Wawenock Myth Texts from Maine / Forty-third Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1925-26, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1928, pages 165-198

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Forty-third Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1925-1926, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1928, pages 165-198
The texts are published with the permission of the Division of Anthropology, National Museum of Canada
BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY
FORTY-THIRD ANNUAL REPORT
PLATE 13
FRANÇOIS NEPTUNE, THE LAST SPEAKER OF WAWENOCK (1912)
WAWENOCK MYTH TEXTS FROM MAINE By Frank G. Speck
It is one of the laments of ethnology that the smaller tribes of the northern coast of New England faded from the scene of history before we were able to grasp the content of their languages and culture. At this late day practically all have dwindled below the power of retaining the memory of their own institutions—their link with the past. Nevertheless, some few groups along the coast have maintained existence in one form or another down to the present. In regions somewhat more remote, the tribes of the Wabanaki group, hovering within the shelter of the northeastern wilderness, successfully struggled through the trials of the transition period, preserved their oral inheritance, and even, to a considerable degree, the practices of their early culture. Here on native soil still dwell the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy. On the western and southern boundaries of Maine the Wabanaki bands escaped extinction only by fleeing to Canada, where their descendants now live at the village of St. Francis. Of the tribal names included in this group, however, one in particular, the Wawenock, has long been reckoned among the obsolete, though several times the suggestion had appeared in print that the Indians residing at Becancour, Province of Quebec, might be its survivors. In 1912 my interest in possibilities of the sort culminated in the intention to follow up this source myself. The results were extremely gratifying, for during the winter’s visit traces were uncovered of those eternal values of native language and tradition, which happily were still preserved in the memory of François Neptune (pl. 13), one of the Wawenock men. My object in the following pages is to present part of the literary material obtained from him, to which I have prefixed a sketch of the tribe’s history.