of those who inhabited coastal Maine thousands of years before the French arrived, and how their lives changed at the dawn of the seventeenth century.

In 1604, when Frenchmen landed on Saint Croix Island, they were far from the first people to walk along its shores. For thousands of years, Etchemins—whose descendants were members of the Wabanaki Confederacy—had lived, loved and labored in Down East Maine. Bound together with neighboring people, all of whom relied heavily on canoes for transportation, trade, and survival, each group still maintained its own unique cultures and customs.
After the French arrived, though, these indigenous people faced unspeakable hardships, from “the Great Dying,” when disease killed up to ninety percent of coastal populations, to centuries of discrimination. Yet they never abandoned Ketakamigwa, their homeland. In this book, anthropologist William Haviland relates the challenging history endured by the natives of the Down East coast and how they have maintained their way of life over the past four hundred years.
 
Includes illustrations

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781614235880

Book preview

Introduction

In 1604, when the Sieur de Mons and his lieutenant, Samuel de Champlain, stepped ashore on Saint Croix Island, they were far from the first people to do so. For thousands of years, others had lived, loved and labored on this and other islands, as well as on the mainland. Indeed, had it not been for aid provided by the natives of the region, perhaps none of the French would have survived that first difficult winter on the island. It was also two local natives who served as guides as Champlain explored the coast as far west as the Kennebec River in the summer of 1604.

Who were these natives with whom Champlain and his fellow Frenchmen interacted? Unfortunately, there has been a great deal of confusion over who lived where along the shores of Maine and New Brunswick. One source of this confusion stems from the use of linguistic labels in early French accounts, though regional terms were used by the English. So it was that people known to the English as Pemaquids, Penobscots, Machias, Passamaquoddies and Saint John’s Indians were known collectively to the French as Etchemins. To further complicate matters, the French began to use other labels, such as when they applied the Mi’kmaq word Maliseet to Etchemins. Then, too, the upsets caused by conflicts, massive die-offs from disease and the loss of lands following the influx of Europeans caused all sorts of dislocations and regroupings on the part of the survivors.

Despite these problems, a clear picture exists of who was who along the shores of the Gulf of Maine. Living along the coast between the Kennebec and Saint John Rivers were the Etchemins, whose name for themselves means real people, as opposed to animals, monsters and other people seen as less than truly human. Their homeland they called Ketakamigwa, meaning the big land on the sea coast. West of them lived a people whom the French called Armouchiquois, from a Mi’kmaq word meaning dog people, not intended as a compliment. Included were groups living as far south as Cape Cod, among them the Abenakis (dawn land people), whose homeland extended from the Kennebec to the Merrimack River and west to Lake Champlain. Their name for themselves was Alnambak, meaning real people; the name Abenaki is a corruption of what Indians living in Quebec called them. French settlers in Quebec began to use the name in 1628 at a time when their food resources were running dangerously low. In the nick of time, local Indians arrived with news of a people to the southeast—the direction of the winter sunrise—who were willing to furnish aid.

Ethnic distribution at the time of European Exploration. Prins and McBride 2007: 51. Courtesy Harald E.L. Prins.

A depiction of Armouchiquois and Montagnais Indians from Champlain’s 1612 map of New France. The Montagnais (now called Innu), who lived north of the St. Lawrence River, are the ones who introduced the term Abenaki to the French.

North and east of the Etchemins lived people the French called Souriquois, known from the late 1600s as Mi’kmaqs (meaning kin friends). Their original name for themselves was L’nu’k meaning (guess what?) humans or people. The name Souriquois may derive from the Shediak River, called the Souricoua by the early French. This was part of an important travel route between the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Bay of Fundy that ran right through the middle of Souriquois country.

All these people spoke closely related languages, variants of Eastern Algonquian, and had long traded with one another. Animal hides and copper from mines in the Minas Basin of Nova Scotia were exchanged for corn and beans grown by the Abenakis. This peaceful exchange was upset in the sixteenth century with the arrival of the French in Mi’kmaq country. Redirecting their trade to these newcomers (called wenuj, meaning who is that?), the Mi’kmaqs gained access to guns and sailing vessels, allowing them to raid their neighbors along the coast for the things that they had earlier obtained through trade. Allied with them in this raiding were the Etchemins living east of the Narraguagas River (which flows through Cherryfield), who are known today as Passamaquoddies (people of the pollock plenty place) and Maliseets (funny talkers). Collectively, these people were called Tarrentines (traders) by the English.

To defend themselves against these raiders from Down East, the western Etchemins entered into an alliance with those Abenakis living between the Kennebec and Mousam Rivers. Known as the Mawooshen Confederacy, the name means band of people walking or acting together. The name Mousam is a corruption of Mawooshen. The confederacy was headed by a grand chief named Bashaba, whose headquarters was up the Penobscot River at the mouth of the Kenduskeag Stream. As was the custom when referring to people or things preeminent of their kind, he was often referred to as The Bashaba, a practice that has confused many historians.

Already accomplished mariners, Mi’kmaqs quickly mastered the use of European shallops, such as this one. So it was that, in 1602, the English captain Bartholomew Gosnold encountered Mi’kmaq traders sailing in a shallop off Cape Neddick in southern Maine. Drawing by Duane A. Cline. Courtesy Bunny McBride.

Disaster befell the Mawooshen Confederacy in 1615, when Mi’kmaq raiders managed to kill Bashaba. On top of this came the Great Dying, one of several epidemics that swept through native populations in the Americas. Of European origin, this epidemic killed off up to 90 percent of coastal populations. To replenish their numbers, the local Etchemins encouraged their surviving Abenaki allies, who were under pressure from the growth of English colonies to the south, to join their communities. It is these Abenaki and Echemin descendants of the old Mawooshen Confederacy who became known as Penobscots. Eventually, the Abenaki language became dominant among them, although some Etchemin words still persist today. Among the Passamaquoddy and Maliseet, by contrast, modern versions of the old Etchemin language are still spoken.

By 1700, in the face of continual pressures from the English, the Penobscots joined with other Abenakis, as well as their former adversaries Down East, to form the Wabanaki (dawn land) Confederacy. On a grander scale, it represented a revival of the old Mawooshen idea. Still today, these people of northern New England and Canada’s Atlantic Provinces are collectively known as Wabanakis.

The superiority of canoe transport over all other modes is apparent from this map of waterways in the state of Maine (The network of rivers, lakes and streams continues eastward into New Brunswick.) The waterways not only made canoe travel possible but also, except when they were iced over, impeded overland travel. Courtesy David Cook and Ann Flewelling.

In addition to speaking their own version of the Eastern Algonquian language, each of the Wabanaki nations maintained its own distinct culture. The Etchemins and Mi’kmaqs, for example, relied on hunting, fishing and the gathering of shellfish and wild plants for their subsistence. The Abenakis engaged in these activities, too, but also grew corn, beans and squash. But all of these groups understood one another’s language, traded with one another and even intermarried. Thus, despite particular differences, they had much in common as well. Perhaps the most obvious is their reliance on canoe transportation. Except when ice prevented it, most of their travel was by canoe over the extensive network of lakes, rivers and streams of the Northeast. Etchemin and Mi’kmaq families, in particular, spent a great deal of time in their canoes, traveling from one favorite campsite to another, coming together periodically at traditional gathering places to trade and socialize—hence their depiction as Canoe Indians. Even the Gulf of Maine itself provided opportunities, as Etchemins made trips to offshore islands like Monhegan and Matinicus. Both they and the Mi’kmaqs traveled to and from Nova Scotia across the open waters of the Bay of Fundy. Truly, these people were skilled mariners.

Birch-bark canoes like this one were so well suited for the waterways of the Down East coast that they remained in use throughout the nineteenth century, when they were largely replaced by canvas. Courtesy Abbe Museum.

In the following pages, we will focus our attention on the Etchemins in particular, looking first at their background and then their way of life and how they have coped over the past four hundred years.

Chapter 1

The Archaeological Background

Although there is general agreement that the ancestors of the historic Etchemins have been living along the coast for something like 3,000 years, not all scholars agree that people living here before that are ancestral to more recent populations. Some think that there was a population replacement about 3,800 years ago, but many others are skeptical. I belong to the latter group, and today’s Wabanakis also see themselves as having been in place since the beginning. But more about this later.

Written records pertaining to the Gulf of Maine’s original inhabitants are almost nonexistent before 1604, so to learn about earlier history, we must turn to archaeology for information. Along the coast, numerous shell middens were formed as refuse was discarded by people in the course of their daily activities. Although these middens have suffered in varying degrees from the effects of erosion caused by rising sea levels, until the past few decades, they were little disturbed by development or the activities of relic collectors. Therefore, they preserve a record of people’s past activities over the many millennia before the advent of written records. This record is retrievable, however, only through careful and meticulous excavation, usually by professionally trained archaeologists. The good news is that many sites along the coast, both on islands and the nearby mainland, have been professionally excavated; the bad news is that many hitherto untouched sites have been disturbed in recent decades by untrained diggers, with a consequent loss of irreplaceable information.

In addition to the shell middens, archaeologists have also investigated a number of interior sites, often near the falls of rivers and streams where people fished and portaged their canoes or at other good fishing spots. Though it may seem that archaeologists are merely digging up things, what they are really digging up is information. That information comes not from recovered potsherds, spear points and other artifacts by themselves, but rather from the way these objects are associated with one another, as well as with other things such as charcoal, fire-cracked rock, plant, fish and animal remains and so forth. Once taken out of context, objects by themselves tell us next to nothing. Thus, to dig around in archaeological sites looking for relics destroys them, and the information they contain, as effectively as if they were bulldozed into oblivion.

PALEO-INDIANS

Archaeology has revealed that