As I was sitting there, I noticed a tiny ant crawling across a blade of grass. As I watched the ant move along, his little body began to light up. Then, the blade of grass that he was walking on lit up. As I sat there and watched, the entire area surrounding me began to light up. I slowly raised my eyes and the entire field became illuminated, as did the trees standing on the other side of the field lining the forest. Every bird that flew into my line of vision had an added layer of light surrounding it.
(Mitchell 7)
Awakening sometime after midnight in the Maine woods, Henry David Thoreau noticed the mysterious glow of bioluminescent fungi affixed to a moosewood log. Though Thoreau would devote himself to studying bioluminescence empirically in the years that followed, for the time being he “let science slide, and rejoiced in that light as if it had been a fellow creature” (Thoreau, Maine Woods 247). The next morning, 25 July 1857, he asked his Penobscot guide, Joe Polis, about this “phosphorescent wood” (245). Upon learning its Penobscot name—“artoosoqu”—Thoreau inquired about similar bioluminescent phenomena and eagerly listened as Polis described how his “folks” occasionally would see “fires passing along at various heights, even as high as the trees, and making a noise” (247). As Thoreau hung on Polis’s every word, he did not simply acquire another linguistic specimen for his ever-growing list of “Indian” vocabulary. Rather, “artoosoqu” expressed another world that multiplied the possibilities of his own: “Nature must have made a thousand revelations to them which are still secrets to us” (247). After returning to Concord in August, Thoreau expands on this insight in a letter to his friend Harrison Blake: “I have made a short excursion into the new world which the Indian dwells in, or is. He begins where we leave off… . I rejoice to find that intelligence flows in other channels than I knew” (“Concord”). This celebration of another mode of dwelling is accompanied by a corresponding desiccation of former epistemological channels. In the posthumously published account of his third and final trip to the Maine woods, titled “The Allegash and the East Branch,” Thoreau asserts that he was “glad to make acquaintance with the light that dwells in rotten wood. Where is all your knowledge gone to? It evaporates completely for it has no depths —” (Maine Woods 248).Footnote 1 Carrying Polis’s lessons with him along the way, Thoreau would continue from that point on to venture beyond the dried-up streams of Western knowledge and toward previously unheeded channels of Indigenous epistemologies.
Throughout his brief life, Thoreau documented his extensive readings related to Indigenous peoples in the more than three thousand pages of notes that make up the twelve volumes of his unpublished “Indian Notebooks.”Footnote 2 Yet it was only after his week-long excursion with Polis that Thoreau began to use his understanding of Indigenous knowledge as a way of enhancing his studies of the natural world. Previous scholarship has largely overlooked the influence Polis had on Thoreau’s late natural history manuscripts, specifically Wild Fruits (a collection of entries and essays focused on phenology, or the study of cyclical and seasonal phenomena) and The Dispersion of Seeds (his study of ecological movement), both of which remained unpublished until the late 1990s.Footnote 3 Part of the reason for this oversight stems from the fact that Thoreau deliberately concealed his former guide’s name when writing these manuscripts. As Lisa Brooks writes, Thoreau even postponed the publication of “The Allegash and East Branch” because “Polis’s literacy … posed a challenge to Thoreau’s representations of Indian life. Polis, Thoreau knew, would be able to acquire, read, and contest any story he wrote about him” (248). Thoreau’s reluctance to publish this account, however, did not prevent him from furtively incorporating Polis’s lessons into his studies of phenology and ecology.Footnote 4
When scholars have discussed Thoreau’s relationship to Polis, for the most part they have argued that his prejudices prevented him from fully appreciating his guide’s lessons. To take a commonly cited example, when Thoreau recounts the story Polis told him about how the Penobscot hero Gluskabe hunted a giant moose to explain the origin of Mount Kineo, scholars have detected a critical tone in lines such as the following: “An Indian tells such a story as if he thought it deserved to have a good deal said about it, only he has not got it to say, and so he makes up for the deficiency by a drawling tone, long-windedness, and a dumb wonder which he hopes will be contagious” (Maine Woods 235).Footnote 5 Yet these lines may not be as dismissive as they might at first appear. Later, Thoreau describes the same “long-windedness” when he favorably remarks that Polis speaks with a “true storyteller’s leisureliness” (396).Footnote 6 Thoreau’s observation that Polis did not seem up to the task of telling a story he regarded with great importance could actually indicate Thoreau’s awareness of a rhetorical affect not uncommon in Penobscot storytelling practices. For instance, as Annette Kolodny notes, the Penobscot elder Joseph Nicolar prefaces his narrative The Life and Traditions of the Red Man (1893) with an apologia in which he claims to lack the education to properly tell these stories. Nevertheless, Nicolar proceeds to weave a literary tapestry of Penobscot tales adapted for the sake of cultural diplomacy and affirming Penobscot sovereignty (Nicolar 96).Footnote 7 How might one read Thoreau’s late work differently if one took seriously his attempt to understand Polis on Polis’s own terms?
Whereas scholars have tended to treat Thoreau’s research on North American Indians separately from his groundbreaking late natural histories, I claim that these studies of ecology and phenology should be read in tandem with his growing understanding of Indigenous epistemologies. In this essay, I retrace the emergence of what I call a “perceptual grammar” through which Thoreau translates his understanding of Penobscot knowledge and Abenaki grammar into a heuristic for discerning previously imperceptible patterns of ecological and phenological relations. The first section begins by recounting the reciprocal terms Thoreau and Polis establish for sharing knowledge during their portages, or the intervals in which they would carry their canoe between two bodies of water or around an obstacle. Often an occasion for storytelling, portages, according to the Penobscot tribal historian James Francis, “act as a threshold, allowing our senses to connect one space with another, one time with another, and individuals with their ancestors and ancestral territory” (215).Footnote 8 The remainder of the opening section outlines how Polis’s lessons connect Thoreau to a new sense of space and time vis-à-vis their portages. The second section, then, focuses on how Polis’s lessons inform Thoreau’s reading of the French Jesuit Sébastien Rale’s Abenaki dictionary, compiled in the opening decades of the eighteenth century. Between these two sources of Wabanaki knowledge (a designation that here includes both Penobscot and Abenaki epistemologies),Footnote 9 Thoreau derives a perceptual grammar that helps him articulate complex ecological and phenological relations. The final section examines how this Wabanaki-inflected perceptual grammar shapes a practice of what Thoreau calls “going a-berrying.” For Thoreau, the seemingly trivial activity of gathering berries outdoors becomes a threefold ethical, political, and epistemological practice. Respectively, going a-berrying affirms the absolute value of other forms of life, divests from global fruit markets dependent on slavery and territorial conquest, and revives Indigenous knowledge erased by European natural histories. Just as Thoreau’s perceptual grammar helps him make a portage between two epistemological channels, going a-berrying becomes a way of unsettling the spatiotemporal coordinates that condition settler colonialism as an ongoing fortification against Indigenous futurity. As Thoreau writes, “going a-berrying” is ultimately “another name for making a portage” (Maine Woods 380).
Portages with Polis
The most significant difference between his previous two trips to the Maine woods and the one he takes in 1857 is that, during the latter, Thoreau commits to sharing knowledge with his Penobscot guide on explicitly reciprocal terms. Early in the excursion, Polis tells Thoreau the names of several birds. This leads Thoreau to express a desire to learn with Polis about each other’s worlds: “I told him that in this voyage I would tell him all I knew, and he should tell me all he knew, to which he readily agreed” (Maine Woods 229). As Thoreau’s inquiries shed light on Penobscot ways of knowing, Polis also seeks to understand how white settlers think. For instance, Polis asks Thoreau how it was that, even though he had purchased about a hundred acres of land, someone else was able to purchase the grass over the same area. The third traveler, Ed Hoar, a lawyer and fellow Concordian, explains to Polis that he would need to prove he purchased the land before the other claimant bought the grass. Though Polis comprehends the notion of buying land, his confusion seems to stem from the idea that the grass that pervades the land could be separated from the legal and ontological status of the land itself. In Thoreau’s account of the dialogue, Polis finds each attempted explanation of the white settler’s separation of land from grass mystifying and emphatically “strange!” (237).Footnote 10 The condition of possibility for epistemological reciprocity, though, is not itself a quid pro quo exchange of knowledge, but rather the right to refuse to disclose solicited information.Footnote 11 When Polis notices his canoe leaking, for example, he uses an unspecified material at hand and makes a pitch to mend it. Instead of simply revealing the material, Polis asks Thoreau to guess how he made the pitch. Even after Thoreau offers several guesses, Polis “would not tell” him for the remainder of the trip, perhaps as a way of testing whether Thoreau could determine the answer for himself (280).Footnote 12
As Thoreau pays attention to how his Penobscot guide navigates the forest in general, he seems most impressed with Polis’s ability to find his way even when he is lost or otherwise unfamiliar with their present location. Describing Polis’s spatial attunement to numerous signs in the forest, Thoreau writes:
It appeared as if the sources of information were so various that he [Polis] did not give a distinct, conscious attention to any one, and so could not readily refer to any when questioned about it, but he found his way very much as an animal does. Perhaps what is commonly called instinct in the animal, in this case is merely a sharpened and educated sense. Often, when an Indian says, “I don’t know,” in regard to the route he is to take, he does not mean what a white man would by these words, for his Indian instinct may tell him still as much as the most confident white man knows. He does not carry things in his head, nor remember the route exactly like a white man, but relies on himself at the moment. Not having experienced the need of the other sort of knowledge, all labeled and arranged, he has not acquired it. (253)
While Thoreau also associates this “instinct” with nonhuman animals, he uses the term to refer to a “sharpened and educated sense” that white settlers do not learn. Polis does not have a map of the forest memorized, nor does he otherwise know his route in advance. Rather, he pays attention in the moment to a host of interconnected signs from the forest that are imperceptible even to Thoreau’s otherwise discerning senses.Footnote 13 As Thoreau later remarks, Polis could stick to a trail “almost like a hound, and rarely hesitated, or, if he paused a moment on a bare rock, his eye immediately detected some sign which would have escaped me” (379).
Polis’s spatial knowledge is connected to three interrelated senses of time that Kyle Powys Whyte (Potawatomi) identifies as common throughout Turtle Island: deep time, kinship, and seasonal time (84). As Whyte explains, a sense of deep time is conveyed through stories, which remind Indigenous peoples that “whatever we’re experiencing now couldn’t possibly be the first time it had ever happened” (81–82). Consider the story of Gluskabe’s hunt of the giant moose (mentioned in the introduction), in which the moose’s guts, Gluskabe’s dog, and his kettle all transform into landmarks that for countless generations have designated Mount Kineo as a singular site to gather stones for weapons and tools (Dana et al. 195–99). Thoreau seems to allude to this story when he relates that Polis could find his way to Oldtown in winter “by ‘that rough tooth of the sea,’ Kineo, great source of arrows and of spears to the ancients, when weapons of stone were used” (Maine Woods 322–23). Deep time, preserved in stories, thus helps Polis navigate land and water through the repetition of ancestral percepts.Footnote 14 Polis draws on the temporality of kinship when he carves the date 26 July 1857 in a fir tree beneath an image of a bear in a canoe and two other previously inscribed dates. The carved image seems to indicate Polis’s relation to this animal ancestor, evidently through his father, who is said to have been raised by bears and whose name “Arwasus” itself means “bear.”Footnote 15 According to Whyte, histories of kinship are measured through the “expansion and contraction” of “relationships of mutual responsibility” (75, 82–83). The addition of the date below the bear, then, may commemorate not only Polis’s return to a familiar haunt but also the augmentation of kinship experienced during this trip.Footnote 16 Seasonal time emerges from the complex interplay of human activities and nonhuman “indicators and relationships” (Whyte 84). For instance, during a portage, Polis uses his knowledge of seasonal time to alert Thoreau to the possible presence of bears: “He said that at this season bears were found on the mountains and hillsides, in search of berries, and were apt to be saucy, — that we might come across them up Trout Stream” (Thoreau, Maine Woods 290). Attending to the nuances of seasonal time, Whyte explains, makes it easier to notice when something in a given season deviates from its general patterns and therefore requires a societal adjustment.Footnote 17 Thoreau will begin to think of seasonal time in similar terms as he deepens his understanding of Wabanaki knowledge and translates the resultant perceptual grammar into his theory and practice of going a-berrying.
“A Very Concentrated and Trustworthy Natural History”
Thoreau initially presented “The Allegash and the East Branch” as a lecture on 25 February 1858, but hesitated to publish it upon James Russell Lowell’s solicitation. Instead, Thoreau headed to Harvard’s library in early March to borrow Rale’s A Dictionary of Abnaki Language in North America, compiled among the Norridgewock band of the Abenaki between 1691 and 1722 in French and Abenaki. That Thoreau borrowed this dictionary at this time suggests that he understood the close relationship between Penobscot and Eastern Abenaki, both of which are Wabanaki languages that belong to the broader Algonquian linguistic family.Footnote 18 After copying several pages worth of vocabulary and grammatical notes from Rale’s Abenaki dictionary, Thoreau writes with enthusiasm in his journal on 4 March 1858:
Father Rales’ dictionary of the Abenaki language amounts to a very concentrated and trustworthy natural history of that people, though it was not completed. What they have a word for, they have a thing for. A traveller may tell us that he thinks they used a pare-vent, or built their columns in a certain form, or soaked their seed corn in water, or had no beard, etc., etc.; but when one gives us the word for these things, the question is settled, that is a clincher. Let us know which words they had and how they used them, and one can infer almost all the rest.
(“Online Journal Transcripts” 25: 102–03; my emphases)
The next day, 5 March 1858, Thoreau adds:
It was a new light when my guide gave me Indian names for things, for which I had only scientific ones before. In proportion as I understood the language, I saw them from a new point of view. A dictionary of the Indian language reveals another and wholly new life to us… . It reveals to me a life within a life, or rather a life without a life, as it were threading the woods Footnote 19 between our towns still, and yet we can never tread in its trail. The Indian’s earthly life was as far off from us as heaven is.
(25: 108; my emphases)
Here, the “new light” seems to be an allusion to the “phosphorescent wood,” while the life within or without a life “threading through the woods” may refer to the stories Polis told him about the audible fires moving through the forest.Footnote 20 Returning to the library in May 1858, Thoreau conversed with the librarian John Langdon Sibley “on the mistake of men of science in not giving more attention to the Indians and their languages and habits” (Sibley qtd. in Sayre 191–92).Footnote 21 During their discussion, Thoreau emphasized in particular how “Indian” languages provide insights into ethology, or the study of animal behavior, that he previously had only observed but never seen written about in any natural history.
Alongside several pages of vocabulary and definitions that Thoreau copied from Rale’s dictionary in the penultimate volume of his “Indian Notebooks,” he also took notes from John Pickering’s English explanation of Abenaki grammar, added to the 1833 edition. Recorded in his notes is the observation that in “North American languages nouns are not classed according to genders, or sexes, but under the two generic divisions of animate and inanimate objects” (Thoreau, Extracts [MA 605]).Footnote 22 In the Penobscot grammar guide on “patterns of relation” included in “Still They Remember Me,” Carol A. Dana (Penobscot), Margo Lukens, and Conor M. Quinn write that “[e]verything in Penobscot is either a NA-word or a NI-word”; “Na” refers to people, a “who,” and “ni” refers to things, a “what” (Dana et al. 35). In this case, however, the designation of “people” does not just refer to humans: “Penobscot (like other Wabanaki languages) relates differently to animals, asking ‘Who is this?’ to identify an animal, unlike English ‘What is this?’” (35). For instance, in the variation of the story of Gluskabe’s moose hunt that Newell Lyon (Penobscot) told the anthropologist Frank Speck in the early twentieth century, reprinted in “Still They Remember Me,” Lyon used the same word pattern to describe the place where the moose guts and Gluskabe’s dog turn to stone:
etali-pənahpskʷihlαk wəlakəsəyal – “Where they (the moose guts) turned to white stone”
etali-pənahpskʷihlαt aləmoss – “Where the dog is turned to stone” (Dana et al. 196–97)
In both cases, the ending root “-hlα” means to “‘go, move,’ or to even ‘become, turn into’” (Dana et al. 43). As Dana, Lukens, and Quinn note, “the typical Penobscot word is often more like a two- (or more) word phrase in English … because many basic concepts that are separate, standalone words in English are expressed as word-endings in Penobscot” (42–43). The one minor difference at the end of each word, the “k” versus “t,” indicates whether the subject is a “who” or a “what.” Here, the moose guts are a “what,” whereas Gluskabe’s dog is a “who” (37). Moreover, certain words contain “patterns of relation” that identify a “who” or a “what” in relation to another “who” or “what.” The word pattern nilil/nihi, for instance, indicates the relation between someone and someone or something else: “that (NA) in-relation-to …” (39).Footnote 23 As the authors note, “The nilil/nihi pattern – this special attention to relation(s) – is, as far as we know, not clearly found in any languages of the world except Penobscot and its fellow Algonquian languages” (40).Footnote 24
While Thoreau copied several Abenaki words verbatim from Rale’s dictionary into his “Indian Notebooks,” he often seemed content to provide (either in French or in his own English translations) only the definition of a word, or simply to note that “they have a word for” some notable phenomenon. If Thoreau considered Rale’s Abenaki dictionary a veritable “natural history,” as he wrote in his journal, it is because he understood Abenaki words to indicate particular ecological and phenological relations. For instance, Thoreau recorded that there is a word for a tree that looks hollow and is hollow, as well as a word for a tree that does not look hollow but actually is hollow. When Thoreau writes the draft for The Dispersion of Seeds two years later in 1860, at one point he describes tree stumps that do not appear hollow, yet upon further inspection prove to have been hollowed out by animals:
If you dig up old oak stumps in a young wood, even though they may be so completely decayed that only a hollow marks their site, and you do not find a particle that looks like decayed wood or bark even, and your spade meets with no resistance, you will commonly find perfectly open channels raying out from this hollow, with the pellicle of the root for a wall still, which for a hundred years the earth has learned to respect. These galleries are all underground runways of squirrels and mice, probably for many generations leading to their nests and granaries. The holes above lead to them. Every old stump, indeed, though it may be much more recent than this, is a very metropolis to them.
(Dispersion 144–45; my emphasis)
Given Thoreau’s frequent puns, as well as his desire to conceal Polis’s identity, it is difficult not to read a hidden citation of Polis in “metropolis.” The long and winding syntax of the first sentence suggests Thoreau’s efforts to simultaneously conceal and disclose this key to his late observations. The oak stump is hollowed by decay even though not a “particle” of the stump “looks like decayed wood or bark even.” While Thoreau does not explicitly note the word that seems to enable this observation, he was prepared to see this phenomenon thanks to the perceptual grammar he derived from both Polis’s lessons and Rale’s Abenaki dictionary.
Going a-Berrying
Thoreau’s last two natural history manuscripts, Wild Fruits and The Dispersion of Seeds, written concurrently and published more than 130 years after his death, exemplify his efforts to use a Wabanaki-inflected perceptual grammar to study ecological and phenological relations. Wild Fruits is divided into entries and essays devoted to particular fruits, organized phenologically according to the order of their first appearance in a given season. Early in the manuscript, in the entry titled “Strawberries,” Thoreau describes a “sort of Indian knowledge” that allows one to locate the fruit by following a particular insect:
Only one in a hundred know where to look for these early strawberries. It is, as it were, a sort of Indian knowledge, acquired by secret tradition. I know well what has called that apprentice, who has just crossed my path, to the hillsides this Sunday morning. In whatever factory or chamber he has his dwelling-place, he is as sure to be by the side of the first strawberry when it reddens as that domestic-smelling bug that I spoke of, though he lies concealed all the rest of the year. It is an instinct with him. But the rest of mankind have not dreamed of such things as yet. The few wild strawberries that we have will have come and gone before the mass know it. (Wild Fruits 13)
The fact that “only one in a hundred know where to look” discloses another branch of knowledge overlooked by the dominant scientific schema of his day, which was preoccupied with taxonomies and physiognomies.Footnote 25 While the domestic-smelling bug’s relationship to the strawberries is imperceptible to the churchgoers and professional naturalists, the apprentice notices how the anticipation of the strawberry’s emergence prompts the insect’s hatching within its own web of relations. Thoreau makes the connection between the insect, seasonal time, and his new perceptual grammar explicit when he writes, “I get my very first smelling—aye, even tasting—of that remarkable bug (one of the Scutellaridae) which we are wont to say tastes exactly as a certain domestic bug smells—and thus I am set up for the season” (12). One does not even need to see the bug itself, only pick up the trail of its scent, in order for it to index strawberries in their season. To learn the Wabanaki-inflected perceptual grammar that allows the apprentice to go a-strawberrying is also to revive phenological and ecological relations that New England settlers have devastated through their so-called improvements.Footnote 26
Paying attention to what particular animals find important helps Thoreau determine where to look for phenological and ecological relations. In The Dispersion of Seeds, which examines the ecological agents that make possible the movement and distribution of seeds, Thoreau considers how the gathering of squirrels at the location of acorns indexes a season: “We must look where the animals are. Squirrels are to be found where their food is in its season” (135). Thoreau’s Wabanaki-inflected perceptual grammar affirms that ethology indicates phenology. Noticing what animals deem important allows Thoreau to see and celebrate squirrels as ecological agents who indicate a season that they, in part, compose. At the time Thoreau was writing, New Englanders themselves gathered seasonally around squirrels, yet with the aim of hunting them on a massive scale within a concentrated space. Instead of the annual squirrel hunt, Thoreau advocates for a different celebration of seasonal time in which those living up-country might “recognize once in a year by some symbolic ceremony the part which the squirrel plays in the economy of Nature” (130). Thoreau’s call for a seasonal celebration of squirrels becomes a way of disbanding the settler-hunters’ zooicidal relation to these vital ecological agents, thereby reviving a sense of kinship with them. Similar to how Whyte discussed the importance of seasonal time for assessing and, if necessary, altering social activities, Thoreau links phenology to the possibility of an alternative mode of social gathering.Footnote 27
As Thoreau increasingly sees his surroundings anew through a Wabanaki-inflected perceptual grammar, he also begins to develop a threefold ethical, political, and epistemological theory and practice of “going a-berrying.” Wild Fruits in particular reimagines the genre of natural history to disarm its historical role in reducing ecological relations to a proleptic catalog of commodities. In the manuscript’s opening paragraph, Thoreau evokes images of sea voyages only to cancel out these commercial ventures to foreign places:
As I sail the unexplored sea of Concord, many a dell and swamp and wooded hill is my Ceram and Amboyna. Famous fruits imported from the East or South and sold in our markets—as oranges, lemons, pine-apples, and bananas—do not concern me so much as many an unnoticed wild berry… . The tropical fruits are for those who dwell within the tropics. Their fairest and sweetest parts cannot be imported… . For it is not the foreignness or size or nutritive qualities of a fruit that determine its absolute value. (3)
The absolute value of a fruit derives from the unique encounter the picker has with it outdoors and in its season. For Thoreau, going a-berrying then becomes an ethical practice of affirming the absolute value of each and every fruit.Footnote 28 Thoreau writes, “The South may keep her pine-apples, as we will be content with our strawberries, which are, as it were, a pine-apple with ‘going-a-strawberrying’ stirred into them, infinitely enhancing their flavor” (3–4). A Concordian who eats the prized pineapple bought from a marketplace does not partake in its absolute value. This absolute value can be appreciated only by going a-berrying for local fruits where one lives, at the time of the fruit’s seasoning: “These apples have hung in the wind and frost and rain till they have absorbed the qualities of the weather or season, and thus are highly seasoned, and they pierce and sting and permeate us with their spirit. They must be eaten in season, accordingly—that is, out of doors” (85–86). Going a-berrying allows the picker to enter into a singular relation with a fruit that is not abstracted or mediated through the market. Thoreau thus advocates going a-berrying as a political act of divestment from the global fruit markets in an economy fueled by slavery.Footnote 29 He decries the “foolish demons” who “devote themselves to the culture of tobacco, inventing slavery and a thousand other curses for that purpose, with infinite pains and inhumanity go raise tobacco all their lives, and that is the staple instead of huckleberries” (51). Hence Thoreau’s call for New Englanders to “[l]et alone your garden, cease your cultivation—and in how short a time will blueberries and huckleberries grow there!” (25).
That Thoreau chooses to highlight huckleberries as the antithesis of tobacco and fruits from the southern hemisphere is no accident. The most sustained engagement with Indigenous knowledge in Wild Fruits is in the essay “Black Huckleberry,” which Thoreau was reworking as a lecture titled “Huckleberries” into the final year of his life.Footnote 30 In this essay in particular, Thoreau attempts to reconstruct Indigenous epistemologies through North American Indian practices of going a-berrying. He “celebrate[s]” huckleberries alongside whortleberries and blueberries as fruits dispersed in a manner “very nearly coterminous with what has been called the Algonquin Family of Indians, whose territories embraced what are now the Eastern, Middle and Northwestern States, and the Canadas, and surrounded those of the Iroquois in what is now New York” (46). The concurrence of these Indigenous linguistic families and the range of huckleberries indicates a more intimate knowledge of the fruit. Thoreau writes:
Of course, the Indians made a much greater account of wild fruits than we do, and among the most important of these were huckleberries. They taught us not only the use of corn and how to plant it, but also of whortleberries and how to dry them for winter. We should have hesitated long before we tasted some kinds if they had not set us the example, knowing by old experience that they were not only harmless but salutary. I have added a few to my number of edible berries by walking behind an Indian in Maine and observing that he ate some which I never thought of tasting before.Footnote 31 (46)
Earlier in Wild Fruits, Thoreau mocks the fact that the black huckleberry (gaylussacia resinosa) had recently been named after the French chemist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, a man who apparently had never even seen the berry itself, let alone gone a-huckleberrying for it: “What if a committee of Parisian naturalists had been appointed to break this important news to an Indian maiden who had just filled her basket on the shore of Lake Huron!” (37). For Thoreau, to describe the natural history of North American fruits requires close attention to epistemologies preserved in Indigenous languages, rather than the pontifications of armchair taxonomists.
Each of the chronologically rearranged passages Thoreau pulls from his “Indian Notebooks” for the entry on the black huckleberry mentions North American Indian practices of drying these and similar berries to preserve them. Yet Thoreau recognizes the limitations of the particular accounts Europeans provide in their travelogues and natural histories:
But little is said by the discoverers of the use which the Indians made of the fresh berries in their season, the hand-to-mouth use of them, because there was little to be said, though in this form they may have been much the most important to them. We have volumes of recipes, called cookbooks, but when a fruit or a tart is ready for the table, nothing remains but to eat it without any more words. We therefore have few or no accounts of Indians going a-huckleberrying, though they had more than a six-week’s vacation for that purpose, and probably camped on the huckleberry field. (Wild Fruits 46)
To compensate for the dearth of such accounts of “Indians going a-huckleberrying,” Thoreau revisits his notes and rereads the passages he extracted from travelogues and natural histories comparatively to recover a description of what going a-huckleberrying has meant historically to North American Indians. Thoreau writes that “it is only after listening patiently to such reiterated and concurring testimony, of various dates and respecting widely distant localities, that we come to realize the truth” (46). This comparative method of reading between the lines of European and settler accounts offers a way for Thoreau to pay attention to what each particular traveler overlooked. After excerpting passages that briefly indicate instances of “Indians going a-huckleberrying” from more than a dozen such accounts, Thoreau confirms that “they did not learn the use of these berries from us whites” (46). He then concludes that this practice of going a-berrying connects contemporary pickers to the temporality of deep time: “Hence you see that the Indians, from time immemorial down to the present day, all over the northern part of America, have made far more extensive use of the whortleberry at all seasons and in various ways than we, and that they were far more important to them than to us” (49). As with storytelling, the relationship between going a-berrying and deep time connects the picker not only to the past but to the future as well. Thoreau learned from La Hontan and other authors that North American Indians dried blueberries in preparation for the winter in case “the chase [hunt] fails them” (La Hontan qtd. in Wild Fruits 48). Adding his own commentary alongside this note, Thoreau remarks, “They were herein more provident than we commonly suppose” (48). The providence Thoreau registers in this brief aside fundamentally disrupts the settler colonial myth of the “vanishing Indian” prevalent in Thoreau’s day, which held that North American Indians neither plan for nor have a future beyond their inevitable and imminent extinction.Footnote 32 Dried berries and the knowledge conveyed through traditional stories, Thoreau recognizes, have sustained North American Indians “from time immemorial” during the harsh and otherwise deadly winter months, and thus index a futurity that continues to unsettle settler constructions of space and time.
More than seven generations after Thoreau’s passing, tribal nations of the Wabanaki Confederacy continue to gather berries in the Dawnland.Footnote 33 In 2020, the director Nancy Ghertner, in association with the Passamaquoddy Cultural Heritage Museum, released the documentary Voices from the Barrens: Native People, Blueberries and Sovereignty, which follows members of the Mi’kmaq and Passamaquoddy nations during their annual hand raking of blueberries. Similar to what Thoreau recognized from his comparative readings, Donald Soctomah (Passamaquoddy) affirms that going a-blueberrying historically has ensured sustenance in times of scarcity: “When all other resources were gone, the blueberry was always there” (Voices 00:01:20).Footnote 34 Thoreau’s sense of going a-berrying as a seasonal way of renewing social activities that connect past, present, and future also resonates with how the Passamaquoddy and Mi’kmaq hand rakers describe the importance of blueberry picking for them. Plansowels Dana (Passamaquoddy), for instance, notes that while “we need the financial aspect of it too … we also come for the social and the community and the family that we create here” (00:39:35). Raymond Stevens (Mi’kmaq Tribal Elder, Eskasoni First Nation), who teaches and works to preserve the Mi’kmaq language, views blueberry picking as a space for education: “When people gather, I also learn, people teach me” (00:40:15).
Though members of the Wabanaki Confederacy, including hand rakers from the Penobscot and Malecite Tribes, continue to join in the harvest every August, pressures from buyers on the global market have forced the Passamaquoddy Wild Blueberry Company to reduce the number of hand-raking camps in recent years.Footnote 35 As the late Susie Marshall (Mi’kmaq Tribal Elder, Eskasoni First Nation) puts it, “they are chasing natives from the good berries” (00:36:10). In 2017, the harvest was canceled because of contract breaches that left the company with no buyers, which in the words of Matt Dana (Passamaquoddy) “was a big loss, not only economically, but it was almost spiritual as well” (00:48:55). The following year, an unusually late frost in June was devastating for many Passamaquoddy growers, which compelled the company to increase its dependence on mechanical harvesters and reduce the number of hand-raking camps from four to two. Still, Brian Altvater (Passamaquoddy and a board member of the company) affirms that “we’ll always have hand raking, it just won’t be done at the level that’s been done before” (00:52:10). If going a-berrying for Thoreau marked the horizon of a political ecology withdrawn from the slave economy and territorial conquest, going a-blueberrying for Wabanaki hand rakers today is a matter of sovereignty and what Gerald Vizenor (Minnesota Chippewa) would call “survivance,” or the “active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion” (1). In the words of William J. Nicholas, Sr. (Governor and Chief, Motahkomikuk Passamaquoddy Community), going a-blueberrying means getting to “live the way that we’re taught. We were taught how we survive … that’s really the inherent part of being sovereign: being able to completely be left alone and not have anything from the outside or anybody from the outside try to change our way of living and dictate how we’re supposed to do things, and that’s our survival” (Voices 00:43:10).
