A fuller history emerges

Melissa Otis has written a book that we have been waiting a long time for. The story of Native Americans in the Adirondacks has been ignored, glossed over, and woefully misstated. “Rural Indigenousness: A History of Iroquoian and Algonquian Peoples of the Adirondacks” should be on every Adirondack bookshelf.

Reading, digesting, and benefiting from Otis’s book is for me a humbling experience. When I first started reading and writing about Adirondack history some 45 years ago, the received wisdom, as pronounced by Alfred Lee Donaldson, whose two-volume “A History of the Adirondacks” furnished the starting block for any Adirondack historian, was that Native American association with the Adirondacks involved, at the most, seasonal hunting and trapping and was thus for the most part transient, undiscoverable, and insignificant. A better historian might have challenged this facile declaration.

Melissa Otis has