New Lights in the Dawnland

“New Lights in the Dawnland”
Recorded and Produced by Michael Kline, Talking Across the Lines, Sunderland, MA 

We will listen together and have conversation & light refreshments.

“New Lights in the Dawnland” is a two hour audio documentary based on five individually recorded voices recounting 13,000 years of Indigenous history of Northfield and surrounding areas in Massachusetts and Vermont leading up to the arrival of English colonists in the 17th Century and the impacts of colonialism that followed. Replete with tribal songs, flute and drum interludes and ambient sounds, this conversational telling of the story creates its own imagery, to the considerable satisfaction of those whose voices are interwoven throughout.

The five narrators recorded for “New Lights in the Dawnland” spoke from memory and the heart where memory dwells without notes or prior discussions as to the intended content of their testimonials. The five voices belong to old friends who have paid increasing collective attention to their own Indigenous cultures and histories, buttressed by a decade of archaeological research of their homelands and battlefields. It is a study of the confluence of the focused efforts of the five in the service of wider understanding and inclusion – among themselves and non-Indigenous neighbors.

This production, then, has its roots in intertribal memory and legend passed through a multi-generational conduit of oral tradition. Its sources are enriched through spiritual interaction with natural surroundings, as well as, more recently, the surfacing of old letters, diaries and other written colonial records. This production does not purport to be a polished or footnoted, scholarly, historical, rendering of Squakheag's past. Library bookshelves groan with euro-centric studies which have long peddled destructive stereotypes and historical inaccuracies.

The response of these narrators is a passionate reaching out in search of balance and reciprocity in the telling of a shared past as a cornerstone to peace and reconciliation. It is dedicated to the life, accomplishments and speedy recovery of Doug Harris and his devoted new wife, Genevieve Frasier.