He Comes Flying

Have you ever heard of Peter Paul Wz8khalain? Probably not. But over the last several years, as I've become more familiar with his life story, the journeys he took, and the work he did during that complex span of some 90 years, I've come to consider him one of indigenous America's most fascinating early writers and publishers. also was a Native son of New York State, born in the Adirondacks on the Raquette River around 1800. If he is so interesting, you may ask, why is he so little known? Three reasons for that. First is that his books, first appearing in print around 1830, were written entirely in the Abenaki language. Second is that he published from St. Francis (now known as Odanak), a Reserve (the Canadian equivalent of a reservation) in Quebec. Third is that few copies of his published books survived--for reasons I'll explain later in this story. Wz8khilain. That name of his, one of the many names he was known by--including Peter Masta, Pial Pol, and Pierre Paul Osunkherhine--means either Birds are Flying or He Who Comes by Flying in the Abenaki language he so loved. And fly he did, first to Moor's School at Dartmouth College, which he attended from 1822 to 1829. An unusual accomplishment for a Native American in the early 19 th century, but not a unique one. Both Harvard and Dartmouth were founded with Indian Education as central missions. The money to start Dartmouth, in fact, came from the efforts of Samson Occom, a Mohegan Christian minister who raised over 12,000 pounds to fund an school during his 1766-1767 preaching tour of England. Though we have no birth certificate or papers specifying his percentage of blood to identify Peter Paul as an Abenaki Indian, it's a good bet that he was, based on the fact that there were--and still are--many Abenaki families in the Adirondacks, a place where Algonquin and Iroquois people have lived and hunted for countless generations. (Such back and forth travel between Canada and the northern regions of New York and New England is a long established pattern--even today, despite border restrictions that treaties say were never supposed to apply to the first Americans.) Peter Paul went from Dartmouth to the St. Francis Reserve in 1829. There he established a Protestant church and an English language school and began his publishing. was accepted at St. Francis, though not by everyone, as an integral part of the Abenaki community. The problem he faced was that the first Christian missionaries who had come to St. Francis in the 17th century were Catholic. It's hard for some people today to understand just how wide the gulf between Catholics and Protestants was in Canada during the 19th and much of the 20th century. Close to outright warfare. That Wz8khilain was introducing Protestantism to St. Francis made him the enemy of the true faith. So it was that the Catholic priest made a point to go about St. Francis obtaining every copy he could of the three books Peter Paul published in editions of about 500 each--to burn them. Despite that, a few copies of Peter Paul's books survived. So, too, did that divide between Catholics and Protestants--reflected in the two surviving main clan divisions of Bear and Turtle. My old friend Maurice Dennis/Mdawelasis, who worked for years at the Enchanted Forest in Old Forge, New York, before returning to spend his last years on his home reserve, explained it to me: Up at Odanak, he said, Turtles remain Catholics, and the Bears, Protestant. Peter Paul did not remain at St. Francis, despite the fact that he married the daughter of the head chief Simon Obomsawin. Perhaps, the animosity was too much for him. For whatever reasons, he eventuallyleft the reserve, going with his family to Port Huron, Michigan, sometime between 1858 and 1861. There he died in 1890. I've found no record that indicates he continued writing or publishing--though I hope that more work of his remains out there and may still turn up some day. …

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