Looking back on 2018, I see my most interesting time as the two weeks in July that I spent working in New Brunswick, Canada, with Victor Atwin, pictured here. He is a Maliseet elder from the Kingsclear First Nation—an expert speaker of the Maliseet language and a teacher in the language revival program at St. Mary’s First Nation in Fredericton. We transcribed and translated a substantial body of material in Maliseet that was tape-recorded in the 1970s by the anthropologist László Szabó of the University of New Brunswick. Victor is an accomplished story-teller himself, and as a young man he knew many of the speakers whom Szabó recorded—and heard many of their tales. The texts that we worked on this past summer include not only a variety of family stories, but also accounts of historical events that had been transmitted orally over many years. One particularly moving narrative tells the story of an attack on the village at Kingsclear by a group of white men who were working as log drivers on the Saint John River in the mid-nineteenth century. The drivers, numbering nearly 100, set upon the Native village, breaking down the doors of people’s homes with the intent of killing the men and raping the women. A Native counterattack, led by an older Maliseet woman, killed many of the loggers and drove the others away. A contemporaneous account of these events appeared in a local newspaper. The date was 1866.
Looking Back on 2018
