Examining the ancestral home and range of Indigenous people
By Janet Reynolds
For many, the story of the settling of the Adirondacks goes something like this: The area was a vast, uninhabited wilderness until white settlers came to start mining, lumbering and, later, vacationing. Yes, a few Native Americans traveled through the Adirondacks in pre-colonial times, but they never actually lived there.
It’s a tale that has been perpetuated by everyone from Ralph Waldo Emerson in his poem “The Adirondacs” to Alfred Donaldson, a banker whose 1921 two-volume book, “A History of the Adirondacks,” noted that “Indians never made any part of what is now the Adirondack Park their permanent home.”
The problem, several historians and archeologists say, is that it’s not true. And continuing this myth, they say, is an injustice to the Indigenous people who were — and still are — there.
“The idea that this was unclaimed space is factually wrong,” Camille Townsend, a Rutgers University history professor specializing in Native American history, said. Home, especially for Native Americans of this time, was a series of places you return to. “It might vary a bit,” she said, depending on weather issues such as drought, “but it was a regular pattern of places you come to each year and whether you’re a child or adult, you’re delighted to return to them.”
Karl Jacoby, American History professor at Columbia University, concurred. “All parks have this ideology of empty wilderness,” he said. “It’s almost always about erasing the Indigenous people on the land, that North America was an empty space waiting to be inhabited when the Europeans showed up.” These Manifest Destiny and John Lockean views of property also, not coincidentally, make taking over the land easier. If no one officially lives there, then any new arrivals can simply take it as their own — which they did throughout much of America.
Frequently, the taking of land was made easier because of deaths. European diseases devastated Indigenous people, said writer and traditional storyteller Joseph Bruchac, a member of the Nulhegan Abenaki Nation, who said some historians may have passed on a fallacy by suggesting no one ever owned land taken by the Europeans. “It’s a very harmful way of looking at things, interpreting the people who lived there as nomads at most,” he said. “It makes an assumption that these were people with no culture. It feeds into the myth of the vanishing or nonexistent Native — without culture, without history, without fixed abode.”
The myth also belies the increasing number of artifacts found within the Adirondack Park, some of which have been shown, thanks to carbon dating, to be more than 11,000 years old.
Tim Messner, associate professor of anthropology at SUNY Potsdam, has been periodically excavating in the Adirondacks for a few years. He has uncovered remnants of a fire pit in the Long Lake area from 1,000 years ago. Other finds include drills, spear points and knives 5,000 to 7,000 years old in the Tupper Lake area.
One site in Tupper Lake dates back 11,500 years. Both the Six Nations Iroquois Cultural Center in Onchiota and the Adirondack Experience museum in Blue Mountain Lake have artifacts as well. And these are just the found pieces that have been turned over to museums and institutions. The likelihood that additional evidence is sitting in attics and garages is high, Messner and others said.
“The archeological evidence speaks to a deeper history and more complicated history than has been conventionally put forth,” Messner said. “People didn’t live in one spot. For the bulk of humanity, people were hunting and gathering.”
“They didn’t have a fixed address. They had a physical entity that was considered home,” Messner said. “That’s how I conceive of the Adirondacks — people moving through and spending time everywhere because that’s what life necessitated for thousands and thousands of years.”
“It forces us to challenge our Eurocentric understanding of place and property and all these ideas of how one lives,” Messner said.
“People think evidence of habitation has to be villages or cities that were there a long time,” Bruchac said. “Our pattern of living was seasonal.” The Algonquins, for instance, were not primarily agriculturalists, he said —they hunted, gathered and fished. “So, they were not seeing a village as a village but seeing a territory as their village or home.”
David Fadden, who runs the Six Nations Iroquois Center, begun by his grandfather, said his people had a broader perspective when it comes to ancestral territory. “The way we perceive ownership and usage of land is different from colonial and European concepts,” he said. “Fences and walls are unheard of with Native peoples.”
Marla Jacobs, cultural manager at the Akwesasne Museum and Cultural Center on the St. Regis Mohawk territory in northern Franklin County, sees the perceived story of ownership as a bigoted one. “I really believe it’s a form of racism to make Indigenous people look dumber,” she said. “The reason why we were living the way we were was because of the respect we have for nature itself.”
She referenced a tribal thanksgiving address to illustrate. The address, she said, pays respect to Mother Earth, water, plants and animals. “We do this because all these things came before us and will be here after us,” she said. “We acknowledge our presence and thank them for sustaining us.”
That belief system is incorporated into Native lifestyle. “A long time ago the word ‘nomadic’ would be used because we traveled,” Jacobs said. “We never stayed in one spot for very long. When we removed ourselves from that space, it gave the land time to heal.”
Curt Stager, a natural sciences professor at Paul Smith’s College, has been studying this issue for years and is writing a book on this topic. He concludes that Indigenous people regarded the Adirondack Park as their homeland.
“Are you saying your pantry isn’t part of your home because you only go in it a few seconds a day?” he said. “You needed to go where the food was and that would change through the seasons. The whole region was home.”
“They may or may not have had villages, because that may not be how they lived,” Stager said. “The main question is did they live here. It’s an unequivocal yes. All you need is one artifact, and we have them, and it spans from the post Ice Age.”
“Their story never ended,” Stager adds. “They have been here almost since land emerged from under the ice sheet.”
Melissa Otis, an Elizabethtown historian who wrote the book “Rural Indigenousness,” is direct about why the history of Native people in the park is so misunderstood. Earlier historians didn’t bother to examine or write about Native American ownership. Her book is an attempt to right that wrong by examining the history of the Algonquian and Iroquoian people in the Adirondacks.
“It’s very colonialist. It’s a westernized perspective of what a home is supposed to be,” she said. “It doesn’t take into account the various ways people around the world live and occupy space.”
It’s a misnomer to say the Algonquin people were nomads, Otis said. “They had a specific territory for what was going on. It was very routinized work that they did,” she said. These people fished and gathered plants in different areas. The colonial perspective involved property purchases.
Aurora Pfaff, a Saranac Lake writer who is part Mohawk and has written about her ancestors on TupperLake.com, agrees with Otis. “People put an emphasis on home and Native people don’t think of land as a possession,” she said. “Home is where you feel it, not just a building on a plot of land and here’s the dividing line between your house and my house. We’re part of something bigger. Your neighbors aren’t just who lives next door. It’s the animals. There’s a respect for the environment that’s really crucial in looking at the place as your home and not just the place where you lay your head.”
Pfaff believes perpetuating misinformation about Native itinerancy harms Native Americans today. “There is this sensation or misconception that what happens in the past is over and done with,” she said. “The concept that they weren’t here, that no one was here, that this land was just open and empty is not accurate. It erases the people who were here. It erases whole communities and erases the people who stood on the shore of a lake in the Adirondacks and found it beautiful.
“To erase people’s existence in a place is detrimental to the communities, socially, emotionally,” she said, “and I think it’s something a lot of people who are still here struggle with. We’re here and you’re not seeing us. We need to be seen. We need to be seen as the original Adirondackers.”
I have Seneca loved the boudaries between the tribes of Update New York!
An ancestor of mine married a full blooded Seneca woman. I commune with the beautiful world outside.
I believe that the Adirondacks were vacated each winter as there was milder conditions with more game outside the region.
That is a common myth but not correct. There are records of Native peoples ice fishing, trapping, and hunting in the Adks. Indeed, fur trapping is best in the winter as the fur is more thick then.
The suppression of nomadism is a well documented worldwide phenomena. Maybe because the ancient Greeks have been so influential in the halls of western colleges and universities for so long the West regards nomadic cultures as barbaric and because most of these highly developed cultures tended to have oral historical traditions (and because written records don’t survive well anywhere except in places like Egypt or on baked clay tablets) their philosophies, points of view, get short shrift. We learn of cultures like the Scythians, Sogdians, Mongols, from the records of their enemies. When the Huns are driven from the steppe into new places western histories record it as invasion, but when the Greeks take lands on the Black Sea, or Alexander builds cities in Sogdia we call them “settlements.” There are many names for theft, among them are colonialism, settler/settlement, evangelism, and sometimes education.
So the suppression of cultures in North and South America was a baked-in systematic part of the barbaric cultures Europeans brought with them to the laughably named New World.
It is indeed unfortunate the way Humans re-write history and even PRE-history to suit their versions of Manifest Destiny, proselytization, imperialism, and “civilizing” continents. Europeans are not unique in this behavior. It is quite easy to “rewrite” the history of indigenous peoples – especially if they have virtually no written history.
Hunter-gathering cultures existed for many millenia prior to “civilization” which was necessary with agrarian and domestication shifts in cultures. It is easy to confuse hunter/gathering cultures with nomadic cultures, but they are very different. The idea that these groups did not create societies is incorrect. Post Ice-age indigenous peoples usually were much more intertwined socially than our “city-centric” culture would expect. It is just that the societies were in a geographical network as opposed to fixed cities and settlements. Trade and sharing of technology was very important.
Smaller clans and groups often lived apart for periods of time seasonally depending on the availability and location of game, fish, salt, and other resources. Semi-permanent camps were often utilized to gather resources, and the members of the group would regularly gather to re-distribute the food and resources among the group. Other groups delving into agriculture often tended to create more permanent villages, but this shouldn’t imply they were more “civilized”.
We are finding worldwide that inter-glacial and post-glacial peoples were much more socialized and organized than the archaeology would indicate simply with artifacts. Often their oral history is quite rich, but is often ignored by science which prefers written history and hard artifacts. We need to re-calibrate our science to include “softer” data and oral history to fully flesh out the remarkable influence and societies that have existed for 20,000 years or more.
An interesting read is “After The Ice – A global human history 20,000-5000 BC” by Steven Mithen.
I fully appreciate this post for highlighting some of the outstanding contributions made by Indigenous persons and interdisciplinary scholarship on Indigenous peoples of the Adirondacks. Full stop.
However, it’s frustrating to the point of straining credulity to frame this by inferring the dominant narrative of Adirondack history is “white people discovered and tamed this Wilderness”: yes, the erasure of Indigenous Americans was long predominant narrative of ALL mainstream American history, but you’d have to be living under a lot of stone fences to still believe that. Framing these contributions to the real Indigenous history of the Adirondacks as a counter-narrative feels, to me, like egregious subjugation. After all, is not the very word “Adirondack,” a terrible transliteration of the Iroquois word for “bark-eater” a derivative term they used to identify the Algonquin peoples who would survive living in the ADKs throughout the difficult winter months by eating the Inner bark, or cambium, or white pine and other coniferous trees for its abundance of vitamin C (this was also their word for “porcupine,” if I’m not mistaken) — a word better represented by one Wilderness region of the modern day classification of land inside the Blue Line — the Ha-de-ron-dah Wilderness?
I believe both history and Indigenous peoples are better served when the historically accurate narrative is centered as the focus of these important contributions in archaelogy, anthropology, history, etc. — in this case, it is that of the historically marginalized people who lived, died, loved, raised kids, built stuff, hunted, gathered, prayed, sang, danced, grieved, created art, engaged in war, etc. etc. in the Adirondacks at least 12,000 years ago. The “White people discovered” narrative should be relegated to a footnote, if that — which is more than they gave to the Indigenous people from whom they took everything.
Just a thought.
Please see my book, “Rural Indigenousness: A History of the Iroquoian and Algonquian Peoples of the Adirondacks” – it’s in many local libraries. It absolutely argues what you are and the notion of “rural indigenousness” is that Native peoples occupied this place from the beginning, some stayed past settlement colonialism and continued to contribute to the area, and are here to the present day doing the same.
Keep in mind, the whole notion of wilderness is a colonialist concept used to colonize the land that wasn’t rightfully theirs and I argue for a different term like wildlands which doesn’t imply land that wasn’t occupied (in whatever form) by others. Let’s face it, very few places (f any) in the lower 48 can claim that title….
I believe this article is adding to the earlier history that records can’t account for and is a useful addition to the history that’s unfolding.
PS: Adirondacks is likely a Haudenosaunee word meaning something like bark eater (but not a literal translation) and they did refer to many Algonquian peoples as that but not only in the Adks. As well, Iroquois is a derogatory Algonquian word meaning something like snake. Both Haudenosaunee and Algonquian peoples occupied the Adks in their own ways year round – it just didn’t look like European occupation and that’s where the myth and justification for theft of their homelands began. That said, the territory of the Adks was Mohawk and Oneida.
The nulhegan abenaki from Vermont aren’t federally recognized. Please keep this in mind with further articles. Use federally recognized people only.
do the nulhegan abenaki recognize the Federal government? Does a quoted person have no identity if their peer group is not Federally recognized?
I was so excited to read this article. But am distracted by the simple yet inaccurate narrative of the Adirondacks native inhabitants as absent from the historical accounts of the area.
Yet, Even a cursory search of the history clearly reveals acknowledgment of the indigenous peoples living in the area and even older writings acknowledge the deceitful manner in which these lands were acquired and settled.
I am no apologist for how our country was settled by Europeans, but to mischaracterize the historical record in such a way risks diverting focus from the wonderful archeological work of understanding the areas earliest inhabitants. That would be a shame.
Please see my comment to Taryn MorvilloStewart above – there absolutely is a rich history of Iroquoian and Algonquian peoples in the Adirondacks and I hope I have contributed to it in some small way with my book, “Rural Indigenousness.” There’s also a wonderful article by Lynn Woods “A History in Fragments” in Adk Life (Nov-Dec 1994) along with others helping to bring to light this history. This article is a nice addition to the pre-textual history.