Study Leader Profile: David Stuart-Smith
The Adventures in Learning Curriculum Committee had long been hoping to offer a course on Native American Indians when news was received through the adult education pipeline that there was a “great” course on Indian history and culture being taught at New England College by an historian who is himself of Indian descent. Contact was quickly made; and David Stuart-Smith this fall will lead a four-week course titled “History and Culture of New England's Native Americans.”
David has spent more than thirty years researching New Hampshire Indians. In addition to the culture and history of the New Hampshire Indians, David's course will include what has been learned from the anthropological and archeological studies of these people. His experience working in Maine at the 1628 archeological site of the Plymouth trading post on the Kennebec River sparked his interest in the Indians of that period. His own ancestry goes “way back,” he says, but he associates himself now with the Penacook tribe.
When the English first came to America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they were woefully unprepared for life on the frontier. The Indians reached out and helped the early settlers - mostly young men - indentured usually for seven years - who were brought over to clear the forests. In his lectures David will stress the importance of oral tradition – the lore that was passed from generation to generation and governed much of pioneer daily life. He uses the rules of bird hunting as an example of this tradition. Birds could not be killed sitting visibly in a tree. They could only be killed in flight.
David has a doctoral degree from the Union Institute in Cincinnati. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Peabody Essex Museum Library and a professor of history and cultural studies at Vermont's Norwich University for fifteen years. He is a frequent lecturer for the New Hampshire Humanities Council and currently serves as the historian for the New Hampshire Intertribal Council.
An avid supporter of the Indian museum in Warner, David plans to take his class to the museum for an optional fifth and final session.
~Heidi Beckwith
