Valley News Staff Writer
etween the village of Woodsville and the Newbury-Bradford line, the Connecticut River meanders slowly in loose loop-de-loops. In summer months, acres of corn stalks rise up on either side in a waving wall of greenery.
This is the historic home of the Koasek Abenakis, a band of native people who also grew corn in these fertile fields, known as the Koas meadows. There is archeological evidence of a community living here for at least part of the year as long ago as 1,100 A.D. But their ancestors likely made it their home before that, potentially for several thousand years.
There are many families from Newbury and Haverhill who can trace their ancestry back to the Koasek band, to a time before their way of life was disrupted, and ultimately destroyed, by the arrival of Europeans to New England in the 1600s and their expansion north over the next 150 years.
But for others with long ties to the two towns, whatever connection may have existed has become murky over time.
“A lot of people in the area say that they have family history of having native lineage,” said Nancy Millette, who grew up in Haverhill and is director of the White Pine Association, a nonprofit group dedicated to the preservation of the history, culture and language of the Abanaki people. But many people are not sure if the family stories are true and, in many cases, official documents such as birth and marriage records do not help. “It is very, very hard to find the paperwork.”
In most cases, Abenakis who remained in the region after the arrival of European settlers blended into the broader community. Many spoke French and were Catholic, the result of interacting with trappers and missionaries from Canada, and gave their heritage as French to avoid the negative feelings their neighbors had about the Abenaki.
“There was a lot of discrimination in a lot of communities,” said Millette, who is Abenaki and currently serves as co-chief of the Koasek band. “They were called ‘river rats' or ‘gypsies.' They were fifth-class citizens.”
That is why, she said, the association decided to participate in an ongoing scientific research project coordinated by the National Geographic Society. The Genographic Project, which was launched in 2005, is a five-year nonprofit, non-governmental effort to develop a large genetic database. The collection focuses only on the section of human DNA that can identify ancestral ties to distinct migratory groups of early humans.
Scientists working with the project have collected samples from longstanding populations of native peoples from East Asia, India, the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. By last summer, the project had gathered almost 52,000 sequences of mitochondrial DNA, which are genetic instructions that are passed from females to their offspring. In addition, the project is collecting sequences from the Y-chromosome, which is passed from father to son.
Theodore Schurr, a professor of biological anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and his colleagues will be visiting Haverhill next Friday and Saturday to discuss their work and take genetic samples for free testing from people with long family ties to the region. (See related story.)
The kind of genetic testing that the project is offering will not link someone to a particular indigenous tribe, said Schurr. It will only reveal whether there is some kind of native ancestry. And the tests do not always reveal ancestry even when historical records show it exists.
“Identity is a very complex thing,” Schurr said. “It doesn't hinge strictly on genetics. Genetics is only a tool.”
However, the information they collect in Haverhill and elsewhere across the country and the globe can tell them about the historic migration of peoples across the planet from Africa, which appears to have started around 90,000 years ago. It can also offer insights into whether there was a historic connection between two distinct groups.
For example, the project is interested in finding out what sorts of genetic mutations that indigenous people in the Koas and other Algonquin speaking people along the East Coast have in common with Iroquois from the Great Lakes region of the United States and Canada, said Schurr. His group is already working with the Wampanoag tribe based in Rehoboth, Mass., near the border with Rhode Island, he said.
Genetic information may uncover aspects of history that nature has washed away. In the Koas meadows, the meandering of the Connecticut River has likely erased any archeological record that could show when people first began living there, said Dick Boisvert, New Hampshire state archaeologist.
“If there were occupations there 5,000 years ago, they probably would be eroded away,” Boisvert said.
For more recent history, town and church documents can show a great deal, said ethnohistorian John Moody, a Hartford resident who with his wife, Donna, operates the nonprofit Winter Center for Indigenous Traditions based in the Upper Valley. Painstaking research by Moody and others since the 1970s suggests that among longstanding residents in any given area of New England, a significant part of the population has some blood relation to the indigenous people of that area.
“In terms of native ancestry, the baseline from our perspective is 30 percent,” said Moody. For places like the Koas, a known village site, the percentage could be closer to 50 percent, he said.
The Moodys said they do not think that genetic testing will add any information to what is already known. Also, it has a problematic history that can make any project of this type suspect to many who might participate.
Over the years, collaborating with scientists has yielded nothing but trouble for native people, from submitting to researchers in the eugenics movement of the 1920s and 30s who measured the size of their heads through to the still ongoing Human Genome Diversity Project, which collects cell lines to plumb for potentially valuable genetic diversity, the Moodys said. They believe that this history makes it unlikely that many members of the Abenaki community will participate in the new project.
“These are fresh wounds,” said John Moody. “This is a deep concern. A lot of Abenaki families are very reluctant to be tested.”
For her part, Millette hopes that at least 500 people will participate, enough so that the association can develop a reservoir of information about the community. Her goal is to show how deep native roots spread through the region and to encourage more families to learn about their own history and the history of the Koas meadows.
“It's the most beautiful place in the world. We look at the meadows on both sides of the river with awe,” said Millette. “But the children don't even know all the history of that.”
Kristen Fountain can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or (603) 727-3209.
