The Gathers takes us through the history of a series of meetings between people in the Canadian Maritimes and US New England of Indigenous and settler heritage that took place 30 years ago. The gatherings took place over a series of years in the form of a sharing circle.

While seemingly framed as something largely inspirational (at least on a personal level for the participants themselves), what was most interesting to me is how the narrative on this kind of sharing relationship (and that relationship's role in reconciliation) has shifted over the last couple of decades. It would be interesting to see how a similar circle would differ if it were run today.

“The Gatherings: Reimagining Indigenous-Settler Relations” by Shirley N. Hager and Mawopiyane; Aevo UTP / University of Toronto Press, Toronto, Ontario, 2021; 306 pages, hardcover, $29.95.

I came upon a strange, surprisingly good book lately, “The Gatherings: Reimagining Indigenous-Settler Relations.” It’s a collection of recollections concerning a series of “gatherings” in the 1980s and '90s by more than a dozen white people and Maine and Canadian Wabanakis. Its title makes it sound like it might be a feel-good New Age tome, but it’s not.
Original co-organizer and co-editor Shirley N. Hager explains in an introduction that the gatherings, as the participants came to call them, were conceived in the mid-1980s when a small group of white people in Portland decided they wanted to address the painful history of settler-Native relations. They sought out members of Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Micmac/Mi’kmaq and Maliseet communities – collectively referred to as Wabanaki, or Dawn Land, or First Peoples – who might be open to trying to create grass-roots relationships that might foster communication between deeply divided people. The first of the gatherings took place in 1987, and they continued once or twice a year through 1994.
The book, which is meant to summarize and in a way invoke the ideas and atmospheres of the gatherings, has roughly three parts: statements and summaries by the participants; a shorter middle part that answers the question of why the gatherings ended; and a group of loose essays that talk about the concerns, frictions and perils that arise when Natives and settlers’ descendants meet.
We learn that no one was sure how, or even if, the proceedings would work. Indigenous people of the Northeast were among the first to suffer the ravages of the European settlement of North America, and they harbor generational distrust after five centuries of mistreatment ranging from bad faith legal dealings to efforts to exterminate them. The white people suffer from a sense of generational guilt about this history, as well as the vague sense that they don’t understand the Native point of view.
It’s no surprise to find out that this gaping chasm is extremely difficult to bridge, even personally among a few dozen people with no other agenda than to try to communicate.
The difficulty is illustrated in the very first words of the first recollection by Miigam’agan, a Mi’kmaq woman of the Fish Clan in northeastern New Brunswick: “I used to get upset with my partner gkisedtanamoogk when he would go to these Gatherings. ‘Why do you invest time out there when there is so much work to be done at home?’ He would talk about the importance of building alliances and he would say, ‘Not everyone is arrogant, not everybody’s a racist. There are friends out there and they need our support too.’”
Despite her generations-deep skepticism, Miigam’agan is drawn into the gatherings, and eventually we learn that for her, the effort had some measure of success. Responding, later in the book, to a question posed to her by editor Hager about “the pressure Indigenous people can feel from non-Natives wanting to learn how to be more connected to the Earth,” Miigam’agan replies: “I’ve been … learning about European history and the comparisons with our (Native) culture. And I see that our spiritual knowledge, our Original instructions or Earth-based ways, were all the same.”
This in a way encapsulates the energy of the book as a whole. The Gatherings ended in 1994 when Native people not taking part grew suspicious – on the basis of generations of distrust of whites – and their objections overwhelmed the endeavor. But the communication and relationships forged among the participants gained an emotional and moral momentum of their own. In the 2010s some of the participants – calling themselves collectively “Mawopiyane,” a Passamaquoddy word meaning “let us sit together” – decided to preserve whatever they could of that momentum by assembling the book.
“The Gatherings” is an unusual book in its organization (which may be a reflection of the Native influence on the endeavor), and an unusual book in the powerful authenticity of feeling it expresses. The gatherings themselves were meant to be a start toward better understanding among deeply estranged peoples. The history of Native-settler relations goes back a long, painful way, and has a long, painful way to go, as a recent statement by new U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland about the dark past of indigenous boarding schools indicates. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/11/deb-haaland-indigenous-boarding-schools/> But this book shows there’s hope among well-meaning people.
“The Gatherings” is available through book stores, online book sellers, and University of Toronto Press. <https://utorontopress.com/9781487508951/the-gatherings/>


Off Radar takes note of poetry and books with Maine connections the first and third Thursdays of each month. Dana Wilde is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. Contact him at universe@dwildepress.net.

I really appreciated what The Gatherings set out to do in sharing the stories and experiences of Native and non-Native voices, building connections and navigating relationships as they unpacked settler colonialism. This is important work we should all be doing, especially those of us living on stolen land in North America. I do think this book provides a wonderful example of how that work can proceed, but should not be seen as prescriptive for all communities. I will be recommending this to colleagues and students at my university.

A big thank-you to NetGalley, the author, and publisher for giving me a copy of this book for an unbiased review.

5/5 - This book should be required readings in schools and universities within any country that has a history of colonization of indigenous land.

This was hands down one of the most important books I've read all year. I am a Russian-American living abroad and I have always had a deep-seated curiosity in regards to Native Americans. This curiosity was amplified by the opportunity to spend a week with the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians during a cultural exchange program at my university. We were seated around a table speaking about our unique identities as people inhabiting the United States. At the time, I did not have my citizenship and I lived in a constant fear that if I were to publicly say something negative about the U.S., my opportunity to stay would somehow be invalidated or revoked. So I mentioned how lucky I felt to be welcomed by the U.S., how inviting the country was for me, and how proud I was of being Russian-American. Usually when I said things like this, I got an overwhelmingly positive response. But now, the room went quiet and one of the Native American leaders said something to the effect of: "This country that welcomed you stole the land from us."

He admitted later that he was hurt and angry by my statements, but at the time he was calm and patient. Still, his statement triggered a strong emotional response from me. I felt hurt, quite frankly because I have a way with words and I'm used to saying things that people agree with. Even when people disagree with me, they generally like me. I felt that he did not like me, like I stepped on something raw and painful. I was humiliated. I felt confused, because in school we learned how happy the Southern Californian Native tribes were to work on missions and how lucky they were to be given autonomous legal claims over their reservations. I knew that this was a tainted view of life on reservations, but I never questioned it. And I felt anger, because I too was in a position of being stigmatized due to being an immigrant - I mean, I felt terrified to speak to my actual experience! - and I felt we should have been allies, but here he was, calling me out! Honestly, I wanted to leave. But it was the first day of a week long program and I physically couldn't. I had to stay and I had to be humble, because there was nothing left to do.

The other amazing thing was - many (though not all) of the other non-Native students rejected me for my blunder, but my Native hosts took me under their wing to educate me because I was so stunned by that experience and I think they could sense that I needed to learn. I actually ended up spending more one-on-one time with them. And through that discomfort, I built relationships that revealed a completely different history than the one I had grown up with. I had my own experience of a gathering. It didn't make me an expert on Native histories or struggles, but it made me desperate to learn.

Reading this book was akin to having this experience. The book is written in the form of a gathering, in which Native and Non-Native voices are reflected in a sort of circle. The reader has the opportunity to sit down and listen. The book has a lot of academic content - conversations on history, observations of the way the legal system has been harmful to indigenous peoples - but also personal content, observations on what it takes to have a meaningful and honest exchange. Through this book, I learned for example that some Native tribes don't have words like "priority" because of a commitment to what is happening in the present. I learned that they distinguish between a "work" world and their world, one which has a concept of time that is fully dedicated to what is happening now.

And yet, these groups also think of seven generations into the future. They think about their connections to the land and what they owe to the land. They acknowledge that there are different world views on our planet and that all of them are necessary to living in a way that is resilient and healthy.

If you read one book this year seeking to learn to see the world a different way, let it be this one. Come to the circle with your mind open. I for one can see myself returning to this book over and over again.

An important and personal look into the voices of different people. I liked the structure, having different stories and perspectives versus one all-encompassing story to show the diversity over different experiences. I would love to get the audiobook and share with others!

This book is a beautiful representation of what it can look like for people groups of two different nationalities to come together and have meaningful dialogue. Through the careful consideration of all involved, conversations can go to meaningful places that can bring about true change.

I found myself appreciative of those involved in these Gatherings, and their willingness to share their stories so that others can begin to consider to do a new way to do things too.


I received a copy of this book from NetGalley and the Publisher. This review is my own, honest opinion.

I live in Vermont, land that traditionally belonged to the Abenaki and Abenaki, so I was excited to read this book. There is a lot of talk in my work community about how we can create better connections with the local Abenaki to build community, improve relationships, and create a stronger, improved community. But it can feel like an extremely daunting thing to do.

This book is such a wonderful example of how this work can be done and how it can be done in a way that is respectful of all parties and honors the ways of Indigenous people. The first person narratives of the gathering experiences were powerful and informative. It's easy to get the thoughts and reflections of white people but much harder to know what this kind of experience would be like for an indigenous person (and with good reason).

This book is a good roadmap in how to build community and work together while acknowledging all of the deep harm that has happened and been caused by colonization.

The Gatherings is an important collection of stories between Indigenous people and settlers as they gather to examine world views.

This book felt really important as we continue to deconstruct colonialism and work to make things better. I really enjoyed hearing different perspectives of people working together to understand and correct the racism and colonialism that negatively effects Indigenous communities to this day.

Thank you to the publisher and to NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Am interested in ways of thinking+seeing -- worldviews -- and it was thought-provoking to see the approaches between the people in this book, and to hear from them about the challenges they faced during the process of gathering together, as well as their successes.

Also much to think about and apply to ideas of how to go forward re. colonialism in my part of the world, and even possible solutions for conflict in general.

Very careful not to take this as a prescriptive path (so conscious of --fetishistic?-- attitudes towards Native/Indigenous wisdom), but it's always wonderful to begin to see the world from a different perspective.

Thank you to @NetGalley and to University of Toronto Press @utpress for this eARC.

This book deals with a series of gatherings between natives and non natives with the idea to build connections and understand each other. It is build in two parts: the first one gives testimonies of the people attending the gatherings; the second one attempts to analyze the impacts and lessons learned from them.

Although the idea of those gatherings is good, the book itself reads more as a collection of experiments and a very superficial analysis on the results. It does not offer definitive ways to improve relationships between natives and non-native, or even a way forward. The idea of the book in my opinion was better than the execution.

this book was such a beautiful collection of peoples' experiences. it's not a narrative book with an overarching story, but an anthology of stories from many different people. more than anything, this book restored in me a sense of hope that Indigenous and white people can come together with respect and build community. I was especially grateful to hear from all of the Indigenous people involved, especially the women. this book didn't center white people or white feelings, and it achieved an emotional honesty because of that. I hope that more initiatives like the Gatherings can be done in other places. I would definitely recommend this book for anyone looking for a very personal collection of stories.

Several decades ago, a group of Native and non-Native folks began meeting at what they called Gatherings. Despite some of the discomfort from both populations, those who stuck with it learned from one another and developed meaningful relationships that informed and continue to inform their lives to this day. While the format of the book was a bit confusing, the content was interesting. The participants don't sugarcoat their stories, so there is plenty about the fear, discomfort, and hurt that existed, but also the learning and deep understanding that developed over time. It is clear in both the Gatherings and in the putting together of this book that the authors were very mindful of it being a collective process. For the non-Natives, much of this meant putting aside Western settler notions of how to go about things and instead shifting their thinking to a different way. The most useful part of the book was about how to better relations between Natives and settlers.