Wabanaki Confederacy - History

History

Historically, the confederacy has united five North American Algonquian language-speaking First Nations Peoples. It played a key role in the American Revolution via the Treaty of Watertown signed in 1776, by two of its constituent Peoples, the Mi'kmaq and Passamaquoddy. Wabanaki soldiers from Canada are still permitted, due to this treaty, to join the US military, and have done so in the recent conflicts the US has engaged in, including the Afghanistan war and the Iraq War.

Members of the Wabanaki Confederacy are:

• (Western) Abenaki
• (Eastern) Abenaki, or Penawapskewi (Penobscot)
• Míkmaq (Mi'kmaq or Micmac)
• Pestomuhkati (Passamaquoddy)
• Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet or Malicite)

Nations in the Confederacy are also closely allied with the Innu and Algonquin, and with the Iroquoian-speaking Wyandot. Historically, Wabanaki were also allies of the Huron and with them jointly invited the colonization of Quebec City and LaHave and the formation of New France in 1603, to put French guns, ships and forts between themselves and the Mohawk people. Today the only remaining Huron First Nation is in the suburbs of Quebec City itself, a legacy of this protective alliance.

The Wabanaki ancestral homeland stretches from Newfoundland, Canada, to the Merrimack River valley in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Following the European invasion in the early 17th century, this became a hotly contested borderland between colonial New England and French Acadia. Beginning with King William's War in 1688, members of the Wabanaki Confederacy of Acadia participated in six major wars before the British defeated the French in North America:

• King William's War (1688–1697)
• Queen Anne's War (1702–1713)
• Father Rale's War (1722–1725)
• King George's War (1744–1748)
• Father Le Loutre's War (1749–1755)
• French and Indian War (1754–1763)

During this period, their population was not only radically decimated due to many decades of warfare, but also because of famines and devastating epidemics.

Wabanaki people freely intermarried with French Catholics in Acadia starting in 1610 after the conversion of Membertou. After 1783 Black settlers, refugees from the US, began to settle in the historical territory and many intermarriages between these peoples occurred, especially in southwest Nova Scotia from Yarmouth to Halifax. Suppression of Acadian, Black, Mi'kmaq and Irish people under British rule tended to force these peoples together as allies of necessity. Mixed-race children were commonly abandoned on reserves to be raised in Wabanaki tradition, as late as the 1970s.

The Wabanaki Confederacy was forcibly disbanded in 1862, but the five Wabanaki nations still exist, and they remain friends and allies - in part because all peoples claiming Wabanaki heritage have forebears from multiple Wabanaki and colonial ancestries.