Wabanaki Confederacy
The Wabanaki Confederacy is a North American First Nations and Native American confederation of five principal Eastern Algonquian nations: the Abenaki, Mi'kmaq, Wolastoqiyik, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot.
There were more tribes, along with many bands, that were once part of the Confederation. Native tribes such as the Nanrantsouak, Alemousiski, Pennacook, Sokoki, and Canibas, through massacres, tribal consolidation, and ethnic label shifting were absorbed into the five larger national identities.
Members of the Wabanaki Confederacy, the Wabanakiyak, are located in and named for the area which they call Wabanaki, roughly the area that became the French colony of Acadia. The territory boundaries encompass present-day Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, in the United States, and New Brunswick, mainland Nova Scotia, Cape Breton Island, Prince Edward Island and some of Quebec south of the St. Lawrence River, Anticosti, and Newfoundland in Canada.
Name and etymology
The word Wabanaki is derived from the Algonquian root word "wab", combined with the word for "land", being "aki". "Wab" is a root that is used for the following concepts:| Algonquian word | English meaning |
| Wabi | He sees/sight |
| Waban | East |
| Wában | Sunlight |
| Wabish | White |
| Bidaban | Dawn |
| Wasseia | The light |
Waban-aki can be translated into a number of ways but is most often translated into "Dawnland".
The political union of the Wabanaki Confederacy was known by many names, but it is remembered as "Wabanaki", which shares a common etymological origin with the name of the "Abenaki" people. All Abenaki are Wabanaki, but not all Wabanaki are Abenaki.
During the time it existed, the political union went by other names, some shared and some unique to individual members. The Mi'kmaq, Passamaquoddy, and Wolastoqey called it Buduswagan. The Passamaquoddy also had their own unique name: Tolakutinaya. Finally, the Penobscot interchangeably called it Bezegowak and Gizangowak.
Early contact period (1497–1680s)
Small-scale confederacies in and around what would become the Wabanaki Confederacy were common at the time of post-Viking European contact. The earliest known confederacy was the Mawooshen Confederacy located within the historic Eastern Penobscot cultural region. Its capital, Kadesquit, located around modern Bangor, Maine, would play a significant role as a political hub—for the future Wabanaki Confederacy, for example.In 1500, Portuguese explorer Gaspar Corte-Real reached Wabanaki lands. He captured and enslaved at least 57 people from modern-day Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, selling them in Europe to help finance his trip. The rich fishing waters full of cod in and around the Gulf of Saint Lawrence attracted many Europeans to this area. By 1504, French Bretons were fishing off the coast of Nova Scotia. Norman fishermen began to arrive around 1507, and they too would start kidnapping people from the surrounding land. This would hurt relations with some tribes. But the fishermen also started slowly introducing European trade goods to the Wabanaki, returning to Europe with North American trade goods.
After the establishment of the Treaty of Tordesillas by which Catholic Europe established spheres of influence for exploration, Portuguese explorers commonly believed that Newfoundland and Wabanaki lands were on the Portuguese side of the Inter caetera, entitling them to the land. Portuguese explorer João Álvares Fagundes attempted to establish the first European colony in Wabanaki lands in 1525. He brought families totaling almost 200 people, mostly from the Azores, and founded a fishing settlement in Cape Breton, within Mi'kmaq territory. The settlement lasted at least until 1570, as fishing ships brought news of them back to Europe. The fate of the settlement is unknown, but the people would have interacted with the local Mi'kmaq.
Throughout the 1500s, Wabanaki people encountered many European fishermen along with explorers looking for the Northwest Passage. They were at risk of being captured and enslaved. For instance, Portuguese explorer Estevan Gomez reached Wabanaki lands in 1525, kidnapping a few dozen people and taking them back to Spain, where he was forced to release them. The Crown did not arrange their passage back.
Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano also reached Wabanaki lands. He was documented capturing a native boy to bring back to France around 1525. Around 1534 French explorer Jacques Cartier would explore the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and traded with Mi'kmaq people living in Chaleur Bay. He encountered people now known as St. Lawrence Iroquoians on the Gaspé Bay. These are now believed to have been independent of the Five Nations of Iroquois that developed the Iroquois League further south. By the early 1600s, the St. Lawrence Iroquoian villages were abandoned. Historians now believe they may have been defeated by the Mohawk in competition over hunting. They may also have been defeated by Algonquins from further east in the St. Lawrence Valley.
Cartier traded with the Mi'kmaq, and returned to France with furs of North American animals such as beaver, which became high-demand items. Cartier brought back numerous goods from the First Nations from his three trips to the St. Lawrence, but the furs had the greatest demand. French colonists went to the area to work in what became the North American fur trade.
More Europeans entered Wabanaki lands over the coming decades, where they started as traders to meet the growing fur demand in Europe. The French established permanent trading operations with the Wabanaki around 1581 to obtain furs. Henry III of France granted a fur monopoly to French merchants in 1588. This would lead to the desire for the French to establish permanent trade posts in and around Wabanaki lands for furs. French fur traders like François Gravé Du Pont would often travel to Wabanaki lands to obtain furs, establishing the French fur trading site of Tadoussac in 1599. During one of his trips back in 1603 he would bring Samuel de Champlain with him, and he would lead to a new era of Wabanaki/French relationships.
When Champlain established contact during an expedition to the Mawooshen in Pesamkuk in 1604, he noted that the people had quite a few European goods. Champlain had a positive encounter on Pemetic, meeting with sakom Asticou in his and his peoples' summer village. Asticou was a sakom with regional power over the eastern door of Mawooshen. He was subsidiary to sakom Bashaba, who led the entire Mawooshen Confederacy. Champlain went upriver to the Passamaquoddy, where he established another post at present-day Saint Croix Island, Maine. The French colonial region known as Acadia developed on existing tribal territory. The ethnic French of Acadia and the peoples of Wabanaki coexisted in the same territory with independent, yet allied governments.
Champlain continued to establish settlements throughout Wabanaki territory, including Saint John and Quebec City, among others. The trade and military relations between the French and the local Algonquin tribes, including the Mawooshen and later Wabanaki, lasted until the end of the Seven Years' War. Asticou approved the founding of a Jesuit mission in 1613 in the present-day location on Somes Sound, Maine.
The following year the mission village was destroyed by Captain Samuel Argall during a resupply visit to nearby English fishing outposts. French and English colonists would long compete for territory in North America. In the same year, Captain Thomas Hunt kidnapped 27 people from present-day Massachusetts to sell as slaves in Spain. The famous Tisquantum was among the captives.
English colonists established contacts with the Mawooshen in 1605. Captain George Weymouth met with them in a large village on the Kennebec River. He took five people as captives to take back to England, where they were questioned about settlements by Sir Ferdinando Gorges. Sakom Tahánedo was the only one of those captives known to have returned home. He accompanied settlers of the short-lived Popham Colony, who hoped to establish good relations with the local peoples by returning Tahánedo, but local tribes were uneasy about the English colony.
In 2020 journalist Avery Yale Kamila wrote that the account of the Weymouth voyage has culinary significance because it "is the first time a European recorded the Native American use of nut milks and nut butters."
Champlain forged strong French relations with Algonquin tribes up until his death in 1635. Somewhere in the area near Ticonderoga and Crown Point, New York, Champlain and his party encountered a group of Iroquois. In a battle that began the next day, 250 Iroquois advanced on Champlain's position, and one of his guides pointed out the three chiefs. In his account of the battle, Champlain recounts firing his arquebus and killing two of them with a single shot, after which one of his men killed the third. The Iroquois turned and fled. This action set the tone for poor French-Iroquois relations for the rest of the century, with conflicts arising over territory and the beaver trade.
The next year the Battle of Sorel started on 19 June 1610. Champlain had convinced some tribes to fight in the war, amongst them was Wendat, Algonquin and Innu peoples, with some French regulars. They fought against the Mohawk people at present-day Sorel-Tracy, Quebec. Champlain's forces were armed with the arquebus. After engaging their opponent, they slaughtered or captured nearly all of the Mohawk. The battle ended major hostilities with the Mohawk for twenty years.
In and around this time, more French arrived as traders in Nova Scotia. The French migrants formed settlements such as Port-Royal. At many of these settlements, the French traded weapons and other European goods to the local Mi'kmaq. The influx of European goods changed the social and economic landscape, as local tribes became more dependent on European goods. This new economic reality harmed their existing kinship ties among clans and reduced the reciprocal exchange that had supported the local economy. Subsistence hunting shifted into a competition for animals like beaver and for access to European settlements. Population movements, and intraband and interband disputes were affected.
Allied with the Wolastoquiyik and Passamaquoddy, the Mi'kmaq fought with their Western Mawooshen neighbors for goods as trading relations broke down. This power imbalance resulted in war starting around 1607. In 1615 the Mi'kmaq and their allies killed the Mawooshen Grand Chief Bashabas in his village. War was costly for the Mi'kmaq and their allies, but especially for their southern Abenaki/Penobscot adversaries. Many Abenaki villages faced great losses from the war. The war was then followed by a pandemic known as "The Great Dying", which killed around 70-95% of the local Algonquin population left after the war.
Not long after this widespread local depopulation, Pilgrim settlers from England arrived in November 1620. Algonquin peoples throughout what would become New England began to see Pilgrim settlers settling in their ancestral lands. Southern Abenaki people such as the Alemousiski would soon come into permanent contact with English settlers moving into Massachusetts, as well as their lands in southern Maine under the colonizing efforts of people directed by Ferdinando Gorges and John Mason, respectively. Pannaway Plantation near modern-day Kittery, Maine would both be founded in 1623. Originally founded as fishing and lumber villages, over the decades they developed larger economies and became major population centers in the fledgling economy.
By the 1640s, internal conflicts within the region started to make Iroquois advances harder to combat for what would become the Wabanaki peoples, but also the Algonquian, the Innu, and French to manage separately. Aided by French Jesuits, this led to the formation of a large Algonquian league against the Iroquois, who were making significant territorial land gains around the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River region. By the 1660s, tribes of Western Abenaki peoples as far south as Massachusetts had joined the league. This defensive alliance would not only prove to be successful, but it helped repair the relationship among the Eastern Algonquians, promoting greater political cooperation in the coming decades.
This growing tension with two large and organized political adversaries, the Iroquois and especially English colonists, over the next 20 years would lead to an Algonquian uprising during King Philip's War, followed by the First Abenaki War. Soon after the many Algonquian tribes fought together in an effort to strengthen both defensive and diplomatic power, a push to make a formal political union would take place leading to the development of the Wabanaki Confederacy.