Thanks to Lori-Suzanne Dell’s recent article on the Brunswick Mall, more people have a better sense of how people shaped and maintained that lovely place.

I’d like to offer another layer that includes the history of Wabanaki. Their name, which means People of the Dawnland, includes the Abenaki, Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Mi’kmaq and Maliseet nations.

How is the Brunswick Mall connected to the region’s First Nations? One way to answer this is to consider what a “swamp” is. For me, a swamp means very wet feet and lots of mosquito bites. But all of those bug-breeding muddy pools also act like a giant sponge that can absorb large influxes of water and release them slowly. They are habitat to a variety of plants and animals that need this blend of water and soil.

In the centuries before Brunswick, Wabanaki lived in the area, fishing at Pejepscot Falls, farming along the banks of the Androscoggin, gathering blueberries on the pine barrens, and digging clams at Maquoit.

The swamp also provided for these residents and travelers. It fed a reliable stream of water that saved thirsty Wabanaki the trouble of a steep descent to the Androscoggin. It grew cattails, which have edible roots, leaves that can be woven into mats or bags and downy seed pods that can wrap infants for warmth. It grew fiddleheads, which are the spring shoots of ostrich ferns, providing food at the end of long winters. To be sure, it also bred swarms of mosquitoes that plagued Wabanaki as well as later colonists, but a swamp is more than its nuisances.

In the 1600s and 1700s colonists conducted land sales with Wabanaki, but colonists interpreted these agreements in ways that dispossessed Wabanaki. When Wabanaki disagreed, colonists enforced their understandings with forts, guns and war.

Given the violence of conquest, perhaps it is not surprising that one Brunswick resident used a military metaphor when he recalled the filling of the swamp as an “assault.” It is also significant that the “assault” began on July 4, 1826, a day celebrating the birth of the United States. And in those days, Brunswick residents centered that birthday on the European-Americans who founded the young nation, not the Wabanaki who had lived there long before it.

The swamp was gone, but the Wabanaki history in Pejepscot/Brunswick did not end. Wabanaki continued to journey to and through Brunswick throughout the 1800s and 1900s. If you pay attention today, you will notice that Wabanaki still harvest from nearby blueberry barrens. They attend local schools. Look for information about Wabanaki organizations, and you will see how they cultivate community gardens, including some in town. Knowing the Wabanaki history of the Mall, we more easily appreciate why Wabanaki still have a relationship to this place.

Wabanaki and colonial histories matter, but only one of these histories is easy to see. A plaque near the bandstand at the Mall commemorates the July 4th filling of the swamp. Newspapers and town histories provide details. But only educated guesses allow us to understand what Wabanaki might have thought about this place. How might our sense of Brunswick — or any place in Maine — change if we better understood how Wabanaki were and still are part of these places?

There are no easy answers, and with some colleagues on the Pejepscot Portage Mapping Project (PPMP), I am still looking for some good ones. If you would like to join us, please consider attending different walks around southern and central Maine to explore Maine’s largely invisible Wabanaki and African American history. You can find more about this work at the website of Atlantic Black Box, which is coordinating these walks. The PPMP is organizing one of them in Brunswick on Saturday, Oct. 5. Perhaps these histories, like Dell’s, will give us a better sense of where we live and also the communities we wish to create here.

Joseph Hall is an associate professor of history at Bates College specializing in Native American and early American history.