The Odanak Reserve

The Odanak Reserve is located in south-eastern Quebec, Canada, near the mouth of the Saint-François River, about an hour and a half east of Montreal. With a population of approximately 300, it is the larger of the two Abenaki reserves in Quebec, the other being Wôlinak. The word Odanak is an Abenaki term meaning "village."

The village's history extends back several centuries, to before the arrival of French settlers in the region during the 17th century; the history of the Abenaki Nation in Quebec, New Brunswick and the New-England states goes back literally thousands of years (see About the Abenaki Nation below).

Today, Odanak remains a close-knit community, a village united by its residents' First Nations heritage and their desire to maintain their connection to the past through tradition and celebration. But like all of society, in the past half century, Odanak has seen a great deal of change. During Eugene "Gene Boy" Benedict's youth in the 1940s, '50s and '60s, many of Odanak's residents still relied on Abenaki traditions, such as basket-making, hunting and fishing, as means of subsistence. As Gene Boy himself relates in the film, the community was relatively poor financially, but rich in the sense of connection and caring between its members.
"It was beautiful because it was family life. It was strict, but it was fair. I would say we were spoiled, 'cause in them days, is I'm talking about the late-'40's, early-'50's, we spoke three languages at home, French, English, and Indian."

Joe Benedict, another Abenaki from Odanak speaks in the same terms:
"At those days, everybody used to make their own baskets, or canoes, whatever, in the front yard, and we all used to get together and have tea or something. The village here, too, was a real nice place to stay, there was always something going on, we used to have parties, and a lot of holidays we had parades."

It was a simpler world, and admittedly, the residents of Odanak faced attitudes outside the reserve that were more racist and bigoted than those of today. But this too seemed to provide a sense of unanimity to the community.

It was this Odanak that Gene Boy returned to.

• Archeological evidence suggests that ancestors of the Abenaki were living in the northeastern regions of North America about 12,000 years ago.
• The Abenaki - or WABAN-AKI - occupied much of present day New England, the Maritime provinces and southeastern Quebec, and their peak population is estimated to have been as high as 50,000.
• The Abenaki included about 100 smaller linguistically related groups, each with a different name but all identifying as Abenaki - a term which translates as "people of the east" or "people from where the sun rises." The Eastern Abenaki included the Kennebec, Penobscot, Arosagunticook, and the Western Abenaki included the Penacook, Winnipesaukee and Sokoki. According to legend, it was the Delawares, the mythic ancestors of all Abenaki, who first saw the sun's light.
• Organized into extended family groups, the Abenaki were hunters, gatherers and farmers. They grew beans, corns and squash - the "3 sister" crop combination that was characteristic of Aboriginal agriculture. The Western Abenaki generally lived in longhouses, and Eastern Abenaki tended to build birch-bark wigwams and teepees.
• The Abenaki divided the year into 13 moons and practised rituals that marked the summer and winter solstices. Ruins of their ceremonial stone structures can be found at Pinnacle Mountain in Quebec's Eastern Townships.
• The Abenaki probably first encountered Europeans at the turn of the 16th century, when Europeans fleets fished along the Maine coast.
• In 1604. Samuel de Champlain made contact with the Penobscot and Maliseet, both Abenaki groups. The Abenaki became involved in the early stages of the fur trade.
• The Abenaki were, for the most part, allies of the French in the various wars for colonial domination of North America. There were many instances of intermarriage between French settlers and the Abenaki.
• A series of European-introduced epidemics - smallpox, diphtheria and other diseases - claimed the lives of thousands of Abenaki throughout the 17th century. Many communities disappeared altogether.
• In 1676 some Abenaki communities migrated north to the area of Odanak, on the St Francis River in Quebec, joining other Abenaki already established in the region.
• In 1680 Jacques Crevier, the seigneur of St Francis, laid claim to land in the Odanak area. Subsequent seigneurs later ceded some of this land back to the Abenaki in the interests of forming a protective shield against attacks from the English and Iroquois, but the present-day residents of Odanak have only a small fraction of their original territory.
• During the 1701-1713 conflict between Britain and France, most Eastern Abenaki remained neutral. Some moved north to Wolinak and Odanak, where a Jesuit mission had recently been established. In 1713, with the Treaty of Utrecht, the Abenaki homelands in Maine came under British domination.
• In 1722 the French Jesuit Sebastien Rasles compiled a dictionary of the Abenaki language.
• In 1722 Samuel Shuttle, Governor of Massachusetts, declared war on the Abenaki. In 1724 British colonialist destroyed the Abenaki community of Norridgewock, in present-day Maine.
• Throughout the late 17th and early 18th centuries the Abenaki peoples lost much of their traditional lands in New England. Some migrated north to Quebec and others moved into the northern regions of present-day New England.
• In the first half of the 18th century more terrible epidemics once again decimated the Abenaki population. After the American Revolution only about 1000 Abenaki are believed to have survived.
• During the war of 1812, between Britain and the United States, some Abenaki fought on the British side.
• In 1823 a young Abenaki man called Ozonkhiline travelled by foot from Odanak to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire where he received a university education. He returned to Odanak to work as a Methodist minister, introducing the Protestant faith and challenging the control of the Catholic Church. Over the years many Abenaki were educated at Dartmouth College.
• In 1876 the Canadian Parliament passed the Indian Act, which included the compulsory "emancipation" of any Native women who married non-Indians. In 1968 Mary Two-Axes Early, a Mohawk, mounted a legal challenge against the discrimination against women under the Indian Act. She won her case in 1985.
• Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Odanak developed a successful cottage industry in basket making, a traditional skill with a long history among the Abenaki. It was common for families to undertake yearly sales tours, marketing their wares throughout Eastern North America.
• The Abenaki Museum of Odanak is the oldest Native museum in Quebec, and one of the most important in Canada.
• There are about 38,000 registered Wabenaki in Canada, and about 23,000 in the USA, where they continue to lobby all levels of government for recognition and land rights.