The Western Abenaki, Survival, Erasure, and Recognition

The Green Mountains have been home to the Western Abenaki for at least twelve thousand years. They called the land Ndakinna, which means Our Land, and they moved through it seasonally, fishing the rivers, hunting the forests, harvesting wild plants, and tapping maple trees long before European settlers understood what maple sugar was.

The French arrived in the early sixteen hundreds, followed by the British, and the Abenaki were pulled into a century of imperial warfare that was not of their making. King Philip's War in the sixteen seventies, Queen Anne's War, King George's War, the French and Indian War, each conflict cost the Abenaki lives, displaced communities, and eroded their hold on Ndakinna. By the mid eighteen hundreds, they had been pushed to the margins of a state that formally treated them as absent.

That official erasure hardened in the twentieth century. For decades, Vermont denied that any Abenaki people remained in the state at all. The denial had a specific, damaging consequence. In nineteen twenty-five, Vermont began a eugenics survey that, with a sterilization law passed in nineteen thirty-one, targeted poor, rural, and mixed-heritage families, many of them Abenaki or of Abenaki descent. The state's Eugenics Survey of Vermont, run by a University of Vermont professor named Henry Perkins, compiled family histories, pushed for involuntary sterilization, and explicitly described Abenaki heritage as a marker of hereditary defect. At least two hundred fifty people were sterilized under the program before it wound down in the nineteen forties.

The Abenaki did not disappear. They kept their families, their knowledge of plants and waterways, and their identity, often quietly, because visibility had become dangerous.

Recognition came slowly. In two thousand eleven and two thousand twelve, Vermont formally recognized four Abenaki bands, among them the Abenaki St. Francis Sokoki Band and the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation, as distinct tribal entities with official standing. Vermont was among the last states in the Northeast to extend formal recognition, and the recognition that came carries no federal status and no land base. But it is an acknowledgment that the people who named this land are still here, still speaking, and still seeking the fuller sovereignty that most New England tribes have not yet recovered.