LOE at Seven Days VT for 04.07.25
Abenaki Rights
As community members, colleagues to Vermont Abenaki and land grant university employees, we address Seven Days readers, responding to Abenaki Council of Odanak's advertisement on April 2, 2025, along with similarly oriented event news since 2022. While disturbing "race-shifting" phenomena occurs worldwide and Québec Abenaki have valid claims to territory divided by colonial borders, to cancel all Abenaki people in Vermont, many of whom remained (not going north to Odanak), contributes to ongoing cultural genocide.
Vermont's original peoples endured here, as evident in archaeological records and their lived experience. This campaign erases them and their history. Colonial evidence of "proper written records" is inadequate for people of oral traditions whose presence was hidden or omitted. Vermont Abenaki lost more than 90 percent of their people through land theft, eugenic assaults and hidden identity tactics. We encourage journalists to research and share balanced narratives so that Vermont's settlers can unpack our colonial history.
To learn more, go to Abenaki events; meet Abenaki; listen to their stories; read books such as Trudy Ann Parker's Aunt Sarah, William Haviland and Marjory Power's The Original Vermonters, Colin Calloway's Western Abenakis of Vermont, 1600-1800, Nancy Gallagher's Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State, and Mercedes de Guardiola's Vermont for the Vermonters; and research complex relationships such as those between early Odanak and Vermont Abenaki, and current Odanak Abenaki with Hydro-Québec.
It is alarming to witness Vermont media contribute to a false, simplistic narrative that all Vermont Abenaki are fake, denouncing their legitimacy. Hard-earned state recognition, despite colonial limitations, offers some rights in their ancestral homeland.
Jess Rubin - Burlington
Katherine Elmer - Winooski
Laura Hill - Burlington