MARK YOUR CALENDAR  

On Sunday October 6 at 2 pm, Lisa Brooks, Amherst College Native American Studies Program, discusses her book, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast and Native American place and cultural identification. (Continued below) 

Thanks to a grant from the Roger R. and Theresa A. Thompson Endowment Fund, Strawbery Banke Museum is hosting a 300^th Anniversary Speaker Series, that led off on the actual anniversary of the Treaty signing on July 14, 1713.

The program takes place in the Strawbery Banke Visitor Center lecture hall (14 Hancock Street in Portsmouth NH) and is free and open to the public. The program includes light refreshments and the opportunity to view the “First Nations Diplomacy Opens the Portsmouth Door” exhibit displayed in the Museum’s c. 1695 Sherburne House.

Lisa Brooks, Ph.D, teaches courses in Native American studies, early American literature and comparative American Studies at Amherst College. She received her Ph.D. in English, with a minor in American Indian Studies, from Cornell University in 2004 and was John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. Her first book,The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (University of Minnesota Press 2008) reframes the historical and literary landscape of the American northeast. Illuminating the role of writing as a tool of community reconstruction and land reclamation in indigenous social networks, The Common Pot constructs a provocative new picture of Native space before and after colonization. The Media Ecology Association honored the book with its Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Culture for 2011.

Although deeply rooted in her Abenaki homeland, Professor Brooks’s work has been widely influential in a global network of scholars. She co-authored the collaborative volume, Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective(University of Oklahoma Press 2008), which was recognized by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) as one of the “Ten Most Influential Books in Native American and Indigenous Studies of the First Decade of the Twenty-First Century.”  She also wrote the “Afterword” for American Indian Literary Nationalism (University of New Mexico Press 2006), which won the Beatrice Medicine Award for Scholarship in American Indian Studies. In 2009, Brooks was elected to the inaugural Council of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and she currently serves on the Editorial Board of Studies in American Indian Literatures. In addition to her scholarly work, Brooks serves on the Advisory Board of Gedakina, a non-profit organization focused on indigenous cultural revitalization, educational outreach, and community wellness in New England. She is currently working on a book project, “Turning the Looking Glass on Captivity and King Philip’s War,” which places early American texts, including Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, within the historical and literary geography of Native space.

Prior speakers in the series included 1713 Treaty Tri-centennial Committee chair Charles B. Doleac, Colin Calloway, Dartmouth College historian and author of Pen & Ink Witchcraft: Treaties and Treaty-making in American Indian History and Jere Daniell, Dartmouth College professor emeritus and author of Colonial New Hampshire discussing Portsmouth Before & After the 1713 Treaty.

Additional upcoming programs in the Strawbery Banke Speaker Series include:

On Sunday, October 20, Emerson “Tad” Baker, Salem State College, author of The Devil of Great Island, gives a talk on “Beer, Taverns and Witchcraft” at 4 pm (note different time for this program.)

On Sunday, November 3, John Bear Mitchell, Native American Studies, University of Maine in Orono, discusses Wabanaki culture and story-telling traditions. 2 pm.

Two special exhibits, “First Nations Diplomacy Opens the Portsmouth Door,” at the Portsmouth Historical Society’s John Paul Jones House Museum and at Strawbery Banke Museum feature historical artifacts from the era and replicas of the original Treaty from the Library of Congress and the British Archives, signed by New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Native American dignitaries.

Additional programs in connection with the 300^th anniversary of the 1713 Treaty of Portsmouth include:

Saturday, September 28, Sandra Rux presents the final Portsmouth Historical Society Gallery Talk in connection with the Treaty exhibit at the John Paul Jones House Museum (43 Middle St., Portsmouth NH) on “Textiles in Inventories of Ursula Cutt (1694) and the Edmunds Family (1696)” at 11 am.

The Warner House (built in 1716, just after the Treaty) has scheduled the following related programs, all held at the Discover Portsmouth Center (10 Middle Street, Portsmouth NH):

·         Oct 5, “Along the Basket Trail” presented with the Kearsarge Indian Museum, 10-5

·         Oct 16, Sandra Rux “Game Change: How the Treaty of 1713 Affected William Pepperrell Sr and Archibald Macpheadris” 5:30 pm

·         Oct 23 Martha Pinello “Archaeological Evidence for Native Americans in Portsmouth Before European Contact,” 5:30 pm

From the time that the French established a fort at Port Royal in what is now Nova Scotia, Canada in 1607, and the English settled Plimouth in what is now Massachusetts in 1620 and Portsmouth (New Castle) in 1623, their national rivalries and imperial intentions played out against the “First Nations” people who had inhabited the northeast North American coast for 10,000 years. After the decimating epidemic of 1616-19 and war with the Iroquois, the First Nations of the four Maine coastal alliances and families had formed a confederacy of the Wabanaki, the “people of the dawnland.”

The 1713 Treaty of Utrecht ending Queen Anne’s War in Europe attempted to set the French and English boundaries in the New World. It put the English in charge of the coastal regions that are now Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine and gave France control of the St. Lawrence River Valley around Quebec. The land in between was Wabanaki territory and both France and England agreed to respect the other’s First Nations allies. The Wabanaki questioned how France and England could be talking about control of their ancestral land.  For there to be peace in “the dawnland” a treaty between the English and the Wabanaki was necessary.

The meeting in Portsmouth July 11-14, 1713 was important for the First Nations diplomacy employed, the acknowledgement of a New Hampshire governing Council separate from Massachusetts, and for the impact it had on opening the Portsmouth door to development as a commercial and military hub on the frontier.

The 300th Anniversary commemorations, produced through a special fund created by the Japan-America Society of NH (501c3), build on the research developed for the official website of the Treaty of Portsmouth Tri-Centennial Committee (www.1713Treaty of Portsmouth.org) to present the interpretations of scholars of the First Period in New Hampshire and Maine including Tom Hardiman at the Portsmouth Athenaeum, Richard Candee at the Historical Society, David Watters at UNH, Tad Baker at Salem State and First Nations historians including Lisa Brooks at Amherst, and Micah Pawling and Robert Bear Mitchell at the University of Maine at Orono. The committee is partnering with exhibit sites (the John Paul Jones House Museum/Portsmouth Historical Society), Strawbery Banke Museum and other historic houses (Jackson House and Gilman Garrison/Historic New England, Warner House), historical commemorations such as the 300th anniversary of Old Berwick and various collections of c. 1713 artifacts.

For more information, visit www.1713TreatyofPortsmouth.org