Shaping the Maine Landscape: Wabanaki in Casco Bay

Part of the Changing Landscapes, Shifting Tides: The Story of Falmouth Event Series

Exploring the interactions between humans and the landscape over Falmouth’s 300 year history.

Free; Open Seating; No tickets required.

Featuring Joseph Hall, Associate Professor of History, Bates College

The Changing Landscapes, Shifting Tides:  The Story of Falmouth Event Series continues to explore the history of Falmouth through the interactions of humans with their environment.  In this session, a study of place names offers clues for understanding how people inhabit­­ a place.

Join Bates College Professor Joseph Hall as he explores the question of how Wabanakis cultivated their ties to their homelands even as European-American colonists dispossessed them of most of that territory. Wabanakis, whose name translates as “the people of the Dawnland,” are the indigenous peoples of northern New England and eastern Canada. Their place names describe a particular set of relationships to Maine. Some names suggest how people moved over the land or—more likely—over the waters of Maine by describing the good portages and the dangerous rapids. Others mark good locations for gathering or growing food. Some of these names are still used today. Others have fallen out of use. All of them describe how Wabanakis made this place their home.

Changing Landscapes, Shifting Tides: The Story of Falmouth Event Series is presented by Stantec and partially funded by a grant from the Maine Humanities Council.  This is a Falmouth Tercentennial Celebration event.