January 2000
Hiding In Plain Sight
or Problems in Documenting Western Abenaki Ancestry
by Marge Bruchac
This may help some of you who are at a loss to explain to disbelievers how you know you are Abenaki when you have insufficient paper documents to prove it.
The University of Vermont Eugenics project administered by Henry Perkins, as you probably know, wreaked havoc with my mother's and grandmother's generation in upstate Vermont, New York, and New Hampshire. The random institutionalization of "marginal people" (which all too often translates to Native American, mixed-blood, African American, and poor white), the forced sterilizations in institutions and jails, and the coerced sterilizations by government "clinics" delivering "free health care" to marginal communities. . . all these procedures and programs contributed in large part to the isolation, assimilation, disappearence, and lack of genealogical records for Abenaki, Mahican, and other Native peoples within range of "the Perkins Project." It caused several generations to change their names, move, hide, and refuse to be publicly identified as "Indian." Perkins was not the only Indian hunter - the Ku Klux Klan and other vigilantes also targeted prominent Indian families. My grandfather lost one of his brothers to racial violence.
The irony is, our survival is still in question, only now the attackers are states, the federal government, and federally recognized Indians who question our existence, and our Indian identity. We held on to an astonishing amount of our history and traditions, even in the face of these threats, often by remaining close to our original homelands, and our original lifestyles, basketmaking, hunting, fishing, travelling. When Indian families throughout this region now work to document their blood lines, we have oral histories and the testimony of family and neighbors, many of whom are now dead, but few written records. Many of our relatives were very careful to register as "white" or "French Canadian" or even "colored" at every opportunity, or not to register births, deaths, and marriages at all. Many moved every time the census taker came along. If we were lucky, our ancestors moved to one of the safe zones, like the St. Francis mission village of Odanak - but then they lost not only residence in our homeland, but the right to be identified as "Americans."
Our long histories in this region, as indigenous inhabitants, basketmakers, guides, soldiers, itinerant laborers, neighbors to white settlers, and explicitly as Indians, are extensively documented in local histories, in French and Indian war correspondence, in mission and church records, in Revolutionary War and Civil War records, throughout 19th century newspapers and court documents. . . but there is a curious gap in information during the eugenics years. A few families who remained in Indian enclaves, fully identified to their neighbors, took the brunt of prejudice during the 1920's - 1970's, before national movements raised awareness in general. Some were documented by historians who marveled at the persistent presence of indigenous peoples in the region, long after the "Indian Wars" were over. But many, many others quietly carried on their lives, "hiding in plain sight."
Nancy Gallagher just came out with a book on the Vermont Eugenics project, titled "Breeding Better Vermonters." But even her documentation of this project is missing family names - Perkins chose to identify the sterilized generically as "gypsies" and "pirates," to spare them the shame of being identified as "Indians." Please see the following article from the Boston Globe for more information on this story, which is still unfolding even as we speak.
Thanks for listening
Wlibomkanni - travel well
Marge Bruchac
Please visit the following web page for current events involving Eugenics Programs:
