I read filmmaker Nora Jacobson’s Feb. 19 column, “Vermont Abenaki community deserves recognition,” and I want to say plainly that Vermont Public deserves to be commended — not criticized — for refusing to rebroadcast material that misrepresents history and misleads the public about Vermont’s Native past and Abenaki people.

Jacobson seems to have forgotten that in her film Freedom and Unity, in the opening sequence Odanak Abenaki citizen and filmmaker Alanis O’Bomsawin says: “Vermont was very sacred to our people, and I know that it’s all Abenaki territory. I just imagine that our people are still here… I feel their presence here.” O’Bomsawin also notes, in the same spirit, “There’s a border, but that’s not how our people think today.”

It is striking that Jacobson grounded her film in the Odanak Abenaki connection to their homeland in Vermont, yet now frames that same community as “outside interlopers” in Vermont’s public life.

She writes, “Why is a foreign entity trying to exert control over Vermonters and the Vermont legislature?” That wording stokes resentment and feels reckless amid today’s climate of nativist rhetoric, with Jacobson portraying Odanak’s objections as the work of “foreign” interference. This is particularly disturbing right now, when ICE and the federal government are rekindling anti-immigrant sentiment — the very sentiments she addresses in her film in relation to New Americans — yet she now echoes that same rhetoric herself.

This is especially ironic when used against Native people whose homeland includes Vermont, as she knows.

The column further minimizes the continuous, living Abenaki communities at Odanak and Wôlinak — communities she highlighted in her film — as a small group. Yet those actions are being undertaken with the full support of the elected chief and council of these nations.

The Abenaki First Nations of Odanak and Wôlinak are not a random fringe group; they are the only continuous, living Abenaki communities in our region, rightly objecting to being publicly replaced in Vermont’s history and on their own territory. Their communities’ importance is actually outlined in this film itself, where presenters refer to Odanak as the center of the Abenaki Nation.

Her frustration, however, is understandable. The film, released in 2013, was made at a time when nearly everyone in Vermont was invested in the story of a resurgent and heroic “secret,” hidden Abenaki community — a new identity that offered some historically
impoverished and marginalized French Canadian Vermonters renewed ethnic pride and access to needed resources.

It also offered well-meaning liberals, in an overwhelmingly white state, a (racial) cause to rally around, rather than confronting structural poverty. By becoming racially “Abenaki,” these groups shifted to being the deserving poor. We need to take a hard look at ourselves, and take a second look at the fictions written by Vermont’s social historians and archaeologists at the time on this subject.

At the time of its filming, however, reports by the Vermont Attorney General and the Bureau of Indian Affairs had already shown these groups were not Abenaki at all — but those reports were largely ignored. Their findings have since been further corroborated and reported in multiple investigations by Vermont Public, VTDigger, New Hampshire Public Radio, the CBC and APTN, and independent scholars. Even UVM students and Burlington High School reporters have been able to grasp the issues at play here.

While I understand that in 2013 partnering with these groups and embracing their stories struck many as good work, done with the best intentions, we know better now — and, like Vermont Public, we must all do better, even when it is uncomfortable and inconvenient.

Freedom and Unity is a well-made film, and the makers should be proud of most of it. It is unfortunate that they were misinformed and invested time, money, and professional credibility in a project based, in part, on a false history. However, institutions cannot keep
amplifying errors once the problem is clear, no matter how inconvenient. The ethical response is to revise one’s view in light of evidence and change course — when we know better, we can do better.

Jacobson asks, “Since when is it Vermont Public’s job to publicly adjudicate Abenaki identity?” But the question here isn’t whether any individual may self-identify as they wish — and, in fact, Vermont Public has long been careful to include the views of the Vermont-recognized “Abenaki.” What’s at stake is whether public institutions should present particular organizations — whose claims are contested — as authoritative sources on Vermont’s Native history and Abenaki identity.

These “Vermont Abenaki” groups’ rest their claims on a mythic reinterpretation of the past (what we usually call religion), and the film treats them as fact. That message is then carried into schools, museums, media, and state institutions. This is more than an issue of “expression of identity” — millions of dollars earmarked for Native people are directed to these organizations each year on the strength of legitimacy we have collectively conferred. Refusing to rebroadcast a documentary that presents contested identity claims as settled fact isn’t censorship; it’s Vermont Public exercising evidence-based editorial judgment.

Jacobson’s piece also runs through the familiar set of rhetorical moves and fallacies that the “Vermont Abenaki” organizations and their supporters have used for years to justify these unfounded claims — too numerous to untangle in this reply, but the website Unsettling Vermont documents and debunks many of them. Underlying this rhetoric is a move to distract, minimize, and at times intimidate or bully those of us calling for truthful history and ethical partnerships with Abenaki First Nations.

She also mischaracterizes the critique as a “purity” project about blood, but this dispute is not about blood-quantum policing. It is about the fact that the “Vermont Abenaki” groups are not descendants of Abenaki people at all. It is not a matter of “how much”; it is a matter of a total absence of documented ancestry, alongside substantial counterevidence, and a lack of connection and continuity — and of repealing flawed legislation that has legitimized this situation.

Finally, Jacobson repeats the claim that sterilization programs in Vermont were focused on Native people, saying: “In the early 20th century, the Eugenics program forcibly sterilized people deemed ‘undesirable’ — that often meant French-Canadians, mixed race people, people of Abenaki descent…” and that this caused “Vermonters with Abenaki descent to hide their ancestry.”

There is absolutely no evidence to support that framing. It is a myth. In my own research, summarized in my 2024 VTDigger commentary and echoing conclusions also found by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Vermont Attorney General, I found no credible evidence to
support these claims. The records show instead a troubling, and ongoing, pattern of historical erasure of the real victims of this movement — women, the poor, and above all the disabled — and the reworking of this history for the purpose of validation. Between 1931 and 1952, 256 sterilizations were performed under Vermont’s 1931 law — as far as I or anyone else has found, none of the individuals targeted were Abenaki or Native.

If I had found something else, I would be saying it.

Vermont Public is right to stop presenting contested claims as fact. The path forward is responsible coverage grounded in evidence and inclusive of the Abenaki First Nations whose objections are central to the dispute.

Jacobson — and any PBS committee considering giving this film an award — needs to do the homework that Vermont Public has diligently done and change course. As it stands, Freedom and Unity, as it relates to Native people, functions as a colonial act of misrepresentation, and it should not be broadcast to the public without serious correction and accountability.

Do the research, reach out to Odanak, and make the revisions to your otherwise excellent film so it can be fully on the right side of history and get the awards it deserves.

Richard Witting is a Burlington-based a historian who works with the Abenaki First Nations of Odanak and Wôlinak doing advocacy work.