Casco Bay and the People of the Dawn
Near Portland, Maine
You are looking out at Casco Bay, a sprawling body of water whose shores have been home to people for more than twelve thousand years. Long before European ships appeared on the horizon, the Wabanaki, whose name translates roughly as People of the Dawn, lived along these inlets, harvested the bay's extraordinary richness, and built the social world that would shape everything that followed.
The Wabanaki peoples of this coast, including the Abenaki bands who claimed Portland Neck and the surrounding shores, organized their lives around the rhythms of this place. They fished, hunted, and dug clams from the tidal flats. They traveled the bay's many channels by canoe. The original name for what became Casco Bay, Aucocisco, is believed to mean place of the herons, a reference to the great blue herons that moved through the marshes at the water's edge.
For thousands of years the Wabanaki and their ancestors shaped this landscape in ways that endure. The bay's islands, by some counts more than seven hundred of them, despite an old military officer's claim that there were exactly three hundred sixty-five, one for each day of the year, earned the nickname Calendar Islands from that myth. Peaks Island, visible from here on a clear day, was a Wabanaki summer camp for fishing and shellfish gathering long before it became a Victorian resort.
When English colonists arrived in the sixteen thirties, the Wabanaki at first attempted to incorporate them into existing trade and kinship networks. But the English brought epidemic diseases that decimated communities, and they demanded land in ways the Wabanaki had no cultural framework to refuse. By the early seventeen hundreds, sustained warfare and dispossession had pushed most Wabanaki off Portland Neck entirely. The people who built this civilization on Casco Bay are still here, in Maine, in their recognized nations, asserting sovereignty over lands and waters their ancestors named. When you look at this harbor today, you are looking at a place twelve thousand years in the making.
