Well, native culture in New York State is very interesting because predominantly the focus has been on Haudenosaunee or Iroquois ancestry and Iroquois stories, Iroquois history, Iroquois tradition. However, the Algonquin peoples, in the North it would be Lenape to the south of Albany and then Abenaki to the north, were ignored in large part because they were often allies of the French.
Now, Abenaki people tended to keep their identity rather closely hidden in many cases for a couple of reasons. One is that in Vermont where there was a large population center of Native Americans in the northern part of the state, there was in the 1930s a very active campaign of actual what they called purifying the race, getting rid of through various techniques of sterilization, undesirable aspects of the population such as criminality, which they thought was inherited in those days.
And people who were of poor education were regarded as, and I use the word as they did, idiots. And often people who were of native ancestry fell in those classifications. And there’s a lot of documentation of this. So, it was much better to pretend that you were just like everybody else, to say, as my grandfather would, that they were French Canadian. In fact, a friend of mine named Wolf Song, who was a Vermont storyteller, when he began to stand up and tell his stories, got a phone call – this is in 1978 – from his aunt, terrified, saying, “What are you doing? Now they’ll know we’re here and they’re going to come and get us.”
So, that was part of the mix that I grew up with, that kind of ethnic denial of their native ancestry. And yet if I looked around, there were native people everywhere, often visible as performers. Places like, oh say, Frontier Town in the Adirondacks always had an Indian Village. Lake George had the Indian Village. There was a place called The Enchanted Forest in Old Forge where Abenaki people were doing programs.
And all of these different places, we’d go there, I’d hear storytelling, I’d meet these people. And then later in life they would become real mentors and close friends of mine up until the time they passed on. People like [unint.], Maurice Dennis, who was in The Enchanted Forest or [unint.], Ray Fadden, who was in the Indian Village and then founded The Six Nations Indian Museum.
And those Mohawk and Abenaki elders were very generous because for whatever reason I always loved to listen to stories and would sit quietly and listen. And by showing my attention, in return they would tell those stories to me.
