If there’s an atlas of the roads to hell that were paved with good intentions, special mention must be made of the 17th-century Puritan effort to convert New England’s Native Americans to Christianity.

Benefiting from an early harmony between the natives and English colonists, the effort gained substantial ground for decades, largely due to the exertions of the Puritan John Eliot, who made it his life’s work to convert the natives.

Paralleling this cultural encroachment, of course, was the territorial grabbery that was practiced by growing numbers of colonists throughout the century, and that ultimately led to the outbreak of war between Europeans and Native Americans in the 1670s.

A poet and �ֲ���ý faculty member, Robert Strong explores the origins of that devastating and transformative war, known as King Philip’s War, in his latest book, Bright Advent. The book focuses on Eliot; Metacom, aka King Philip, chief of the Wampanoag in Massachusetts; and John Sassamon, a Massachusett who worked with Eliot to translate the Bible into Algonquian, and whose murder begins both Strong’s narrative and the war.

Robert Strong reads “Anne Eliot” from Bright Advent:

A writer should consult period documents before rendering history as poetry, but Strong goes a step further with Bright Advent. The book combines his original poetry with verbatim excerpts from 17th-century documentary materials, notably letters and other writings by Eliot.

Director of national fellowships and a lecturer in English at �ֲ���ý, Strong spoke to us about the use of single quotation marks, the power of Puritan language, and a prayer he wrote for the Big Mac.

What’s your book about?

The book is about the translation of the Bible in a collaborative project between Puritan ministers and native linguists. The attendant missionary work around that project involved a lot of real estate deals, trying to get land for “praying Indian towns” — communities of Christianized Native Americas.

What really was earnest and kindhearted work from John Eliot was contributing to what was essentially genocide of the local native tribe, and in large part helped lead up to King Phillip’s War. So the book is about those tensions.

The book opens with the murder of John Sassamon, which gave the English the excuse for going to war. And then the book goes back in time and follows Sassamon forward through the translation and conversion work, and his own conversion to become a minister in a praying Indian town.

Talk about your use of archival material.

I’ve worked with archival material on and off since I started writing poetry. And I’ve been fascinated with the language of the 17th century, and with the context of this cauldron of the beginnings of America, which involved so much conflict and the intensities of religion, and multiple cultures coming against each other.

There are huge gaps in the archive — we don’t even have the voice of the English women from the 17th century. And so, as a human being and a poet, I know that there’s a huge emotional and human landscape there, and I wanted to figure out what it might be. In creating the book, I used the archival language for a sort of linguistic momentum, to carry beyond the end of that archival page into the actual lives of the Puritans and the natives.

So I invented human relations for them that we don’t get from the archives. Sassamon and Eliot translated and printed the entire Bible together, so I had to describe the friendship that had to be there. And I gave voice to a female Native American who I put in a relationship with Sassamon, and I gave voice to Anne Eliot, John’s wife.

From an editorial standpoint, your treatment of the archival material is unorthodox.

I use single quotes to indicate the archival material as gently as possible. So, some people would say, “Well, you need to cite the material and say exactly where it comes from.” But that would highlight it, and I actually did not want to footnote. So it’s not a scholarly use of material, though the bibliography mentions all the sources.

But one thing I did at my editors’ request was to find a historian to write the introduction. They wanted a historian to weigh in, to say, “Actually, this is a very curious, an intriguing use of source material that raises interesting questions, even in a book of poetry.”

That was Christine DeLucia, who teaches indigenous and colonial histories of the Northeast at Mount Holyoke. She works in part in memory studies, and she has about how King Philip’s War is remembered in the Native American communities of the Northeast today.

How does this book align with your earlier work?

The Wampanoag chief Metacomet depicted in a copy of an engraving by Paul Revere, published in The entertaining history of King Philip’s war, by Thomas Church, 1772. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

My first full-length book is called Puritan Spectacle, and I wrote it coming out of research into Puritan conversion narratives at the Massachusetts Historical Society. It’s a very different book — individual poems, straight poetry, and they don’t make a story. I was looking for the roots of our contemporary consumerist culture in the English language as it first arrived on these shores.

We’ve inherited a style of language that came down across the myths of things like Thanksgiving and the Pilgrims, and those poems infuse it into our contemporary landscape. For example, I have a prayer for Big Macs, a prayer for cheerleaders, a prayer for the mall, and so forth.

When I was doing the research fellowship at the historical society, I was actually the first poet who’d ever gotten this particular fellowship. They didn’t know what to do with me.

There was this night where they would host the research fellows and bring in local historians and people who were interested. You were supposed to read from your work and then talk a little bit. And I read them the “Big Mac Sacrament,” and the look on their faces around the table, I will never forget it.

While I was there, I discovered unpublished letters of John Eliot that appear in Bright Advent. Some of them are his bureaucratic queries and pleading for money to the government of Massachusetts Bay and to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel back in London.

Those letters were so striking both because of their urgent concern for the souls of the Native Americans, and because of this kind of committee-meeting savvy that we’re all familiar with [laughs]. But that’s within the framework of our knowing that his work is contributing toward a war that was eventually just devastating for everyone.

What interests you about 17th-century America?

These are people who are speaking and writing in the same historical and linguistic moment that Shakespeare is. The language is both completely foreign to us and utterly recognizable. The Puritan ministers were so highly educated and articulate, and they had their Hebrew and their Latin.

So their sentences are beautiful, and since most of those sentences are saying something about the beginning of what became America, I find it just to be so powerful and resonant.

You’ve done a few public readings from Bright Advent.

A couple were during the big Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Washington in February. One of those was in a really loud bar in a Korean restaurant.

At these conferences, most of the readings are group readings where you’re one of 10. And I was like, “Wow, what am I going to do?” So I just chose the opening murder scene and screamed it. And so that worked really well! It was a murder scene screamed in a bar.

And back at �ֲ���ý, you read during a {PAUSE} gathering.

It was amazing to read in Gomes Chapel because all the characters in this book are so saturated — both in their actual lives and in the story that I tell — with the pressures and intensity of religious striving. So to read it in the chapel space was really, for me just personally, really intense, after I had spent so much time with these characters.

“John Eliot preaching to the Indians,” a wood engraving published in Ballou’s Pictorial, vol. 10, 1856. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

A portrait of Esther Attean by Maine artist Robert Shetterly, from his “Americans Who Tell the Truth” series.

Harward Center Civic Forums at �ֲ���ý in October afford the opportunity to learn more about the role of immigration in Maine’s economy; and about a historic effort to redress problems created by government policies toward Native American children.

Denise Altvater and Esther Attean, members of the Maine Passamaquoddy Tribe and architects of the Maine Wabanaki–State Child Welfare Truth & Reconciliation Commission, discuss that initiative’s history and prospects at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 1, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

James Tierney, former attorney general of Maine and majority leader of the House of Representatives, gives a talk titled Immigration in Maine: Past and Future at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 20, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

Both presentations are open to the public at no cost as part of the Civic Forum series presented by the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, the �ֲ���ý office that connects the college and the
community in mutually beneficial ways.

A portrait of Denise Altvater by Maine artist Robert Shetterly, from his “Americans Who Tell the Truth” series. Shetterly will introduce Altvater and Esther Attean (shown above) at a Harward Center Civic Forum.

For more information, please call 207-786-6202.

Truth and Reconciliation

The Oct. 1 forum will explore the recent formation of the Maine Wabanaki–State Child Welfare Truth & Reconciliation Commission, the first of its kind in the U.S. The commission was formed in response to the long and little-known history of state child welfare programs forcing the assimilation of Native American children into the dominant culture.

The commission aims to discover the truth about the experiences of Wabanaki people with child welfare programs, and to promote healing and lasting change. The five commissioners were seated last February and their work will continue until June 2015, when they will make recommendations based on their findings.

Joining Altvater and Attean as presenters will be Arla Patch, community engagement coordinator for the Maine-Wabanaki Reconciliation, Engagement, Advocacy, Change and Healing coalition; and Maine artist Robert Shetterly, who will introduce Altvater and Attean. Shetterly included the pair in his portrait series “Americans Who Tell the Truth,” depicting 200 individuals who have addressed issues of social, environmental and economic justice.

Starting in the 1800s, Wabanaki children in Maine were taken by the state from their families and communities and put into boarding schools or foster care to integrate them into the dominant culture. This policy stripped the children of their culture, language, family and community, losses still felt in Maine native communities today.

Immigrants and Maine’s Economic Future

James Tierney.

For the second October forum, �ֲ���ý welcomes Tierney, Maine’s attorney general from 1980 to 1990 and a veteran of the Maine Legislature whose eight years in the House of Representatives included two sessions as majority leader.

With the aging of Maine’s population posing a threat to economic vitality, “we need more people,” Tierney told a University of Maine audience in a landmark 2002 talk about diversity and immigration that has become a standard reference for state and community leaders.

“We must see immigrants as an opportunity,” Tierney said. “California, Texas, New York, Florida, Arizona, Washington — the states that are our country’s engines of economic growth are culturally diverse.”

Tierney now serves as the director of the National State Attorneys General Program at Columbia Law School, where he has taught law since 2000. He also lectures at Harvard Law School and works as a consultant to attorneys general around the country, offering guidance on the effective performance of their office.

Tierney served as special counsel to the attorney general of Florida during the contested and still-controversial 2000 U.S. presidential election.

Chief Oren Lyons. (Larry Palumbo/Coyote Magic)

Chief Oren Lyons, a Native American leader and environmental activist, offers a lecture titled Peace, Power, Righteousness: Environmental Stewardship From a Native Perspective at 7 p.m. Monday, March 3, in the Peter J. Gomes Chapel, 275 College St.

Presented by the Office of Equity and Diversity in cooperation with other offices at �ֲ���ý, the event is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-786-6031.

Lyons, a member of the Onondaga and Seneca nations, is a Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan and a chief of the Onondaga Nation Council of Chiefs of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Haudenosaunee (“People of the Longhouse”).

Lyons attended Syracuse University on an athletic scholarship. A lifelong lacrosse player, he was a standout in the sport at Syracuse, was later elected to the Lacrosse Hall of Fame and today is honorary chairman of the Iroquois Nationals Lacrosse Team.

Graduating Syracuse with a degree in fine arts, Lyons became a successful commercial artist. He later taught at the University of Buffalo, and was named a SUNY Distinguished Service Professor and Professor Emeritus of American Indian Studies.

In 1977, Lyons was a founding member of the Traditional Circle of Elders and Youth, a council that seeks to infuse Native American culture into contemporary cultural and political discourse.

In 1982, he helped establish the Working Group on Indigenous Populations at the United Nations. He is the recipient of the United Nations NGO World Peace Prize.

He serves on the Executive Committee of the Global Forum of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders on Human Survival. Among many other honors, he is a recipient of Sweden’s prestigious Friends of the Children Award, along with his colleague, the late Nelson Mandela.

Lyons was the subject of Oren Lyons the Faithkeeper, a 1991 PBS documentary by Bill Moyers, and appeared in the 2007 documentary The 11th Hour, a documentary on the state of the natural world and climate change, produced by Leonardo DiCaprio.

He is the author, co-author or editor of several books and has illustrated a number of children’s books.

Here’s a list of the �ֲ���ý and related offices and programs making Lyons’ visit possible:

The departments of history and athletics; the environmental studies program; the Harward Center for Community Partnerships; the offices of Intercultural Education and of Sustainability; the Learning Associates Program; the Multifaith Chaplaincy; and the �ֲ���ý Group of the Wabanaki-�ֲ���ý-Bowdoin-Colby Collaborative.

Bruce Bourque, senior lecturer in anthropology at �ֲ���ý and curator of archaeology at the Maine History Museum, talks about his new book, The Swordfish Hunters: The History and Ecology of an Ancient American Sea People.

Produced by Phyllis Graber Jensen with Doug Hubley.

A panel discussion and lecture at �ֲ���ý College on Feb. 11 will focus on the material culture of the Wabanaki people, the Native Americans that include Maine’s Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Micmac and Maliseet tribes.

The panel presentation Artistic Lives — Living Art: Wabanaki Basketmakers begins at 4:15 p.m. in the Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk). A Basket Is a Song Made Visible, a keynote talk by Native American scholar Clara Sue Kidwell, follows at 7 p.m. in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

These events are made possible by a Colby-�ֲ���ý-Bowdoin Mellon Collaborative Faculty Enhancement grant. For more information, please call 207-753-6933.

As a program titled Learning and Teaching with Wabanaki Culture, these events will examine Wabanaki material culture as a means for integrating aspects of indigenous thought and practice into a curriculum.

The program is part of a larger effort to increase awareness of Native American and Wabanaki issues at �ֲ���ý, and to promote collaboration between the campus and Wabanaki communities.

With panelists including basketmakers Jeremy Frey, a member of the Passamaquoddy tribe, and Richard Silliboy of the Micmacs, the afternoon discussion will explore what material culture means to the Wabanakis and the roles that material culture can play in intercultural education.

Kidwell, director of the American Indian Center at the University of North Carolina, will address Native American knowledge systems, and scientific thought and practice.

She is an enrolled member of the White Earth Chippewa tribe and is also of Choctaw descent. Prior to coming to North Carolina she was director of the Native American studies program and professor of history at the University of Oklahoma in Norman.

Her publications include A Native American Theology (Orbis Books, 2001), co-authored with Homer Noley and George Tinker; Native American Studies (University of Edinburgh Press, 2005) co-authored with Alan Velie; and The Choctaws in Oklahoma: From Tribe to Nation, 1855-1970 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2007).

She received a bachelor’s degree in letters and a master’s and doctorate in the history of science from the University of Oklahoma. Before joining the faculty there in 1995, she served as assistant director of cultural resources at the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution.

Kidwell previously taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Dartmouth College and the University of Minnesota, among other institutions.

An associate professor of anthropology and coordinator of Native American research at the University of Maine, Darren Ranco discusses the influence of Native American tribes on environmental legislation in a �ֲ���ý College lecture at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 17, in Room 204 of Carnegie Science Hall, 44 Campus Ave.

A member of the Penobscot Indian Nation, Ranco presents the talk The Clean Air Mercury Rule and Indian Tribes: Sovereignty, Subsistence and Participation. Made possible by the Mellon Innovation Fund at �ֲ���ý, in conjunction with a faculty project researching prehistoric conditions in Penobscot Bay, the event is open to the public and refreshments will be available. For more information, please call 207-786-6490.

Ranco’s lecture will examine how tribes in Maine and the nation commented on and participated in the Clean Air Mercury Rule proposed by the Bush administration in 2004 and 2005, and how these comments reveal environmental values and concerns of tribes that relate to sovereignty, subsistence rights and practices, and forms of involvement in federal rule-making.

Ranco’s research focuses on methods that U.S. indigenous communities, particularly in Maine, use to resist environmental degradation and protect their cultural resources. Those methods include traditional approaches to diplomacy; and raising awareness of ways in which society’s attempts to equalize rights or access to resources may, in fact, have the opposite effect, depriving groups or individuals of their own, often minority, cultures.

Ranco teaches classes on indigenous intellectual property rights, research ethics, environmental justice and tribal governance. He has a particular interest in how better research relationships can be created among universities, native and non-native researchers, and indigenous communities. He has a master’s degree in environmental law from Vermont Law School and a doctorate in social anthropology from Harvard.

Professor of history, American studies and American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota, David Chang presents the talk Borderlands in a World at Sea: Konkow Indians, Native Hawaiians and South Chinese in Global and National Spaces, 1860s-1880s.

The annual Tangney Lecture is sponsored by the Charles and Virginia Tangney Fund and the history department at �ֲ���ý, and is open to the public free of charge. For more information, please call Associate Professor of History Joseph Hall at 207-786-6462.

A historian of intersectional race and ethnicity in the United States, studies the histories of American Indian and Native Hawaiian people. His book The Color of the Land (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), argues for the central place of struggles over land ownership in the history of racial and national construction by Creeks, African Americans and whites in the Creek Nation and eastern Oklahoma.

He is currently working on a long-range research project that draws on the archive of Hawaiian-language sources in order to reveal Native Hawaiians’ perspectives on the nature of the 19th-century world and their place in it.

Featuring three panelists, Monday’s symposium is titled Latin American Indigenous Movements in the 21st Century: Frontiers of Activism. It takes place in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave., and is sponsored by the Mellon Innovation Fund, the environmental studies program, the anthropology department, the social science division and the Multicultural Center at �ֲ���ý.

Tuesday’s roundtable discussion is titled Indigenous Environmental Activism Among Near and Distant Neighbors and includes two of the Monday panelists and two Native Americans from Maine. It will explore forms and roles of native environmentalism and its engagements with Western environmental policies. This takes place in the Benjamin Mays Center, 95 Russell St., and is sponsored by the Mellon Innovation Fund, the environmental studies program and the Multicultural Center.

The programs have been put together by �ֲ���ý College faculty including a group associated with the Latin American Studies general education concentration at the college. General education concentrations, or GECs, part of the college’s core curriculum, are groupings of courses oriented around a common theme and often drawn from diverse academic departments and programs.

Monday’s panel is composed of three activists involved in indigenous politics in Latin America: Patricia Gualinga, Victor Montejo and Trevor Stevenson ’00.

Gualinga is a member of the Kichwa indigenous community of Sarayaku in Amazonian Ecuador. She has spent years leading the community against oil exploration on indigenous lands, a process that has put Sarayaku in the international spotlight. Gualinga has also ensured that women’s voices are heard in the movement for indigenous rights and environmental justice.

Her efforts have taken her around the world and led to collaborations with non-governmental organizations in the United States and Ecuador, as well as participation within the Ecuadorian government and CONAIE, Ecuador’s national indigenous federation.

Montejo is a Jakaltek Maya from the Northwestern Highlands of Guatemala, where he was a schoolteacher before coming to the United States. He fled Guatemala in 1982, after his brother, also a teacher, was assassinated by government soldiers and his own name appeared on death lists.

For the last eight years Montejo has chaired the Native American Studies Department at the University of California, Davis. In 2003, he gave up a Fulbright grant to run for Congress in Guatemala, and was elected in December of that year. He is the author of several books.

Stevenson is originally from Wyoming, where he was involved in environmental and indigenous issues. He has worked with indigenous movements in Latin America for more than a decade and has extensive experience in coordination between indigenous peoples and local governments and NGOs. He has served as the executive co-director of the Washington, D.C.-based Amazon Alliance for Indigenous and Traditional Peoples and their Environment.

Gualinga and Stevenson will join two members of Maine Wabanaki tribes in Tuesday’s event. Brenda Commander is serving her fourth term as chief of the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians. She is overseeing tribal efforts to restore the Meduxnekeag River, a tributary of the St. John River that flows through tribal lands. Through partnerships with private and government agencies in Canada and the United States, the tribe is improving the water quality of the river for cultural and environmental reasons.

John Banks has been director of the Penobscot Nation’s Department of Natural Resources since the department’s founding in 1980. During that time he has overseen the implementation of an extensive water quality testing program for the Penobscot River to ensure that the river complies with state and federal clean water standards.

In addition, Banks and his department have played an important role in the newly formed Penobscot River Restoration Trust, which is raising money to pay for a removal of dams that would reopen 1,000 miles of river habitat along the Penobscot.