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Local Anthropologist Bill Haviland reads from his latest book "Indian History on Deer Isle"
In the late 1700s, when the first Anglo settlers stepped ashore on Deer Isle, Maine, they were far from the first to do so. For thousands of years people had lived, loved and labored on this and other islands as well as on the mainland. Early French explorers, traders and missionaries, who knew far more about indigenous people than their English counterparts, referred to the region’s inhabitants as Etchemins, a people who occupied the entire coast from the Kennebec River down east as far as the Saint John River. Their descendants today are known as Maliseets, Passamaquoddies and Penobscots. So what do we know about these folks?

