Alternate spellings include: Abnaki, Abinaki, Alnôbak,[5] Abanakee, Abanaki, Abanaqui, Abanaquois, Abenaka, Abenake, Abenaki, Abenakias, Abenakiss, Abenakkis, Abenaque, Abenaqui, Abenaquioict, Abenaquiois, Abenaquioue, Abenati, Abeneaguis, Abenequa, Abenkai, Abenquois, Abernaqui, Abnaqui, Abnaquies, Abnaquois, Abnaquotii, Abasque, Abnekais, Abneki, Abonakies, Abonnekee.

[6] Wôbanakiak is derived from wôban ("dawn" or "east") and aki ("land")[7] (compare Proto-Algonquian *wa·pan and *axkyi) — the aboriginal name of the area broadly corresponding to New England and the Maritimes.

Within these groups are the Abenaki bands: Smaller tribes: Smaller tribes: Wolastoqiyik and Passamaquoddy: The homeland of the Abenaki, called Ndakinna (Our Land; alternately written as N'dakinna or N'Dakinna), previously extended across most of what is now northern New England, southern Quebec, and the southern Canadian Maritimes.

The other major group, the Western Abenaki, lived in the Connecticut River valley in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts.

The maritime Abenaki lived around the St. Croix and Wolastoq (Saint John River) Valleys near the boundary line between Maine and New Brunswick.

[11] In those days, the Abenaki practiced a subsistence economy based on hunting, fishing, trapping, berry picking and on growing corn, beans, squash, potatoes and tobacco.

They also produced baskets, made of ash and sweet grass, for picking wild berries, and boiled maple sap to make syrup.

An anecdote from the period tells the story of a Wolastoqew war chief named Nescambuit (variant spellings include Assacumbuit), who killed more than 140 enemies of King Louis XIV of France and received the rank of knight.

[citation needed] The remaining Abenaki people live in multi-racial towns and cities across Canada and the US, mainly in Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and northern New England.

[4] In December 2012, the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation created a tribal forest in the town of Barton, Vermont.

Other neighboring Wabanaki tribes, the Pestomuhkati (Passamaquoddy), Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet), and Mi'kmaq, and other Eastern Algonquian languages share many linguistic similarities.

[14][15] In Reflections in Bullough's Pond, historian Diana Muir argues that the Abenakis' neighbors, pre-contact Iroquois, were an imperialist, expansionist culture whose cultivation of the corn/beans/squash agricultural complex enabled them to support a large population.

[16][page needed] In 1614, Thomas Hunt captured 24 Abenaki people, including Squanto (Tisquantum) and took them to Spain, where they were sold into slavery.

[17] During the European colonization of North America, the land occupied by the Abenaki was in the area between the new colonies of England in Massachusetts and the French in Quebec.

The Abenaki pushed back the line of white settlement through devastating raids on scattered farmhouses and small villages.

[18] During Queen Anne's War in 1702, the Abenaki were allied with the French; they raided numerous English colonial settlements in Maine, from Wells to Casco, killing about 300 settlers over ten years.

[citation needed] Several Abenaki companies include: in Wôlinak, General Fiberglass Engineering employs a dozen natives, with annual sales exceeding C$3 million.

[citation needed] Notable Abenaki from this area include the documentary filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin (National Film Board of Canada).

The bureau's report concluded that the petitioner is "a collection of individuals of claimed but mostly undemonstrated Indian ancestry with little or no social or historical connection with each other before the early 1970s.

[31] The Abenaki Nation of Missisquoi's shifting claims about its root ancestors as well as loose membership criteria are consistent with race-shifting patterns.

[31] Leroux's research prompted renewed calls by the Abenaki First Nations to reassess Vermont's state recognition process.

The three sisters were grown together: the stalk of corn supported the beans, and squash or pumpkins provided ground cover and reduced weeds.

[47] They use Hierochloe odorata (sweetgrass), Apocynum (dogbane), Betula papyrifera (paper birch), Fraxinus americana (white ash), Fraxinus nigra (black ash), Laportea canadensis (Canada nettle), a variety of Salix species, and Tilia americana (basswood, or American linden) var.

latifolia, Vaccinium angustifolium, and Zea mays as a tea, soup, jelly, sweetener, condiment, snack, or meal.

Multiple epidemics arrived a decade prior to the English colonization of Massachusetts in 1620, when three separate sicknesses swept across New England and the Canadian Maritimes.

[4] The Abenaki population continued to decline, but in 1676, they took in thousands of refugees from many southern New England tribes displaced by settlement and King Philip's War.

Books for younger readers both have historical settings: Joseph Bruchac's The Arrow Over the Door (1998) (grades 4–6) is set in 1777; and Beth Kanell's young adult novel, The Darkness Under the Water (2008), concerns a young Abenaki-French Canadian girl during the time of the Vermont Eugenics Project, 1931–1936.

The first sentence in Norman Mailer's novel Harlot's Ghost makes reference to the Abenaki: "On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago."

Selections include letters from leader of the early praying town, Wamesit in Massachusetts Samuel Numphow,[clarification needed] Sagamore Kancamagus,[clarification needed] and writings on the Abenaki language by former chief of the reserve at Odanak in Quebec, Joseph Laurent, as well as many others.

[54] Maps showing the approximate locations of areas occupied by members of the Wabanaki Confederacy (from north to south): Please list living people under their First Nation or state-recognized tribe.