For the first time, a Missisquoi flag is flying at a school in the Lake Champlain Islands.
The Alburgh Community Education Center held a flag-raising ceremony Tuesday with Missisquoi Chief Richard Menard and members of the Abenaki Circle of Courage, an after-school program based around service and Indigenous arts and culture.
Menard and sixth-grade student Sage Gould, who is Abenaki, raised the flag in front of the Alburgh school community. The ceremony also included singing and drumming.
While Missisquoi flags have been raised at schools in Franklin County before, Menard said this is the first time the ceremony has taken place at a Grand Isle County school.
The Abenaki Nation of Missisquoi is one of four state-recognized tribes in Vermont.
“It’s one of the steps to recognizing that the Abenakis are here, and have been here for thousands of years,” Menard said in an interview.
Menard said there is a larger Abenaki population in Alburgh than people might realize. There likely are 40 or 50 Abenaki students at the town’s school, he estimated, and at least 70 or 80 Abenaki families in the town itself.
Some in the Abenaki community are reluctant to publicly identify as members because of discrimination and the legacy of the eugenics movement in Vermont, Menard said.
In March 1931, the state Legislature approved a law that allowed sterilization of people deemed “feeble-minded,” “imbeciles” or “idiots,” and Abenaki people and French Canadians were among those targeted by eugenicists.
According to the University of Vermont — which employed Henry Perkins, leader of the state’s eugenics movement — 253 people were sterilized under the law.
The Legislature passed a joint resolution earlier this year to apologize for those actions.
Jeff Benay, director of Indian education for the Swanton-based Missisquoi Valley School District, said the Alburgh school’s flag-raising ceremony is important regardless of how many Abenaki students are there. The ceremony brings “incredible pride,” he said.
“A generation ago, this never would have happened,” Benay said. “But it’s happening now, and that’s significant.”
Benay said he started working with officials from the Grand Isle Supervisory Union to improve how Indigenous history and culture is taught in the islands’ schools.
For instance, district officials want to make sure that, when schools teach social studies units about Indigenous people, the stories they tell are historically accurate, said Megan Grube, the supervisory union’s director of curriculum, instruction and technology.
In general, Grube said, the district wants to find more ways to celebrate “all of the cultural contributions that Indigenous people have had in the Islands.”
“Diversity does not have to be controversial,” Benay said. “When we look at the flag that is being raised in Alburgh, we look at the inherent possibilities for kids.”
