New Ethnography Study about Maine's Wabanaki Indians Available Online

The first-ever maritime cultural history of Wabanaki Indians in the Gulf of Maine, with a focus on the Mount Desert Island and Penobscot Bay area, is now available for download. Researched and written by Dr. Harald Prins and Bunny McBride, Asticou’s Island Domain: Wabanaki Peoples at Mount Desert Island 1500-2000 was commissioned by Acadia National Park in cooperation with the Abbe Museum and Maine’s four Wabanaki Indian nations.

Native Americans have inhabited Maine’s coast for more than 10,000 years. Today the state's four indigenous tribal nations—Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Maliseet, and Micmac—are known collectively as the Wabanaki ("People of the Dawn"). Acadia National Park lies in the center of the ancestral Wabanaki homeland.

Since its completion at the end of 2007, the National Park Service and Acadia National Park have distributed more than 150 copies of Asticou’s Island Domain to various libraries, scholars, and other interested individuals, as well as to each of Maine’s tribal nations. The National Park Service has just published a digital version on its history website. You can access the document from the Acadia National Park link listed here.