Couple creating 'Indian' museum in The Old Sugarhouse on Route 2

December 29, 2007

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EAST MONTPELIER – The Old Sugarhouse on Route 2, which features more Indian gifts than maple products, is undergoing a transformation. The gifts have been moved upstairs to make room on the ground floor for an Indian museum, which the shop's owners, Todd Hebert and Shirley Hook, plan to open on March 1.

Both owners claim Abenaki heritage: Hebert goes by the Indian name Red Fox; Hook's is Shining Eagle. The museum is part of their plan to create a center where people, both native and non-native, can learn about the history and culture of the Indians in Vermont. (Red Fox prefers the term "Indian" to "Native American.")

Red Fox said the museum will be unusual for Vermont – few people know much about the state's Indian inhabitants. He observed that tourists who visit the Sugarhouse, formerly Danforth's Sugarhouse, see the Indian gifts for sale and often ask, "'There were Indians in Vermont?' When you say, 'Yes,' their next question is, 'Who were they.' I want to answer those questions," Red Fox said, "both through the museum and the store."

"For years, the Abenaki heritage was hidden – it wasn't OK to be Abenaki," he said. "A lot of people are Abenakis and they don't even know it."

He noted that many people who call themselves French Canadian have Abenaki in their family histories. "A lot of Abenakis moved up to Canada to get away from the problems and then came back when it was safe, but when they came back, they didn't claim themselves as being Abenaki. They claimed themselves as being French Canadian," he said. "It was in the beginnings of the 1800s that it started not being OK. You had to blend in."

Red Fox estimates that today, as many as 5,000 Vermonters claim Abenaki ancestry. Others who are Abenakis don't claim to be, he said, and still others don't know they are.

Red Fox and Shining Eagle are looking for people who will lend the museum objects that Abenakis made, used, sold or traded to add to the objects already on display. They also hope to find volunteers available in late January to help set up the display cases. The objects on loan will be secure and available to their owners at any time. Red Fox and Shining Eagle stress that they will not accept objects taken from graves or archeological sites.

Among the crafts that Red Fox hopes to find are Indian baskets, jewelry, arrowheads, pottery and clothing – "anything known to be Indian from this area. The Abenakis traded with the English and other tribes as well, so there will be other things such as gorgets (an article of clothing covering the neck) and trade silver," he said. Canoes, he noted, are hard to find, but Abenakis were known for their dugout canoes and birchbark canoes. The dates of the items are not important, he said. "To me, it's all history."

Off the museum is a room that the pair is offering for a donation to people who want to teach classes in Indian heritage – drumming, drum-making, healing and genealogy – and a shop. The store has shelves of dried herbs for healing, tobacco for ceremonial use, white sage for smudging, sweet grass for basket making, and bone, beads and sinew for crafts. The goal, Red Fox said, is to create "a learning center."

Red Fox and Shining Eagle have invited a special guest to celebrate the museum's grand opening – Trudy Ann Parker, the author of "Aunt Sarah: Woman of the Dawnland." The book – a biography of Sarah Jackson Somers, an Abenaki healer who lived "in the transition time from the way we lived to the way we had to live," as Red Fox calls it – will be released in paperback in January. Copies can be ordered now from the Sugarhouse.

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