Join us for a discussion of how 500 years of colonization has impacted the Abenaki peoples of the northeast.
The "People of the Dawnland" (Abenaki/Wabanaki) of the Northeast are the first Indigenous peoples in North America to have had contact with Europeans. In this presentation, Anne Jennison examines how European colonization of North America impacted generations of Abenaki/Wabanaki people and highlights the ways in which the Abenaki/Wabanaki peoples have acted as agents of their own change through education, self-advocacy, efforts to revitalize their languages and traditional arts, and by working with archeologists, anthropologists, and scientists to recover and reveal more about their history and traditional knowledge.
Anne Jennison is a traditional Native American storyteller and historian of European and Abenaki heritage. While Anne's storytelling skills have been polished by more than 30 years of experience sharing Indigenous lesson stories with audiences of all kinds, she also believes that her growth and development as a human being has been deeply influenced by internalizing the content of the Northeastern lesson stories that she tells. With master’s degrees in both Storytelling and History, Anne brings a wealth of cultural and historical knowledge to enrich her retelling of timeless Northeast Woodlands Native American stories.
Additionally, Anne is the current Chair of the NH Commission on Native American Affairs, a member of the the Indigenous NH Collaborative Collective, an affiliate faculty member for the University of New Hampshire Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) Minor, and a co-creator of the "People of the Dawnland" interpretive exhibit about the Abenaki/Wabanaki peoples at Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, NH. Anne continues to act as a consultant for the museum’s ongoing Abenaki Heritage Initiative - a plan to develop and sustain exhibits and events at Strawbery Banke Museum that focus on the history and culture of the Abenaki, Indigenous peoples of New Hampshire and the Northeast, both past and present.
This program is shared in collaboration with Amesbury Public Library and is funded by the Amesbury Public Library Charitable Trust.
If you are interested in this program, you may also be interested in Native American Repatriation & Civil Rights- NAGPRA and the Peabody Institute of Archaeology on March 20th.