About Our Generations Blog

The  territory we now call “Vermont” has been home to Abenaki people for  millennia, including the Sokoki and Cowasuck along the Connecticut River  Valley, and the Missisquoi and Winooski in the Champlain Valley, among  others. During the French and Indian Wars, Vermont's Indigenous communities faced incursions from the Mohawk to the west, while also  taking in refugees from the south and east. After 1700, there were also  close relationships with the Saint Francis Abenaki mission village in  the north.

Along  Bell Brook in Splinterville, generations of Greenfield–Milton families  shaped a shared legacy of black-ash basketry. Among them, the Hill  family stands as the earliest documented bearer of that tradition,  though written records of their lives are scarce. By following the few  surviving traces—along with the memories preserved within our local  community—we’ve pieced together the story shared here. We welcome any  details your family may hold about Sam Hill and the network of families  who carried forward Greenfield–Milton’s basket-making tradition until  the turn of the 20th century. 

The  first contacts between Native Americans and European settlers were  often ones of friendship and sharing. The Native people of the Americas  appear to have always shown a willingness to welcome and even adopt  outsiders. To this day, ceremonies in which we make new relatives  through adoption are of deep importance to many of the more than four  hundred indigenous tribal nations. Most often, adopting an unrelated  person—as a son or daughter, as a father or mother or grand-parent—was  done within one's tribe. Yet people from other tribes were also freely  adopted into the tribe itself. 

Native America Calling

Monday, November 10, 2025 – Vermont tribes defend their identity against scrutiny from across the Canadian border

GUESTS

Chief Rick O’Bomsawin (Odanak First Nation), Chief of the Abenaki Council of Odanak

Chief Don Stevens (Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation)

Margaret Bruchac (Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation), professor emerita of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania

On October 14, 2025, the Abenaki Council of Odanak released a 731-page ge-

nealogical report claiming to prove that Vermont Abenaki tribal leaders have no

Indigenous ancestry. The report, allegedly directed by Dr. Darryl Leroux and rep-

resenting ”two years of forensic genealogical research,” purports to document

12,043 ancestors across 8 individuals from 7 family lines, concluding they are

”99.9% European” with no valid claim to Abenaki identity.

The  four, State-recognized Abenaki tribes of Vermont appear often in the pages of newspapers in Vermont and New Hampshire. They are known for hosting cultural events; excellence at crafts practiced from pre-contact times; keeping the language intact and bringing it to the people;  storytelling and histories; scholarly research — all of the elements of  an old, yet thriving culture. The Abenaki of Vermont have been  practicing these skills for generations; from before Vermont declared  wrongly, in 1791, that Vermont and New Hampshire had no more Indigenous  people.