Reviewed by Tena Starr copyright the Chronicle 8-29-2012 Vermont
Women, Native Americans & African Americans, Out of the Shadows
of History, by Cynthia D. Bittiinger. Paperback. 158 pages.
Published by the History Press. $19.99. It generally wasn’t
until the 1960s that Vermont history books were written to
acknowledge the fact that Europeans were not the first to
inhabit this ground, Cynthia Bittinger says in this slender
book. The man who finally assembled a convincing body of
research on the early presence of the Abenaki, the man who
finally managed to get historical mention of a people who’d been
here for something like 11,000 years before Europeans were, was
from Albany. Historians generally credit Gordon M. Day with
being the person who unearthed New England’s native past, Ms.
Bittinger says. Mr. Day was born in Orleans County in 1911 and,
as a child, played with children who were part Abenaki. He also
knew the area as a place for natives to hunt and trap. “In his
adult years, he initially set out to stu