Pawling’s research on Wabanaki mobility featured in Working Waterfront
Research conducted by Micah Pawling, an assistant professor of history and Native American studies at the University of Maine, is the focus of The Working Waterfront article, “For the Wabanaki, home has no walls.” “Wabanaki” refers to the Penobscot, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, Mi’kmaq, and Abenaki tribes in northern New England, the Maritime provinces, and the southern shore of Quebec, according to the article. The 19th century, Pawling said, was difficult for the Wabanaki. Accustomed to moving at will between land and water to hunt, fish and gather, they were increasingly dispossessed by Euro-American treaties and deeds, the article states. “Home was not confined to a single place or bounded by walls or lines on a map, but was a feeling of contentment and belonging to a human network united across ancestral territory,” Pawling wrote in his case study, “Wabanaki Homeland and Mobility: Concepts of Home in Nineteenth-Century Maine,” published in the journal Ethnohistory. “Their movements contrasted with the European concept of a sedentary home limited by specific parameters.” Pawling said he’s interested in the 19th century history of the Wabanaki because it was a remarkable time for both change and continuity. “A lot of Wabanaki history explores Native experiences in the Colonial period,” he said. “Then there’s a void, and somehow we jump to modern times. It seems to me there is a lot of work to be done in between.”