ROYALTON — Applause rang out inside the Royalton Academy Building Saturday afternoon as John Moody rose in front of a packed audience, but Moody was quick to shush it.

Moody, who runs the Winter Center for Indigenous Traditions in Norwich along with Emily Boles, an Abenaki basket maker and ecologist, was there to deliver an educational program about the history of the Abenaki tribe in the Upper Valley — specifically in Royalton — where there are several Abenaki historic sites “of great antiquity.” 

“There’s two reasons to never clap an Abenaki man,” Moody said to the audience. “The first is that you don’t know what the tool is gonna say.” That conjured laughter.

“The second,” Moody continued, “is that clapping traditionally brings the rain.”

That brought forth a collective throng of “No!” from the crowd, which was unsurprisingly weary of all the rain the Upper Valley’s received this summer.

Over the course of an hour, Moody, who said he has both “Yankee” and Native ancestry, took the audience through a broad history of the Abenaki through four periods of time, starting in the 17th century and winding through the 1970s, in an event presented by the Royalton Historical Society and the Vermont Humanities Council as part of Royalton’s annual Old Home Days celebration. 

He explained that even though archeological findings of Abenaki sites can be traced back some 12,000 years, a lack of artifacts found at some sites can mislead archeologists and others investigating those areas.

“At sacred sites like Calendar One (an Abenaki site in Royalton on Pepperell Road near McIntosh Pond on Dairy Hill) and most special sites in Abenaki country, there’s very few artifacts,” Moody said. “That’s one reason why Abenaki sites are mistaken or missed.”

Boles greeted the crowd by speaking a few phrases in Abenaki, including giving thanks “to the sky” and to the animals and to her ancestors. 

Moody challenged the idea that Vermont was simply wild lands before European settlers arrived in the 18th century.

“The notion that this was just all tree-covered wilderness, (that) we had to hack our lives out of the wilderness, and it was awful,” Moody said. “Nonsense.”

He explained how Arthur Watson Park in Hartford looked the same in 1760, when settlers first arrived, as it does now, noting that the Abenaki cleared the area to make it a grazing field and farming land. He noted that parts of the town of Quechee, near the Quechee Gorge, were also cultivated by the Abenaki and that the “White Pines” found in the area by European settlers in 1760 indicated that it was once the site of a substantial village.

There were around 30,000 recorded Abenaki living in Vermont, New Hampshire and western Maine before nonnatives showed up in the 1600s, Moody said, noting that he suspects that number was probably closer to 50,000. By 1760 that number hovered below 2,000, and it would reach as low as 100 before the 1970s, when the number of Abenaki in the region began to grow again. In spite of that growth, there are no federally recognized tribes in Vermont.

The 2020 U.S. Census reported there being around 8,000 people in Vermont and 10,000 people in New Hampshire who identify as “American Indian” either solely or in combination with other races. Though the number of people identifying as Abenaki and living in Vermont or New Hampshire has steadily grown since the 1970s, Moody said that process of gathering that data is flawed because of people’s preconceived notion of what a Native American can or should look like.

He told a story about how a census-taker visited his home in 2020 and attempted to leave before getting information on the racial background of his wife, Donna Moody, who was Abenaki. Donna, who has since died, had to let the worker know that she wasn’t white.

“Basically people, the dominant society, if you will, the Yankee world, you're telling Indians who they were and if you didn't look like the Mascoma Savings Bank sign or whatever, you couldn't possibly be Indian,” he said.

Today, generally, about one-third of people in every town and village in historic Abenaki territory identify as Abenaki or another Indigenous people, and roughly “15,000 to 50,000 Abenaki people are buried in every town in Vermont and New Hampshire,” Moody said.

The final section of the program was dedicated to talk around preservation of existing Abenaki structures in Royalton, notably “stone chambers” that have begun to collapse because too many people are visiting them.

Kit Hood, who lives off Dairy Hill in South Royalton, came to the event to hear about the stone chambers. She’s visited three of them on Dairy Hill and found the Calendar One site to be in “worse shape” than the other two, she said. 

Moody had mentioned that the chambers may have been used for vegetable storage, which Hood said surprised her. Having gone inside one of them, she was amazed at the size of the stones and wondered how the Abenaki were able to move them around.

“It’s really cool,” Hood said of being inside the chamber. It had to have been “a lot of work because the stones are huge, the size of, at least, the roof of a car.”

Ray Couture can be reached with questions at 1994rbc@gmail.com.

CORRECTION: There are no federally recognized Native American tribes in Vermont. A previous version of this story was incorrect on this point.