Paul Pouliot is the Sag8mo, or the principal male speaker, for the Cowasuck Band of the Pennacook-Abenaki People, headquartered in Alton, New Hampshire. His wife and research partner Denise Pouliot is the Sag8moskwa, the principal female speaker for the Band. They are also the corporate officers for the Band’s non-profit organizations: COWASS North America (CNA) and The Abenaki Nation of Vermont. Through CNA, the Pouliots sponsored the founding of the Indigenous New Hampshire Collaborative Collective (INHCC), a network of people and organizations researching the precolonial and colonial natural and cultural history of New Hampshire, with the objective of understanding the state’s history, heritage, and ecology from an Indigenous perspective.
I grew up in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, and spent most of my youth fishing and hunting. I was always in the outdoors, either fishing on Cape Cod or hunting in the woods for upland game. The Abenaki-Pennacook are watershed people, and I always felt most at home being close to the water or in the forest. In school, I was a total geek. I was really into the sciences, especially chemistry. My aspiration in high school was to go to space. I wanted to join the Air Force because my father was a bomber pilot during World War II, but it was the time of the Vietnam conflict era, and my father did not want that for me.
So instead, I got my degree at the University of Massachusetts in mechanical engineering. I went into the New England energy industry and worked with gas and electric companies. This was when the EPA was just getting started, and there were issues related to compliance with environmental regulations. Utilities were always improving the power plants, and I did project management work decommissioning coal-fired facilities. Over the years, there were several consolidations and mergers of energy companies happening, and I was offered early retirement in the early 2000s during one of those events.
I wanted to get into more holistic work, and I wanted to do more within the Indigenous community. I started working with the Cowasuck Band in Massachusetts in the late 1980s, and was eventually elected to the position of Sag8mo, or the principal speaker for the Band.
Denise has been with me since the start as a Cowasuck Band citizen and a corporate officer for our non-profit organizations, and we’ve been a husband-and-wife research team since 2008. She didn’t spend time hunting and fishing growing up, but she did Indigenous multi-media crafting, such as basket weaving. We both grew up in a time where our families did not want to identify as Indigenous. After World War II, nobody wanted to be Indigenous, or different; everybody was now an American. Our family gatherings were still tribal in nature. Privately, my family would say, “Don’t do any more Indian stuff.” In the social landscape of the 1950s, if you could pass for being white, it was a lot easier to live without conflict.
I always wanted to get back closer to the center of our homelands, in New Hampshire. In 2008, we moved our headquarters to Alton, New Hampshire, and we got involved with the University of New Hampshire (UNH). Initially some of the work pertained to responding to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to repatriate UNH Indigenous collections cultural artifacts. At the same time, federal grants started to encourage collaborations with Indigenous communities. Some of it had to do with the convergence of Western science and Indigenous knowledge to create in-depth research. The National Science Foundation (NSF) recognized that UNH was involved with us as an Indigenous community and that spurred the interest in the convergence of knowledge within research, which expanded the role of the Indigenous New Hampshire Collaborative Collective (INHCC).
The INHCC was a way of getting people together around research: bringing in students and getting academics out of their academic and institutional silos. Representatives from government agencies and non-profits started to come to our meetings and said, “We’ve got some ideas, what do you think?” This also helped us to create the Native American and Indigenous Studies minor at UNH by getting several faculty members together and thinking about how Indigenous knowledge comes into a field of study. This minor is not based solely on anthropology or archeology, but also in history, ecology, forestry, public health, public policy, law, and psychology.
Forestry and forest research became a part of the INHCC program when a U.S. Forest Service forester, John Neely, approached us and said he was interested in the Indigenous use of fire for forest management in the White Mountains. In recent history, there was no use of Indigenous fire management in this area, and there are projections that the White Mountains could really become a tinder box with climate change. The idea was to look at historical data on how often past Indigenous people controlled the forest through fire. It took us back to when Samuel de Champlain was exploring the northeastern coast. There were descriptions and drawings of Indigenous communities where forests were burnt and highly managed. Some areas were wild and others were cultivated to be like open park landscapes.
We found colonial period records saying things like, “Those damn Indians are burning again and the smoke is coming back towards us.” The problem was we couldn’t determine how often these fires were lit and at what time of year and in what conditions. We narrowed in on the Ossipee Mountains, because there were interesting Indigenous trails documented by Chester Price in the 1950s. One of these trails ended at Mount Shaw, which is a collapsed volcano. John Neely found that these trails ended where there are volcanic lithic tool resources, as well other Indigenous food and material resources, like blueberry barrens and red pine stands. Indigenous people use the pitch from red pine trees to make water-proof birchbark canoes and containers. All of these pyrophytic species are improved with fire, because it keeps other species from encroaching. John, Denise, and I were interested in researching precolonial times, but we couldn’t find any stumps or trees from before the 1600s to do dendrochronology research. We realized we should look at bog cores for indications of fire, because by analyzing carbon deposit layers created by fire debris it is possible to go back farther in time.
Bog cores are a repository for history because you can determine the timeline for fire events and what plants were burnt. Within INHCC we were able to bring UNH, the U.S. Forest Service, and other forestry experts together to look at bog cores from areas of interest near ancient Saco River Indigenous settlements. We’re waiting to hear the results of this analysis.
This kind of research has opened up more opportunities for collaboration. Katie Glover, who was at UMaine and is now at Stanford University, took the lead to create a detailed and historical “white paper” about Indigenous fire usage for forestry fire management from the paleo-times. Since 2008, we’ve also been working with Dr. Megan Howey, an archaeologist at UNH, and she has recently published a book on our collaborative archaeological research in the Great Bay area of New Hampshire (The Shock of Colonialism in New England: Fragments from a Frontier). It covers a lot of geophysical analysis back to the time of the receding glacier. These post-glacial studies can seem really geeky, but there’s actually a great story to tell!
Denise and I also do smaller scale agroforestry and rewilding work, things that are more hands-on, carried out by local groups. Often this type of work is with small, local groups, but we also work with organizations like Southeastern Land Trust and The Nature Conservancy. Most often our work is related to “Indigenizing” some aspect of their landscapes, such as providing Abenaki names for the flora and trails.
Learning about all this history, how to see it on the land, is a learning curve for us as well. In our oral traditions and language, we speak about many strange things. What we’re trying to figure out is: how much of this came from paleo time periods? In our language, we have the words for extinct Ice Age paleo-megafauna, such as mastodon, bison, and camel. We had to have some exposure to them. Learning about these things is amazing – what we can observe now, what our oral history has to say about the past, and what Western Science can prove to be true.
There’s a lot more interest in including Indigenous research now. We’re the traditional Indigenous knowledge advisors for the Convergent Arctic Research Perspectives and Education Research program at UNH. We have partnered with Arctic Indigenous communities in Sweden and Alaska for climate change research. The research is expanding; I often say in reality we’re the Indigenous knowledge keepers, but most often we play the role as “the cheerleaders” for our many Western science expert partners. I can’t do eDNA research, plant pollen identification, radio-carbon dating, or atomic absorption spectrometry. I do not have the access to these research methods or the education to analyze the results. What we say is: “Please find or look into this. Our oral traditions say this, so maybe there’s something more here.” We never thought we would be involved in this level of research. The excitement of learning more is the most meaningful part. It’s so fascinating when we get new information – and it confirms something we heard about in our oral traditions, but didn’t have proof of it previously.
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