Jason Hall

Jason Hall, “Maliseet Cultivation and Climatic Resilience on the W?last?kw/St. John River During the Little Ice Age,”Acadiensis 44, no. 2 (2015): 3-25.

Weaving together documentary sources and oral traditions, Hall’s reconstruction of the history of Maliseet plant cultivation on middle reaches of the W?last?kw/St. John River over the last millennium offers a powerful challenge to received notions about Indigenous economies, the impact of European contact, and the significance of the Little Ice Age in the Northeast. At Meductic, thanks to a favourable microclimate and Maliseet ingenuity, techniques of maize cultivation persisted through climatic changes that doomed the practice elsewhere and prepared the ground, quite literally, for the later establishment of European agriculture there and elsewhere in the region.