Wantastegok - the Language and the Land

“The secrets of our culture lie hidden within our language”
-Joseph Elie Joubert, Abenaki elder, teacher, and author

The opening to a chapter co-authored by Joe Rivers and Rich Holschuh, in the newly-published (December 2020) book “Print Town: Brattleboro’s Legacy of Words.” A special undertaking of the NEH-funded Brattleboro Words Project, the chapter is an honoring and acknowledgement of Indigenous presence and story-making in this place for 12,000 years, long before Brattleboro’s 275 years of existence and its own heritage of authorship and publishing. Much respect is owed to these stories of relationship, nurtured in the meeting of land, water, and sky in this place known as Wantastegok. The language of this landscape, known today as Alnôbaôdwawôgan (known to linguists as Western Abenaki) - “the means by which the People speak” - is a result of sustained Indigenous being-in-place, and it is finding new voices in a landscape that recognizes and welcomes its return.