Thanks for the pics!
And that would certainly explain my difficulty.
I am Western Abenaki. we call ourselves Aln8bak. No federal recognition in the States but meh, we know who we are and so do Vermonters. I am working on learning the language so my children can grow up fluent. Fortunately there are still one or two elders who are fully fluent and they are working hard to revive the language to keep it alive with the help of a linguistics genius that is pouring his soul into the effort and creating teaching materials that facilitate internalizing it. Cutting edge stuff.
This past generation has seen an explosion in interest in the culture and history, as grandmothers and fathers opened up about their childhood and their grandparents. In many ways we are still a very much fractured people, since every family made the decision to live as a "gypsy" or "river rat" in their homeland, assimilate to avoid death and persecution, or emigrate to the reservation at Odenak in Quebec over the years as the European population grew and, more recently, the eugenic movement in the 30's.
Yup. People like to lump everything together by skin color(and even that varies by Nation in the extreme...) "You speak Indian? (i speak Western Abenaki, and badly.) / You are an Indian? (yes I am)/ You don't look Indian...(You're right, I don't have a strong sioux nose like that guy in Dances with Wolves)/ So Tipis, right?" >_<
It's an uphill battle...
