As the Vermont Commission on Native American Affairs prepares to release a grant-funded school curriculum about the state’s Indigenous peoples, two Abenaki nations are asking the grant-funder to halt the work.
The project dates to the fall of 2022, when the commission announced it was getting $50,000 from the foundation of the Burlington-based company Seventh Generation to create materials about Abenaki peoples for K-12 students.
For more than two years, representatives from the four groups Vermont recognizes as Abenaki tribes have been working on the curriculum. And now, it’s nearly complete.
But Odanak and Wôlinak First Nations have asked Seventh Generation to stop any distribution of the project.
The leaders for those governments — who are the only two Western Abenaki nations with federal-level recognition, and who say they never ceded their territory in the Northeast, including Vermont — made this request at least twice. First was a Jan. 30 letter to Seventh Generation, followed by a full-page Seven Days ad on April 2.
The letter repeats what Odanak and Wôlinak First Nations have been increasingly stating publicly: that Vermont did not rigorously vet the groups it now recognizes as Abenaki tribes, and that those groups lack evidence of ancestral and kinship ties to Abenaki peoples. Investigations by news outlets, including Vermont Public, had similar findings.
State-recognized tribes have said that they are under an unfair amount of scrutiny, and that they did submit genealogical documentation as part of the state recognition process — though that paperwork is not public.
But the First Nations leaders say they are the sole guardians of Abenaki citizenship and culture.
“It may be your intention to support Indigenous People and tribal sovereignty,” the letter from Odanak First Nation Chief Rick O’Bomsawin and Wôlinak First Nation Chief Michel Bernard to Seventh Generation reads. “Unfortunately, funding the propagation of a pretend Abenaki curriculum which overwrites our real written and oral history makes your company actively complicit with cultural appropriation and fraud as well as the exclusion of the true Indigenous People of Vermont.”
Burlington Rep. Troy Headrick, an independent, has recently raised similar concerns about the rigor of the state recognition process and its outcomes.
"Self-identified Abenakis are using that recognition to broaden their control of the narrative," he said during Statehouse testimony this month.
Headrick called the curriculum project with Seventh Generation “dangerous.”
O’Bomsawin and Bernard ended their letter by asking for a meeting and a public statement from the company “admitting [their] error.”
According to the Abenaki First Nations, Seventh Generation did not respond. The company also did not return a request for comment from Vermont Public.
The Vermont Commission on Native American Affairs did not comment directly on the published letter from Odanak and Wôlinak First Nations during its meeting last week.
Chair Dan Coutu, who is also a tribal councilor for the state-recognized Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation, opened the meeting by reading the Vermont statute that created the commission and offering his interpretation of its scope.
“[The commission] is to help all Vermont Native Americans,” Coutu said. “It is not to help Native Americans in other states or other countries.”
(The Abenaki First Nations are headquartered in Quebec — though do have citizens living in Vermont and other U.S. states.)
Coutu said the “American Abenaki Curriculum” was finalized and would be undergoing proofreading before being built into a website in the next month.
“I had no idea that there was so much historical material available around the history of Abenaki people within Vermont,” he said. “It kind of blew me away.”
Vermont Public asked the commission by email for more information about the content and sources for the curriculum, but they did not provide additional details.
Lexi Krupp contributed reporting to this story.
