One lifted paddle, the way a man tips his hat. In May 1722 a Wabanaki family came down the Kennebec in a birchbark canoe, the father in the stern with a musket across the gunwales and a baby in a beaded cradleboard on its mother's back, and passed a new English post where a blacksmith was hammering hinges for a storehouse that had no door yet. The blacksmith raised his hammer. The father raised his paddle. Neither spoke. It was a courtesy, and it was a measurement.
A charter sealed in London had already stretched Massachusetts over their country, and English posts were creeping up the rivers from the sea. That summer the fighting began. For three years the Wabanaki fought the militia and rangers of Massachusetts and New Hampshire in a war the English named for William Dummer, who governed Massachusetts through most of it. Its raids and reprisals built to two great blows: the English attack on Norridgewock in August 1724, which killed the Jesuit Sebastien Rale and left the town in ashes, and the fight at Pequawket the next spring, where Captain John Lovewell and the Pequawket leader Paugus both died.
Then came peace talks at Boston and Falmouth, whose English and Wabanaki versions never quite agreed. To the English, the family in the canoe were simply "Eastern Indians." They belonged to five nations, Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet, Mi'kmaq and Abenaki. What, exactly, did those nations believe they had signed?
