In Search of New England's Native Past: Selected Essays by Gordon M. Day

by Gordon M. Day, Michael K. Foster (Editor), William Cowan (Editor)

This volume highlights the work of the late Gordon M. Day, renowned for his groundbreaking research on the history and culture of the Western Abenakis and their Indian neighbors. Where previous historians had tended to portray northern New England as an area largely devoid of aboriginal peoples, Day established beyond all doubt the presence of Abenaki settlements along the eastern shore of Lake Champlain as well as the upper reaches of the Connecticut and Merrimack rivers.

For nearly three decades, Day focused his work on the community of Saint Francis, or Odanak, in Quebec, to which Abenaki refugees from interior New England had fled, beginning in the mid-seventeenth century and continuing into the nineteenth. Drawing on t he methods of several disciplines, including ethnology, linguistics, and ethnohistory, he synthesized data from fragmentary historical records, oral traditions, and place names to reconstruct a world assumed to be lost.

344 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1998

Reviews

[Coralie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fascinating book about the Indians of Northern New England. Day tries to answer the question of whether there were Indian tribes that were native to Vermont. He isn't really able to answer that question, and he admits it in the book, but he finds out a lot of answers to other questions. Who were the St Francis Indians? Who really are the Abenakis? What happened to the Indian tribes who were kicked out of Massachusetts after King Philp's War? Contrary to what our teachers told us in Elementary School, they didn't all die of Smallpox. Even though this book is a little dry, I loved finding out about all this stuff.