War in Wôbanak: Environmental Histories of the French and Indian Wars, 1675-1763

Abstract

In “War in Wôbanak: Environmental Histories of the French and Indian Wars, 1675-1763,” I argue that a century of conflict fought in northeastern North America can be explained by understanding different perceptions and relationships brought to bear on the natural world by members of the Wabanaki Confederacy, officials and soldiers of the British Empire, and English (descended) settler colonists. In Wôbanak, the Dawnland, the first place the sun rises each day in North America, stretching across what most maps now call Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Quebec, and the Canadian Maritimes, the people of the Wabanaki Confederacy, the Abenaki, Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet, and Mi’kmaq made their home. And for the better part of one hundred years, they defended that homeland in the face of colonial and imperial expansion. While colonists and imperial officials insisted that the natural world could be commodified dominated, and extracted, Wabanaki people saw a space teeming with life and with relationships. By viewing the roles trees, non-human animals, agriculture and placemaking, and even pathogens played in these conflicts—and how differing ecologies shaped and were in turn shaped by them—these conflicts appear as environmental events. With the ascendance of the British Empire and the end of this story, their victory is a pyrrhic one as they are subsumed by settler colonists whose own environmental logic set the stage for contemporary environmental disaster.