Historian, visual artist and poet rolled into one, Mihku Paul tells lively stories of Maliseet heroes throughout the millennia; vividly maps a territory encompassing old canoe routes and aunties' work tables; and sings in every register from the mythic to the modern. This beautiful chapbook lights up the Native presence that has always permeated Maine and the Maritimes. Paul joins the ranks of other important Wabanaki poets--Alice Azure, Carol Bachofner, Joseph Bruchac, Carol Dana, and Cheryl Savageau--dedicated to preserving and updating their literary traditions. - Siobhan Senier, University of New Hampshire

Snowshoe Country is an environmental and cultural history of winter in the colonial Northeast, closely examining indigenous and settler knowledge of snow, ice, and life in the cold. Indigenous communities in this region were more knowledgeable about the cold than European newcomers from temperate climates, and English settlers were especially slow to adapt. To keep surviving the winter year after year and decade after decade, English colonists relied on Native assistance, borrowed indigenous winter knowledge, and followed seasonal diplomatic protocols to ensure stable relations with tribal leaders. Thomas M. Wickman explores how fluctuations in winter weather and the halting exchange of winter knowledge both inhibited and facilitated English colonialism from the 1620s to the early 1700s. As their winter survival strategies improved, due to skills and technologies appropriated from Natives, colonial leaders were able to impose a new political ecology in the greater Northeast, projecting year-round authority over indigenous lands.

Dawnland Voices calls attention to the little-known but extraordinarily rich literary traditions of New England’s Native Americans. This pathbreaking anthology includes both classic and contemporary literary works from ten New England indigenous nations: the Abenaki, Maliseet, Mi’kmaq, Mohegan, Narragansett, Nipmuc, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Schaghticoke, and Wampanoag. Through literary collaboration and recovery, Siobhan Senier and Native tribal historians and scholars have crafted a unique volume covering a variety of genres and historical periods. From the earliest petroglyphs and petitions to contemporary stories and hip-hop poetry, this volume highlights the diversity and strength of New England Native literary traditions. Dawnland Voices introduces readers to the compelling and unique literary heritage in New England, banishing the misconception that “real” Indians and their traditions vanished from that region centuries ago.

Margaret M. Bruchac is a scholar, writer, and storyteller of Abenaki, English, and Slovak descent. This is her first published book of verse. Some pieces were inspired by historical research for Historic Deerfield, Old Sturbridge Village, the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, and other museums. As a musician, she also performs traditional and contemporary Algonkian Indian songs and stories with her family. Dr. Bruchac is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Coordinator of Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Connecticut at Avery Point. Her academic publications include Indigenous Archaeologies: A Reader in Decolonization, and articles in the Historical Journal of Massachusetts and Museum Anthropology, among other venues. As the 2011-2012 recipient of both a Ford Foundation Diversity Fellowship and the Katrin H. Lamon Fellowship, Bruchac is presently in residence at the School for Advanced Research, completing a book manuscript for the University of Arizona Press.

This bilingual version of an ancient tale, written in both Abenaki and English , exemplifies the role monster stories have played in Algonquin cultures. It not only points out the dangers that life confronts us with, it also reminds us of the importance of bravery, a keen intellect and the healing powers of family and simple kindness.

Can literary criticism help transform entrenched Settler Canadian understandings of history and place? How are nationalist historiographies, insular regionalisms, established knowledge systems, state borders, and narrow definitions continuing to hinder the transfer of information across epistemological divides in the twenty-first century? What might nation-to-nation literary relations look like? Through readings of a wide range of northeastern texts – including Puritan captivity narratives, Wabanaki wampum belts, and contemporary Innu poetry – Rachel Bryant explores how colonized and Indigenous environments occupy the same given geographical coordinates even while existing in distinct epistemological worlds. Her analyses call for a vital and unprecedented process of listening to the stories that Indigenous peoples have been telling about this continent for centuries. At the same time, she performs this process herself, creating a model for listening and for incorporating those stories throughout. This commitment to listening is analogous to homing – the sophisticated skill that turtles, insects, lobsters, birds, and countless other beings use to return to sites of familiarity. Bryant adopts the homing process as a reading strategy that continuously seeks to transcend the distortions and distractions that were intentionally built into Settler Canadian culture across centuries.

Sovereignty and Sustainability examines how Native American authors in what is now called New England have maintained their own long and complex literary histories, often entirely outside of mainstream archives, libraries, publishing houses, and other institutions usually associated with literary canon-building. Indigenous people in the Northeast began writing in English almost immediately after the arrival of colonial settlers, and they have continued to write in almost every form--histories, newsletters, novels, poetry, and electronic media. Over the centuries, Native American authors have used literature to assert tribal self-determination and protect traditional homelands and territories. Drawing on the fields of Native American and Indigenous studies, environmental humanities, and literary history, Siobhan Senier argues that sustainability cannot be thought of apart from Indigenous sovereignty and that tribal sovereignty depends on environmental and cultural sustainability. Senier offers the framework of literary stewardship to show how works of Indigenous literature maintain, recirculate, and adapt tribally specific approaches to community, land, and relations. Individual chapters discuss Wampanoag historiography; tribal newsletters and periodicals; novelists and poets Joseph Bruchac, John Christian Hopkins, Cheryl Savageau, and Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel; and tribal literature on the web and in electronic archives. Pushing against the idea that Indians have vanished or are irrelevant today, Senier demonstrates to the contrary that regional Native literature is flourishing and looks to a dynamic future.

In this anthology, former Maine Poet Laureate Wesley McNair has collected the work of Maine poets that were featured in his popular column, "Take Heart." Featuring a poem each week, the columns ran in thirty newspapers across the state and reached more than a quarter of a million readers. These are poems about longing and pleasure and death and love, poems about natural world, poems that will inspire tears and laughter and help you carry on--poems from the heart, all penned by Maine writers, whose astonishing vision this book celebrates.

As Shane Neilson writes in Margin of Interest, ‘Maritime poetry is the sum of what’s come before, a unique history, and yes, a unique place.’ In Margin of Interest Neilson examines representation, identity, power, and the politics of literary history, from the creative traditions of the Mi’kmaq to the work of young poets today. He pays due homage to iconic Maritime writers (Milton Acorn, Alden Nowlan, George Elliott Clarke), shines a critical spotlight on lesser-known masters from the region (Travis Lane, Wayne Clifford) and provides a glimpse inside the ‘diverse ecosystem’ of poets under 40 writing in or about the Maritimes (Rebecca Thomas, Lucas Crawford, El Jones). He also combats the prejudices so often applied to writers from Atlantic Canada—stigma associated with mental illness, rigid gendering, vernacular language and even poetic form—and advocates for a long-overdue reappropriation of the regionalist stance, as well as a proper recognition of the region’s writers and their contribution to the Canadian literary landscape. For as Neilson wisely asks, ‘What’s the matter with taking pride in any kind of regional identity that we articulate?’

Intertwining a lyrical voice with historical texts, poet Denise Low brings fresh urgency to the Gnadenhutten Massacre. In 1782, a renegade Pennsylvania militia killed ninety-six pacificist Christian Delawares (Lenapes) in Ohio. Those who escaped, including Indigenous eyewitnesses, relayed their accounts of the atrocity. Like Layli Longsoldier’s Whereas and Simon Ortiz’s from Sand Creek, Low delves into a critical incident of Indigenous peoples’ experiences. Readers will explore with the poet how trauma persists through hundreds of years, and how these peoples have survived and flourished in the subsequent generations. In a personal poetic treatment of documents, oral tradition, and images, the author embodies the contradictions she unravels. From a haunting first-person perspective, Low’s formally inventive archival poetry combines prose and lyric, interweaving verse with historical voices in a dialogue with the source material. Each poem builds into a larger narrative on American genocide, the ways in which human loss corresponds to ecological destruction, and how intimate knowledge of the past can enact healing. Ultimately, these poems not only reconstruct an important historical event, but they also put pressure on the gaps, silences, and violence of the archive. Low asks readers to question not only what is remembered, but how history is remembered—and who is forgotten from it. Reflecting on the injustice of the massacre, the Shawnee leader Tecumseh lamented that though “the Americans murdered all the men, women, and children, even as they prayed to Jesus . . . no American ever was punished, not one.” These poems challenge this attempted erasure.