Native tribes such as the Nanrantsouak, Alemousiski, Pennacook, Sokoki, and Canibas, through massacres, tribal consolidation, and ethnic label shifting were absorbed into the five larger national identities.
Its capital, Kadesquit, located around modern Bangor, Maine, would play a significant role as a political hub—for the future Wabanaki Confederacy, for example.
For instance, Portuguese explorer Estevan Gomez reached Wabanaki lands in 1525, kidnapping a few dozen people and taking them back to Spain, where he was forced to release them.
When Champlain established contact during an expedition to the Mawooshen in Pesamkuk (present-day Mount Desert Island, Maine) in 1604, he noted that the people had quite a few European goods.
The following year the mission village was destroyed by Captain Samuel Argall during a resupply visit to nearby English fishing outposts.
Somewhere in the area near Ticonderoga and Crown Point, New York (historians dispute the site), Champlain and his party encountered a group of Iroquois (likely mostly Mohawk, the easternmost nation).
This action set the tone for poor French-Iroquois relations for the rest of the century, with conflicts arising over territory and the beaver trade.
By the 1640s, internal conflicts within the region started to make Iroquois advances harder to combat for what would become the Wabanaki peoples, but also the Algonquian (tribe west of Quebec City), the Innu, and French to manage separately.
Aided by French Jesuits, this led to the formation of a large Algonquian league against the Iroquois, who were making significant territorial land gains around the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River region.
This defensive alliance would not only prove to be successful, but it helped repair the relationship among the Eastern Algonquians, promoting greater political cooperation in the coming decades.
Soon after the many Algonquian tribes fought together in an effort to strengthen both defensive and diplomatic power, a push to make a formal political union would take place leading to the development of the Wabanaki Confederacy.
[30] The First Abenaki War saw native peoples throughout the Eastern Algonquian lands face a common and powerful enemy, encroaching English colonists.
The political situation was complicated, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony was forced to relinquish control of Maine to the heirs of Ferdinando Gorges in 1676.
The First Abenaki War ended with the Treaty of Casco, which forced all the tribes to recognize the property rights of English colonists in southern Maine.
[33] The Caughnawaga Council was a large neutral political gathering in the Mohawk territory that occurred every three years for tribes and tribal confederacies within and around the Great Lakes, East Coast, and Saint Lawrence River.
[34] The union helped challenge Iroquois hostilities along the Saint Lawrence River over land and resources which was becoming a bigger problem for almost all the Eastern Algonquians to manage separately, but also provided political organization and might to push back collectively against growing English colonial expansionism, as well as mitigating large losses in the recent three-year war with them.
This political unit allowed for the safe passage of people through each of their territories (including camping and subsisting on the land), safer trade networks from the western agricultural centers to the eastern gathering economies (copper/pelts) through non-aggression pacts and sharing natural resources from their respected habitats, freedom to move to each and any of the other's villages along with organizing inter-tribal marriages, and a large-scale defensive alliance to fend off attacks in their now shared territory.
The Passamaquoddy wampum record or Wapapi Akonutomakonol[35] tells about the event that took place at the Caughnawaga Council that led to the formation of the Wabanaki Confederacy.Silently they sat for seven days.
[2]: 125–126 The Wabanaki Confederacy were governed by a council of elected sakoms, tribal leaders who were frequently also the governors of the drainage basin their village was built on.
[34][2]: 122–127 The lack of a single centralized capital complemented the Wabanaki government style, as sakoms were able to shift their political influence to any part of the nation that needed it.
Though Madockawando was treated as such in the Treaty of Casco, and his descendants such as Wabanaki Lieutenant-Governor John Neptune would maintain an elevated status in the confederacy, both officially had the same amount of power as any other sakom.
Gray Lock, who was among the most successful wartime Wabanaki sakoms, refused to make peace after the 1722-1726 Dummer's War, given that his Vermont lands were being settled by English colonists.
Members of the Wabanaki Confederacy participated in these seven major wars:[citation needed] During this period, their population was radically decimated due to many decades of warfare, but also because of famines and devastating epidemics of infectious disease.
[42]: 145 When British settlers encroached on the territory of the Abenaki, Penobscot, and the Passamaquoddy, these First Nations joined the Wolastoqiyik and the Miꞌkmaq in the Wabanaki Confederacy.
The first reconstituted confederacy conference in contemporary time was developed and proposed by Claude Aubin and Beaver Paul and hosted by the Mi'kmaq community of Listuguj under the leadership of Chief Brenda Gideon Miller.
[55] Opposition to its construction has been a catalyst for organizing: "On May 30 [2015], residents of Saint John will join others in Atlantic Canada, including Indigenous people from the Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet), Passamaquoddy and Mi'kmaq, to march to the end of the proposed pipeline and draw a line in the sand."
A ceremony takes place and afterward a traditional Wabanaki meal of roasted corn, salmon, baked beans or moose stew is eaten.
[61] Parker's grandchild Geo Soctomah Neptune is also a nationally recognized basket artist[62] who is two-spirit and was featured in Vogue magazine in 2022 for their style and earring collection.
Wabanaki people traditionally made milks, butters, and infant formula from walnuts, cornmeal, and sunflower seeds for centuries before colonizers arrived.
[68][69] Wabanaki dishes include roasted parched sweet corn, hickorynut and hull corn salad, roasted groundnuts, cranberry sauce, grilled whitefish, Abenaki rose cornmeal pudding,[70] pemmican made from ground fruits, nuts, and berries,[71] Three Sisters soup,[72] dandelion greens, fiddlehead salad, creamy sorrel and fiddlehead soup,[73] clams with sunchokes,[74] miwikisoak stew, hazelnut cakes, salmon burgers, and maple syrup pie.