Abenaki elder Jeanne Brink, who worked to preserve Abenaki culture in Vermont, died earlier this month at the age of 80.
Brink grew up in Berlin and spent most of her life in Washington County. She said in a 1991 interview that while she always knew she was Abenaki as a kid, and was proud of it, she didn’t pay attention to it until later in life.
“Growing up, she was taught to assimilate to the American culture,” said Brink’s daughter, Jeannette Gray.
Brink did get exposure to Abenaki language and traditions through her grandmother, Elvine Obomsawin Royce, and other relatives, who would make baskets and share family stories.
One such story dated back to the French and Indian War. The anthropologist Gordon Day recorded Brink’s grandmother's account, passed down to her by relatives, of Roger’s Raid, on Oct. 4, 1759.
In this version, a young girl warned everyone about the colonial attack in what today is Odanak in Quebec. This allowed families to flee, which contradicts Robert Rogers’ version of events, in which the village was annihilated.
A little over a century after that raid, Brink’s great grandfather, Simon Obomsawin, started traveling from Odanak to Thompson’s Point in Charlotte to sell baskets and other crafts during the summer. By the early 20th century, he lived along Lake Champlain with his children, including Elvine, whom Brink spent time with growing up.
As an adult, according to Gray, Brink brought her own children to Lake Champlain in the summertime. She would take the family blackberry picking, and they would play competitive rounds of the vocabulary game Boggle.
“She was very intelligent,” Gray said. “She was very proud of the fact that she was the first of her family to graduate with a college education.”
It was after marrying her husband Doug and toward the end of raising three children — Jeannette, Jim and John — that Brink got her associate’s degree in administrative assistance, her bachelor’s degree in liberal arts and her master’s degree in Native American Studies, all at Vermont College of Norwich University.
Brink jokingly asked her grandchildren to call her “Doctor Grandma” after she received an honorary doctorate from Middlebury College in 2018 for her “commitment to preserving the culture of her people.”
That cultural preservation took many forms. Vermont newspaper clippings from the late 1980s through the early 2000s announced Brink’s Abenaki storytelling and an art exhibit. She also apprenticed under Odanak basketmaker Sophie Nolett before taking on her own basketmaking apprentices.
In 1990, Brink co-wrote Alnôbaôdwa!: A Western Abenaki Language Guide with Day, the anthropologist. After Day died in 1993, Brink, with help from his family, completed his work on the first Abenaki to English and English to Abenaki dictionaries in 1994 and 1995.
“She kind of felt like it was full circle,” said Brink’s grandson, Jerrad Pacatte. “Dr. Day had done his anthropological research with Elvine Obomsawin Royce, my great-great grandmother. And so I think it was a really special thing that my grandmother was able to work with him on these really important publications.”
Another full-circle moment: Brink collaborated with author Marge Bruchac to share Elvine Obomsawin Royce’s story about Rogers’ Raid that Day recorded. The Vermont Folklife Center published it in 2006 under the title Malian’s Song.
Around that same time, Gov. Jim Douglas appointed Brink as a member of the new Vermont Commission on Native American Affairs in conjunction with a short-lived piece of legislation providing state recognition to Abenaki peoples in Vermont.
That legislation — and the makeup of the commission — unraveled before the state recognized four groups as Abenaki tribes in 2011 and 2012. The government of the nation where Brink’s ancestors originated — Odanak First Nation — has consistently and vocally opposed this state recognition.
Pacatte, Brink’s grandson, said his grandmother didn’t like this conflict. She belonged to both the Vermont state-recognized tribe the Abenaki Nation of Missisquoi, and she also had a 2002-dated citizenship card from Odanak First Nation.
Her attitude, according to her grandson, was: “Let us not be distracted in our greater goal of recording and preserving and sharing the history and culture of our people.”
Brink’s main worry, he said, was erasure. And he said she wanted to empower people with the tools to learn where they came from.
Her thinking, according to Pacatte, was, “If not me, then who? Who will pass the torch?”
Pacatte has taken up that torch. He recorded interviews with Brink in her later years that he wants to transcribe and preserve.
He is also holding close his personal memories of his grandmother: the way she always had a Diet Coke with lime in hand; her oversized 1990s glasses, and how the vibrant color on her manicured nails would flash as she wove baskets.
“She also was the best blueberry pancake maker in the world,” he said. “The day after she passed away, I made blueberry pancakes, just to kind of feel like she — like her presence was there with me.”
Brink died on Aug. 5 in Madisonville, Tennessee.
