Abenaki

Before there was a New York, though, there were the people who lived around the lake, and they had a name for something in it.

The Abenaki, whose territory included the eastern shore and the north end, are the ones most often cited, and the name usually given is Tatauasgaq, which gets translated as something like Great Serpent.

The Mohawk on the western side are sometimes credited with a horned serpent tradition tied to the lake, but when you go looking for where that claim comes from, it tends to lead back to a modern book rather than to a Mohawk speaker.

What I can say with some confidence is that both nations have serpent figures in their stories and that the modern name for the lake monster got attached to the Abenaki word by people writing about Champ in the last fifty years.

Whether the Abenaki themselves ever pointed at the lake and used that word for a particular animal is a question that has never truly been answered.

Then there's Samuel de Champlain who put his name on the lake in sixteen oh nine and who according to nearly every tourist pamphlet and half the books on the subject saw the monster that same year.

But he didn't actually see a monster.

Maybe not.

Now, it's worth noting that Abenaki legends from the people who occupied the region that would become known as Maine also mentioned stories of the Ndemkinowet, if I'm pronouncing that right, which I'm probably not.

It's a half-fish, half-human creature with a small childlike face that's been known to go after women bathing in the ocean.

By all accounts, this is basically a merman.

The witness here, Mr. Mitten, may not have heard of the Abenaki version, so he used the term he knew.

Merman.

It's interesting that a half-human, half-fish story pops up in multiple cultures.

Perhaps.

And, um, there was a native American, um, Chief Greylock.

And there's a lot of rich history and culture with the Abenaki Native Americans in this very area, right? At Little Rock Pond, there are unnamed archaeological sites.

I'll leave it at that because I think the less people that go in there digging around, the better.

But there's a lot of culture and history to that area.

Yeah.

Um, so you see lots of fluorescent yellow areas, right? So there were a couple of different triangulations that I had done on that particular map.

I just didn't want to do them on separate and where things overlaid I highlighted because Going back to, and I don't know if I want to say this or not, but I'm going anyways, going back to the Abenaki Native American culture, there's some symbolism and one particular one that stands out to me as the wisdom curl.

And if you look at the wisdom curl and then you look at ways things are triangulated, they almost look similar in nature.

Precisely.

And the article makes a very sharp point here about the native nations themselves, the Odawa, the Potawatomi, the Abenaki.

They were absolutely not French proxies.

No, not at all.

It became necessary, as their work was extended with each discovery of new lands to the west and southwest, to divide it into seven great centers of activity, each with several missionaries, whose superior reported every year to the superior general of the order in Quebec what had been done in his own field.

These various missions were: that to the Abenakis of Acadia, the name given by the French to northeastern Maine, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, and of Cape Breton Island; that to the Montagnais Indians, as the tribes of the lower St. Lawrence and the Saguenay were called, Tadoussac being the central station.

The several missions at Quebec, Montreal, Three Rivers, and in that region were united under common control.

The mission to the Hurons between Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay was, during much of its thirty-five years of existence, the most dangerous of all because of the stolid barbarism of these cousins of the Iroquois, and later because the Hurons were frequently raided, and at last almost annihilated, by the Long House, a troublous period in which seven of the missionaries lost their lives in the work.

Here they tarried for a time, for this was Marquette's old mission home.

Father Gabriel Druyet, one of the oldest of the Jesuit missionaries and Marquette's instructor at Three Rivers, was now in charge of the work at the Sioux.

For over twenty years had Druyet been engaged in ministering to savages all the way from the Abenakis in Maine to the Ottawas and Hurons on Lake Superior.

He is a familiar character in New England history because in 1650 he went as an agent of the French to visit the Puritans of eastern Massachusetts and suggest to them a union between New France and New England against the Iroquois.