Harald E. L. Prins

In Search of New England's Native Past: Selected Essays by Gordon M. Day. Ed. by Michael K. Foster and William Cowan. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. xvi, 328 pp. Cloth,

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 Abenakj settlements along the eastern shore of Lake Champlain as well as the upperreaches 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 the 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.

70.00, ISBN 1-55849-150-3. Paper,

This is a study of the history and current state of aboriginal politics in Canada drawing comparisons with New Zealand and the United States. By exploring similar terrains of the evolving relationship of the peoples with the state, common patterns are revealed. The work includes analysis of the impact of social structures and societal constraints as they define the parameters and restrict the options of the participants in the scripting of this political drama.