Mawooshen - Môwosan - Walking Together
A section of Delisle's "Carte du Canada ou de la Nouvelle France, 1703."
A place-based relationship to explore through naming/knowing practices: we are using some early European explorer’s documentary references for contextualization and analysis, so please bear with the generalizations and vagaries. These are historic Western constructs built from incomplete understandings, and not always accurate, but they can be helpful as a starting point for further thought.
Mawooshen is the name attributed at early European contact (late 1500s to early 1600s) to what is today's midcoast Maine - an area from the Saco River (Biddeford) east to the Union River (Ellsworth). These were confederated people in a middle alliance between the Abenaki/Almochiquois to the southwest and the Etchemin/Wolastoqkiyi-Passamaquoddy to the northeast of this region, united primarily to resist the Mi'kmaq/Tarrentine aggression from further northeast. This was episodic Wabanaki inter-community warfare, driven by - among others - divisive European colonial influences and shifting, assymetrical struggles for positionality.
The word Mawooshen (as a Wabanaki dialectic derivation) is usually translated as "people walking together" in the few extant modern scholarly explications that describe the collaborative alliance. In thinking about how this might be spoken in Alnôbaôdwawôgan/Western Abenaki orthography today, the following is suggested:
môw- meaning grouped or together
osa- meaning walk
-n meaning "this action", as a nominalizing form (thank you Jesse Bowman Bruchac)
Combined, these give us the word môwosan - meaning “walking together as a group”, a result that lands quite close to the recorded 'mawooshen'
This process of morphemic and human relationship building demonstrates the idea of the "people of a place" - in this case Môwosan/Mawooshen (the People and the Land) sharing a name/sense of themselves-in-place as identical, or congruent, or integral. Indeed, walking together.
See much more here.