The Interface — 11/18/10

When Jeanne Brink enrolled as a business student at the Vermont College of Norwich University in her late 30s, she never thought she’d graduate to become an Abenaki basket weaver. Balancing her job as a full-time secretary and mother of three children, Brink soon found her business courses unfulfilling.

“Even in my late 30s I didn’t know what I wanted to be,” she said. “It’s never too late to change your focus.”

A contemporary Native American literature course led her to do exactly that. Upon taking the class, Brink, a 66- year-old resident of Barre, left the business track to embrace her Abenaki heritage and become one of Vermont’s most active preserverst of Abenaki culture.

“Before I went back to college, I was a person who sat in the corner and didn’t say anything,” Brink said. “I went back to school and found I had a voice. Going to college changed my whole focus, so that my life now is totally Abenaki.”

Before this life changing turn, Brink’s only connection to her Abenaki background was her grandmother. Born on the Odanak reservation in Canada, a cultural hub home to almost 500 Abenaki, Brink’s grandmother was a master basket-maker and one of the last fluent speakers of the Abenaki language. Despite the immediate contact she had with her roots, Brink was discouraged from publicly identifying as a Native American.

“I knew that basket-making had been in my family, but it skipped my mother’s generation,” Brink said. “My grandmother wanted them to be acculturated. It was not a good thing to be a Native American. A lot of Native Americans hid the fact that they were Native Americans. A lot of the Abenaki married non-native so their children could pass for white.”

The Vermont eugenics movement, a social and political campaign that came to a head in the 1920s with the Eugenics Survey of Vermont led by University of Vermont Professor of Zoology Henry Perkins, inflicted much of this pressure. Eugenics, the pseudo-science made notorious by the Nazis, advocates the use of practices meant to improve the genetic composition of the human species.
Such practices have included human experimentation, racial hygiene (a.k.a. selective breeding) and extermination of “undesired” groups. Vermont eugenicists advocated sexual sterilization, colonies for the “feeble-minded” and institutionalization of the bearers of “bad genes.”

One of Vermont’s darkest legacies, the eugenics movement sought to maintain what one proponent called the “quality of the human stock” by managing Vermont’s “underclass” through social planning, education and reproductive control. Several Abenaki families, considered “gypsies,” were one of the targeted groups of the survey, according to several sources.

Brink is a part of a new generation of Abenaki who take pride in their heritage and spread public awareness of their traditions, a 180-degree switch from the perspectives of past generations.
After earning her master’s degree, Brink immersed herself in language study. Seeking guidance, she turned to Dr. Gordon Day, an ethnologist who had spent 40 years documenting the dying Abenaki language.

Brink spent six months in Ottawa helping compile an Abenaki-English dictionary and ultimately co-authored an Abenaki language guide with Dr. Day. Today, Brink’s work documenting and teaching the language is critical for its survival as there are currently only about 10 fluent speakers.

Brink then began pursuing her family’s traditional art and trade: basket making. “At first, I was trying to teach myself, which is not a good idea,” Brink said.

However, the Vermont Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program, an opportunity offering intense study with masters of various arts from a spectrum of cultures, provided the guidance she needed.
Brink spent two years as an apprentice to a master basket-maker and master pow-wow dancer. Now a master in both of these arts herself, she dedicates her time to passing on her expertise to her own apprentices. She has mentored over 15 students over the past 15 years, and she conducts language studies with about 20 students and leads workshops on traditional dance.

“What I’m trying to do is to educate people about Abenaki culture and traditions, so that they might see that Abenaki are not scary people,” Brink said. “We’re trying to preserve our culture and our language. If you don’t do any educating, no one’s ever going to know.”

Brink has shouldered a daunting task. The Abenaki community is not only geographically fragmented, spread across the northeast and Canada in isolated pockets; they are also politically divided.
Many groups are currently embroiled in a fiery controversy over the rights to claim legitimate genealogical connection to the Abenaki. Some parties claim that the heritage of many Abenaki is not Abenaki at all, but rather French-Canadian or a different branch of the Algonquin nation. What it means to be Abenaki has become unclear and arguable.

“It’s not all this movie stuff,” she said. “[Abenaki living on the reservations] have their own problems and their own disagreements within the community. It’s not all cohesiveness.”
The fact that the federal government does not recognize the Abenaki as a discrete Native American tribe further complicates the situation.

Despite the controversies, the geographical obstacles and the ever-shrinking elder generation, Brink fights on, connecting with Abenaki groups in weekend workshops and week-long retreats.

“I feel very hopeful,” he said. “I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t. I can say there are 15 more basket makers now than there were 15 years ago.”

Brink had a bit of advice for any soon-to-be-graduates clueless as to what they want to do after college: “There’s a saying: you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know from where you came. And that’s very true. Look into your cultural background, you’re cultural history and it can help point you to where you need to go in the future.”