Page 01 of this Sagakwa a.k.a. Twin Mountain, Grafton County, New Hampshire Pow-wow event is quite interesting. Clearly, Nancy Cruger (nee: Millette) (and later running under her married name of Lyons) states, "I am the great-granddaughter of Flora (nee: Ingerson) Hunt and Sagakwa has become a cultural exchange weekend from a promise I made to her before she died (you will read more of this "evolving" Great Grandma Flora "story" of Nancy's as further documentation is shown on this blog). Flora was a very proud Abenaki woman and spent much of her life gathering roots and making medicines, helping to raise her grandchildren and teaching all of us our history...our own roots. She also loved the bible and loved to write. Even when she was old and blind she continued writing (how could she write if she was blind?!), which fooled us great-grandchildren into thinking she could see.
This story about "How the Old Man of the Mountain Came to Be: an Abenaki Story" is out of another book, so it has been said. I doubt very much this is "an Abenaki version" of anything. I recall that I was tending the Pow-wow Circle's fire at this event. I remember that alot of people thought the Pow-wow t-shirts with Michael Eastman's Indianized face on them were a bit to "egotistical". I simply thought that the man "used" his own face as a template for his artistic work. Of course, wearing someone's "face" on a t-shirt at a Pow-wow (I know I wore the t-shirt at this event) along with everyone else, was a-bit-of-an-overkill, at least to my thinking. Michael Eastman also looked up in the Gordon Day Abenaki-English Dictionary, the term "sagakwa" AI : shout with pleasure, cheer which is on 443 of the Abenaki to English "Blue" Dictionary......in the English to Abenaki "Red" Dictionary on page 348 is the same information. An Elder once told me that this word sagakwa did not mean to shout with pleasure, or to cheer....but rather it meant to shout with pleasure (as in sexually) when being intimate with another person. Certainly if this is the truth of the meaning of this word sagakwa, then Creator only knows what the ancestors/Old Ones were thinking when they went to this Pow-wow event in Twin Mountain in July 1988. I sometimes wonder if anyone (who might have known the honest-to- goodness Abenaki Language) got the impression they were going to some inappropriate Indianized "orgy" when they read there was a "Sagakwa Pow-wow going on in Twin Mountain, N.H. on July 18-19, 1998?
