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By Giovanna Peebles
Canada’s Odanak and Wolinak/Becancour First Nation tribes (Canadian Abenakis) and their allies are working to extinguish the four Vermont state-recognized Abenaki tribes (Vermont Abenakis). Serious debates in a respectful forum are one thing. Vicious public attacks on the identity of communities, families, and individuals to gain political and economic power are quite another matter. As an anthropologist for 50 years and a Vermont State Archaeologist for 38 of those, I have worked with Vermont’s Abenaki communities for decades. History is on their side. They will not be extinguished.
The Native history of this part of North America is far more complex, “messy,” and poorly documented than portrayed by the Canadian Abenakis. They spew out a firehose of falsehoods. To rebut these attacks requires many 850-word essays. I’ll start with this one.
For hundreds of years, ancestors of the Vermont Abenakis clung quietly and tightly to their cultural identities as Natives in a borderless geography. Some, but not all, lived in Odanak in Quebec. Historian Colin Calloway helps explain the lives and complex historical context of these Natives. Their experience is very different and cannot be compared to that of the Canadian Abenakis on their reserves for many generations.
He writes: “The boundaries that divided Indians and Europeans in early America were porous; the frontier operated as a sponge as often as a palisade, soaking up rather than separating people and influences. Some Indians and some Europeans crossed over to live in the other’s world, and some became members of the other’s society. Interactions in frontier zones served to connect and unite people as well as divide and alienate them, providing new economic, social, spiritual, and sexual opportunities and creating new networks of kinship, affection, commerce, and common interest.”
Within this complex and largely unrecorded social, economic, and cultural history, Native people, regardless if their name was French or English, stayed true to their culture and maintained their traditions in rural northern New England and across the border.
As anthropologists, we know that unwritten knowledge passed down from person to person, family to family, is central to a people’s history and identity, especially in the face of poverty, illiteracy, and a marginalized existence. While basic to understanding the Vermont Abenakis, oral traditions are mocked by the Canadian Abenakis and their allies. They require that the Vermont Abenaki “prove themselves” Native by using a European-based evidentiary standard. Contrary to what some might have us believe, most aspects of the last 400 years were never recorded. Poor, illiterate, unemployed or under-employed, rural people didn’t write and no one wrote about them. Incomplete, mis-written, or altogether missing baptism, marriage, death, census, and other records betray the people they ostensibly “document.” Good historians know the absence of Native names in the above documents results from many factors. In fact, the primary authority on the Western Abenakis, Gordon M. Day, wrote about “the problem of Indian names.”
Indigenous historian Ned Blackhawk describes how Native people were written out of histories and made to “disappear” in his book “The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History”: “indigenous absence has been a long tradition of American historical analysis …” (page 2) … On the scale of white supremacy, Native peoples inhabited the lowest rungs of humanity.” (page 368). Indigenous historian Jean O’Brien says that, “Given the oppressive experience of living within the racial formation of 19th century New England, Indian peoples usually had little incentive to identify themselves in the first place.” These Native historians, among others, help explain why Vermont Abenakis kept such a low profile as to become practically invisible.
Particular historic events, such as the eugenics surveys, further necessitated a low to no profile. And to dismiss those who falsely assert that the Abenakis were not victimized by the eugenics surveys, historian Mercedes de Guardiola carefully pulls apart the thick threads of biases and falsehoods in the eugenics survey documents addressing whether Vermont Abenaki families were victimized.
“… from an ethnographic standpoint, the [Eugenics Survey of Vermont] is nearly useless,” she writes. But Vermont Abenaki families know.
For 400 years, Europeans used disease, guns, words, and power to destroy America’s Native peoples. Today, in a twist of irony, the Canadian Abenakis have weaponized written records, or their absence. They selectively misuse and manipulate information, methodologies (like the “genealogical” studies), and documentation as “evidence” of missing Indigenous identity. The Canadian Abenakis are pushing the edges of the United Nations Genocide Convention (see pages 4–5). There can be no doubt that the Canadian Abenakis’ intent today is to erase the Vermont Abenakis. This is wrong.
The Vermont Abenakis have worked tirelessly to care for their own communities and beyond by expanding economic, social, and educational opportunities; teaching the Abenaki language; developing educational curricula for Vermont schools; helping all Vermonters gain a greater appreciation of Native history and heritage; protecting lands; and protecting their ancestors buried in unmarked graves. Across many years they saved many unmarked Native burials under assault by construction. The Vermont Abenakis long ancestral connections to the land in various parts of Vermont is beyond doubt.
In the Nov. 10, 2025 radio show Native America Calling, “Vermont Tribes Defend their Identity against scrutiny from across the Canadian border,” Odanak Abenaki Chief Rick O’bomsawin said “this has gotten out of hand.” Chief O’bomsawin got that right.
Giovanna Peebles was Vermont State Archaeologist from 1976 to 2014 and Vermont State Historic Preservation Officer from 2010 to 2013. She lives in Montpelier.
The material presented here represents the opinion of the author and does not reflect the opinions of The Bridge. Commentaries may be submitted to editor@montpelierbridge.com. Preference is given to submissions by those who live in central Vermont. Submissions are encouraged to be 500 to 750 words in length.
