History of the Micmac People: Part I
By John Dennis
The Aroostook Band of Micmacs is an indigenous Native American tribe of Eastern Maine. Culturally, the Micmacs are one of the several tribes of the Abenaki group; the native language is a dialect of the Algonquin tongue.
The ancestral home of the Micmacs covered the entire Eastern and Atlantic Maritimes that ranged from Maine, Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and parts of Newfoundland. These districts were the seven traditional districts that were once established as the Micmac Grand Council with one Grand Chief of all districts.
The Micmacs used an elaborate network of rivers, lakes, and portages to trade with other Indian tribes throughout the Northeast, including present-day Maritime Canada, Quebec and other New England tribes.
The Micmacs were one of the tribes that had an allegiance with the French during the French and Indian War and were forced to flee to Canada. The Micmac people prior to European contact were estimated to have a population of 50,000 to 100,000 people whom inhabited the Atlantic Maritimes and some parts of Maine. After European contact, the population of the Micmacs dwindled down to 3,000 to 5,000 tribal members across the several traditional districts.
The Micmacs were, and are, one of the five members of the Wabanaki Confederacy (Abenaki, Penobscot, Passamaquoddy and Maliseet). Through the Confederacy, the tribes signed an international treaty with United States soon after its declaration of independence, the Watertown Treaty in July of 1776.
By the 1800s, most of the Micmac lands were claimed by the British without permission and without any sort of payment for the land that was taken. The Micmac people, who have been living off the land for centuries, were now forced to relocate to centralized lands that were quickly labeled as reservations. The Government had control of the food, clothing, shelter, health care and other necessities that were once in control of the traditional Micmacs. Not long after the centralization process began, the Micmac people started to endure hardships such as smallpox, war and alcoholism, which was the beginning of the demise of the traditional Micmac people.
When the 1900s began, the Micmac people had almost lost their culture, but still had their language. With the introduction of the boarding schools and Indian agents, the Micmac language was the next subject to be lost; the government wanted all Natives to be able to speak English. For many years the schools had many children coming into the school speaking their Native tongue and leaving the school speaking English. Too many of the boarding school students, faced discrimination and a feeling of rejection by their own people for not speaking their Native tongue. With loss of their language, the students felt like they didn’t belong with the tribe anymore and either moved away from the reservations or endured the process and stayed with the tribe while not speaking or teaching the language to their children.
During the 1970s, there was a change within the Micmac people — they took control of their own government and took over the control of their schools from the federal government. Many reservations started acting upon their treaty rights, which had never been done before and voiced their opinion to the government about the mistreatment of the Micmac people.
John Dennis is the cultural/community development director for the Aroostook Band of Micmacs.
