The Indians’ Old Sea, to 1500

Prior to the arrival of European strangers from the east, the ocean possessed a generative richness that contrasted starkly with the predictable darkness and despair of the interior woodlands. Wabanaki oral traditions paint the sea as a rich repository of natural resources awaiting human manipulation, but Native stories also imbue the ocean with capricious forces that lurk just below the surface. Artifacts, legends, and eyewitness accounts reveal that Indians carried out death-defying feats to pursue mammoths of the deep and enemies of distant lands. Climate studies also point to seismic shifts in ocean levels and temperatures that transformed marine ecosystems and the human populations long dependent on them. At once life sustaining and life threatening, the sea’s duality hovered over people throughout the Dawnland’s ancient past and would shape the context of possibilities within which they situated new peoples and things from the east.