Books and Baskets: Following the Journeys of an Abenaki Language Book

This talk follows the travels of a language instruction book by the Abenaki leader Joseph Laurent, New Familiar Abenakis-English Dialogues. In the late nineteenth century, a copy of this book traveled with Laurent’s family from Abenaki homelands at Odanak, in what is currently Quebec, to Intervale, NH, where Abenaki families traveled in the summers to sell baskets to tourists. I examine marginalia and postcards pasted into the book to research how the Dialogues participated in the gatherings at Intervale and to consider how Laurent family members used copies of the book to maintain relations to other Abenaki peoples and to Abenaki homelands.

Kelly Wisecup teaches and researches Indigenous literatures at Northwestern University, where she is a professor in the English Department and an affiliate of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research. She is a non-Native scholar who works with contemporary Native nations and people to research, teach, and write about Indigenous literatures. Her most recent book, Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilations and the Archives of Early American Literatures (Yale, 2021), examines how Indigenous writers used forms like the scrapbook, recipe book, list, and catalog to engage with and critique collecting institutions like museums.

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