Bringing Indigenous Knowledge and History to the Classroom

Editor’s Introduction

The lands that surround the Gulf of Maine, stretching from Massachusetts to Nova Scotia, have been inhabited by Indigenous Peoples for millennia (see map).  These are the traditional homelands of numerous tribes and kinship groups within the Wabanaki Confederacy.  The People moved seasonally, following resource availability, harvesting but also stewarding the lands and waters they relied on to live.

“This cyclical seasonal movement between resource bases within an ecosystem, which functioned to enhance the diversity of the environment and to facilitate the survival of its many inhabitants, had been ongoing in the Wabanaki homeland for millenia…

Wabanaki people had developed an embedded knowledge based on longstanding resource use and reciprocal relationships of exchange with their human and “other-than-human” relations in this place.” (1)

This approach of respect and reciprocity was reinforced through the ages by the telling of stories, many of which included lessons about stewardship - not taking too much, conserving and protecting resources into the future. 

These are lessons that would serve us all well today!  Some GOMI teachers have begun to incorporate Indigenous history and such lessons into their classroom curricula.  The following article is an example from Lynne Taylor at River Valley Charter School (Newburyport, MA).  Lynn’s curriculum is based on the graduate research of Kristine Malpica (2) and on the extensive writings of Mary Ellen Lepionka (3), who was an advisor to Kristine.   Lynne has adopted the idea of storytelling in her curriculum and has focused her lessons on the history that is local to Newburyport and especially on the Merrimack River, which was critical to Indigenous people for resources, transportation, and trade.  The first two stories in Lynne’s curriculum are printed below, and links to her full curriculum are provided. 

In Memoriam:  Mary Ellen Lepionka (Jan 5, 1943 - Oct 7, 2024)

GOMI would like to recognize and express gratitude to Mary Ellen Lepionka for the important contributions she made to understanding Indigenous history of Cape Ann and the lower Merrimack Valley region of Massachusetts/New Hampshire through her extensive research and scholarship.  Mary Ellen was generous in sharing her work, and we hope to honor her legacy by further sharing it and continuing our own efforts to learn and embrace the Indigenous knowledge and full history of the Gulf of Maine region.

 To learn more about Mary Ellen and read her work, please visit her website (3), Indigenous History of Essex County, Massachusetts, and the Historic Ipswich website (4), where she published many articles.

Local Indigenous History Stories

Read-Aloud Lessons

Written by Lynne Taylor

From the research of Kristine Malpica and Mary Ellen Lepionka

Story #1: Ancient People of the Merrimack River Valley 

We are going to talk about the original, or indigenous, people of the very land where we now are. The land where our school is. The land that your home sits upon. The beautiful beaches of Plum Island and the majestic woods of Maudsley. We are going to talk about the Merrimack River and its great importance throughout the ages.  I’ll bet you already know that there were Native Americans here when the first settlers from Europe came to the New World (North and South America.) But what do you know about the people who lived RIGHT HERE? Probably not very much. Do you know the name of the tribe or band of Native Americans that stewarded the land where your town or city now stands? Do you know what happened to them? Do you know any of their names? It has been often said that history is written by the conquerors, and to the victors go the spoils. Today, we are privileged to be living on land that was taken from the original people who lived here. Although this happened hundreds of years ago, we owe it to those original inhabitants to learn as much about them as we can.

So gather round; we will start at the beginning.

For 12,000 years before the arrival of Europeans, Indigenous people inhabited W'abinakik, which means Dawnland in the Abenaki language. W’abinakik is what we now know as New England. The Abenaki are part of what we call the Algonquian language family. The Algonquians are Native Americans who share a similar culture and language, although over time they have separated into many different tribes across what is now the United States and Canada. Some other examples of Algonquian tribes are the Wampanoag and the Massachusset here in the east, but also the Oijibwa and Cree of the north, and the Arapaho and Cheyenne of the west, as well as many, many other tribes.

All along the Merrimack River, down to Cape Ann where Gloucester is, way, way up into New Hampshire and over into Maine, lived the great Pennacook Nation! The Pennacook were part of the Algonquian culture. Many towns and landmarks in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine are named for famous Pennacook people, or are words that came from the Abenaki Language, which the Penacook spoke. Here are some examples:

Agawam means “Beyond the marsh.” 

Annisquam means, “End of the marsh.”

Agamenticus means, “Beyond the mountain rising from the small tidal river.” 

Nashua, Pentucket, Winnepesauke, Sunapee, Osipee, Passaconaway, Kancamaugus, Kennebunk, Ogunquit, Saco, and Sebago are all Pennacook words and names! Have you heard of any of these places before? Did you ever realize that these names came from the Abenaki language? Can you think of any other words that we use today that may have come from Native American people?

Even the name of our beloved Merrimack River comes from the Abenaki word, Molodomak, meaning deep river. The bands of people who lived along the Merrimack River came to be known as the Pawtucket-Pennacook. Generally speaking, the Pennacook were on the northern side of the Merrimack and up into New Hampshire, while the Pawtucket were on the southern side of the Merrimack and throughout much of what is now Essex County, and down towards Cape Ann and Boston. So, it is the Pawtucket people who originally inhabited what is now Newburyport, Newbury, Amesbury, West Newbury and Salisbury. They lived in 30 villages all up and down the Merrimack River Valley from Plum Island to Lake Winnipesaukee. They used the Molodomak as a highway, moving easily up and down the river in their birchbark canoes. The big, central village was called Wamesit, which meant “Room for All,” and was located near Pawtucket Falls in what is now Lowell! Wamesit was where many different bands of Pawtucket-Penacook people would live during the cold winters because it was inland and therefore more sheltered from coastal storms.

There, at Wamesit, as many as 3,000 Pawtucket-Penacook would gather in birchbark wigwams and longhouses to commune together and tell stories during the long winter months.  Then, with the warmer weather, they would disperse into smaller family groups and  clans of 50-200 people to take advantage of the bounty that other areas of the Wolhanak, the River Valley, had to offer. Archeologists  have found ample evidence of many seasonal villages all along the Merrimack River Valley, and much of this evidence has been found within just a few miles of where we sit at this very moment! Can you think of reasons why native people would want to move closer to the seashore in the summer?

(Answer:  Fishing, harvesting clams, lobster, the ground is very fertile and excellent for growing crops.)

Story #2 Indian Hill, West Newbury

Are you ready to hear something incredibly, unbelievably, stupendously exciting?  (Drumroll, please!) ….A large, prehistoric settlement was determined to be near Indian Hill in West Newbury! Believe it or not, archeologists have evidence of Native American habitation from 3,000 years ago up until the first Europeans arrived here in the 1600’s. Indian Hill was originally known as Quascacunquen or Kwaskaikikwen, meaning “Best place for planting (corn.)”

In Western Abenaki Language:

Kwask = state of being

Wai = best, ideal, perfect

Kikwen = fields, planting ground, cropland

As its name suggests, Indian Hill is an Indigenous site. It was the site of a very important agricultural village. The meadows and grasslands on the southwest-facing, gently sloping skirts of Indian Hill began as beautiful and bountiful Pawtucket-Pennacook cornfields!  In addition to corn, the people grew squash, beans, pumpkins, and native sunflowers (Jerusalem Artichokes,) which are native to New England and have edible tubers.

The Cherry Hill Reservoir below Indian Hill was created in 1980 by damming the Artichoke River for Newburyport’s water supply. So, way back when the Pawtucket Village, Kwaskwaikikwen, was at Indian Hill, there was no reservoir below the hill, but rather a pristine river. The Artichoke River was named for the explorer Samuel de Champlain’s 1603 account of native sunflower tubers. Champlain wrote in 1603 that they tasted like artichokes!  Later, Puritan settlers, believing they were building a new holy land, named them Jerusalem Artichokes and gave the Merrimack tributary its name, Artichoke River. The river has since been dammed up to create the Artichoke Reservoir and provide Newburyport with drinking water.

Many of the trees and plants that are still on Kwaskwaikikwen and the surrounding Greenbelt were originally planted, protected and managed by the Pawtucket and their Algonquian ancestors who lived here! They used all parts of the chokecherry, for example, to make fruit leathers, medicinal teas, and smoking mixtures. They used juniper berries in fermentation, poultices, and pain-relieving medicines, and they flavored and colored their corn mashes with goldenrod flowers.

The Pawtucket-Pennacook had land stretching from the Molodomak’s Atlantic mouth to its Lake Winnipesaukee source. They were Patrilineal bands of about 200 people in a village site. Sagamores and sachems were mostly male, but occasionally female. A sachem was a great leader of many bands, whereas a sagamore was a secondary leader of just one or a few bands. For example, Passaconaway (presided over lands above the Merrimac) and Nanapeshament (presided over lands below the Merrimac) were sachems, whereas Masconomet was a sagamore of the Agawam (Essex County) area. When Nanapeshamet died, his wife became a powerful sachem, known as Squaw Sachem.

The dwellings at Kwaskwaikikwen were wigwams made of wooden frames covered with birch bark or mats woven from reeds. A variety of tools were creatively and expertly made from bone, wood and stone. The Pennacook-Pawtucket’s main mode of transportation were finely crafted Birch Bark canoes. These canoes could move entire families and their belongings up and down the Molodomak River and its many tributaries.

To see the complete Local Indigenous History Stories curriculum, please go to:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QZYAzYzU7khXhYsm0MH7U1UdjaO_bzRdpBMc_J05OrU/edit?tab=t.0

A Note to Fellow Teachers

from Lynne

As a longtime enthusiast of history and place based education, I was overjoyed to be able to use the thesis of my friend and bandmate Kristine Malpica entitled, Uncommon Ground: Pawtucket-Pennacook Strategic Land Exchange in Native Spaces and Colonized Places of Essex County and Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century, as the basis for a curriculum geared towards Elementary students. The curriculum consists of hitherto mostly unknown history of what is now Essex County, MA. I have found that kids are so much more engaged in history when it is presented through a place-based lens in a story telling format.  Whenever possible, I like to bring them to the actual site where the stories happened. And from there, I like to follow timeline threads into more familiar US history, with the students now having a more solid and broad base of knowledge and richer, deeper understanding of how we have arrived at where the United States now finds itself.

References

1.  Brooks, L., and C. Brooks. 2010.  The Reciprocity Principle and Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Understanding the Significance of Indigenous Protest on the Presumpscot River. International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies.  3:11-28 ISSN: 1837-0144

2.  Malpica, Kristine. 2021. Uncommon Ground: Pawtucket-Pennacook Strategic Land Exchange in Native Spaces and Colonized Places of Essex County and Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century. Graduate Masters Theses. 686. https://scholarworks.umb.edu/masters_theses/686

3.  Lepionka, Mary Ellen. Indigenous History of Essex County, MA (https://capeannhistory.org/)

4.  Historic Ipswich: Remembering Mary Ellen Lepionka (https://historicipswich.net/2024/10/14/remembering-mary-ellen-lepionka/

5.  Native Land Digital https://native-land.ca

6.  Map from Lepionka,M.E. Who were the Agawam Indians really? https://historicipswich.net/2021/04/21/who-were-the-agawam-indians-really/

7. Peabody diorama of Shattuck Farm https://peabody.andover.edu/2018/05/22/native-history-of-andovers-open-spaces/

8.  Currier, John J. 1902.  History of Newbury, Mass., 1635-19028 Currier, John J. (John James), 1834-1912 p83.

9.  Indigenous New Hampshire Collaborative Collective.  13 Moons Unit: Lesson Plans https://indigenousnh.com/educational-resources/ and Harvest Calendar, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Uf3PMYlHORBiOfjibeCkHcaY2KPCl964/view)

10. Indigenous New Hampshire Collaborative Collective (INHCC) (https://indigenousnh.com/)

Lynne is an AMS certified Montessorian who has worked at River Valley Charter School in Newburyport, MA with students aged 6-12 since 1999. She has been especially passionate about bringing often untold American history to her students. A singer- songwriter as well, she can be found performing at various venues across New England and beyond as half of the FolknRoll duo, Rockwood Taylor.