Empire, the Maritime Colonies, and the Supplanting of Mi’kma’ki/Wulstukwik, 1780-1820

The Supplanting of Mi'kmak'ki/Wulstukwik 79 along with the absence of support from potential diplomatic allies in France and the United States -ensured that by the 1790s "the Mi'kmaq and other tribal nations on the Atlantic seaboard were painfully aware that the old times were over." 2 Depictions such as these are consistent with the more general historical narrative of an ongoing, far advanced dispossession of Native peoples in eastern North America as a whole.As Timothy J. Shannon understandably commented in a 2007 review of Alan Taylor's The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution, Taylor's study of the partitioning of Iroquoia between British North America and the United States brought out "the same problem that confronts other historians of Native Americans in this period, the sense that we have all heard this story before and we know that it is not going to end well."3 This article will suggest, however, that the supplanting of Mi'kma'ki and Wulstukwik by the Maritime colonies, while certainly entering a critical phase during the waning years of the "long" 18th century, was characterized by a complex and distinctive pattern.4 In this substantial portion of northeastern North America there were discrete though intertwined lines of development in, on the one hand, 2 Harald E.L. Prins, The Mi'kmaq: Resistance, Accommodation, and Survival (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1996), 161-3.Other authors who have put forward similar arguments include Daniel N. Paul, We Were Not the Savages: A Mi'kmaq Perspective on the Collision Between European and Native American Civilizations, 2nd ed.(Halifax: Fernwood, 2000) and, though attributing continuous dispossession to a more extended timespan rather than identifying specific turning points, Jennifer Reid, Myth, Symbol, and Colonial Encounter: British and Mi'kmaq in Acadia, 1700-1867 (Ottawa, ON: University of Ottawa Press, 1995).3 Timothy J. Shannon, review of Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 2006), in New England Quarterly 80, no. 3 (September 2007): 524-6 (quotation on 525). 4 In this article, I have used the terms Mi'kma'ki and Wulstukwik to refer respectively to the territories of the Mi'kmaq and Wulstukwiuk (Maliseet).Following the scheme initially set out in Emerson W. Baker and John G. Reid, The New England Knight: Sir William Phips, 1651-1695 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), xxii, I refer separately to the Wabanaki as a broad definition of ethnicity in the portion of the later State of Maine, extending approximately from the Saco River to the Penobscot River.Also separately identified are the Passamaquoddy who, while closely related to the Wulstukwiuk in cultural terms, occupied a territory that came to straddle the Canada-United States border, and whose population centre shifted south-westwards during the 1780s following pressure from the Loyalist migration into New Brunswick.For a thorough discussion, see William Wicken, "Passamaquoddy Identity and the Marshall Decision," in New England and the Maritime Provinces: Connections and Comparisons, ed.Stephen J. Hornsby and John G. Reid (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005), 53-7.The definitions of ethnic identity in what Bruce Bourque has aptly designated "the Maritime Peninsula" were fluid, and they remain contentious among scholars of various disciplines.Bourque's contribution is crucial in distinguishing those groups that were cultural descendants of the larger grouping originally known as the Etchemin.They included both the Passamaquoddy and those increasingly identified by 18th-century European observers as "Maliseet."See Bruce J. Bourque, "Ethnicity on the Maritime Peninsula, 1600-1759," Ethnohistory 36, no. 3 (Summer 1989): 257-84 as well as Bourque, with contributions by Steven L. Cox and Ruth H. Whitehead, Twelve Thousand Years: American Indians in Maine (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), esp.142-4.Although "Maliseet" is commonly used currently, I have preferred to use the increasingly favoured descriptor "Wulstukwiuk."The term "Wabanaki" raises its own complications.That there were -and are -cultural affinities among the Mi'kmaq, the Etchemin and their successors, and those once known to scholars as the Eastern Abenaki is clear enough.On the last-named term and its drawbacks, see Richard D'Abate and

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