Odanak Musician Mali Obomsawin Talks Music, Community and Vermont's 'Pretendian Problem' 

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• Courtesy Of Jared And Abby Lank
• Mali Obomsawin

At first it seemed like Mali Obomsawin just wanted to talk about her music. But the award-winning bassist, composer and singer-songwriter is also a community organizer and advocate for Indigenous rights, and her music is interwoven with her Indigenous heritage. And because she's performing in Vermont, her conversation with Seven Days quickly turned to what she calls the state's problem with "pretendianism," or the practice of people falsely claiming Native ancestry.

Obomsawin, 28, is a citizen of the Odanak First Nation of the Wabanaki confederacy, which includes the Abenaki and four other culturally and linguistically related tribes — the Penobscot, Mi'kmaq, Passamaquoddy and Maliseet — whose traditional territory extends from the northeastern U.S. into Canada.

Although the State of Vermont began formally recognizing Abenaki tribes in 2012, none of those tribes is recognized by the federal government or the Odanak Nation. In fact, Obomsawin and fellow Odanak citizen Jacques Watso were speakers at a May 2022 event at the University of Vermont, called "Beyond Borders," that overtly challenged those tribes' Abenaki heritage — part of a broader conversation among Indigenous people and academics now calling those claims into question. Members of Vermont's Abenaki community were not invited to speak.

Born in Stratford, N.H., Obomsawin grew up in Farmington, Maine, in a converted barn that was once used for storage by Bread and Puppet Theater and that still housed some of its papier-mâché creatures. Her mother is a Sephardic Jew, and her Odanak father a professional blues and jazz musician with whom Obomsawin began performing in fifth grade.

An alum of the Berklee College of Music and Dartmouth College, Obomsawin first achieved musical acclaim through the folk-rock trio Lula Wiles. She later struck out on her own to compose music more deeply rooted in her Native heritage. Her internationally acclaimed 2022 debut album, Sweet Tooth, is by turns haunting, soulful, thunderous and frenetic, with compositions that blur genre boundaries and "live in the liminal space," she said, "between free jazz and folk music."

"Telling Indigenous stories through the language of jazz is not a new phenomenon," Obomsawin explains on her website. "My people have had to innovate endlessly to get our stories heard ... but sometimes words fail us, and we must use sound."

Indeed, many of Obomsawin's vocals are sung in the Abenaki, Passamaquoddy and Penobscot languages, which she is learning, while others are vocables, or syllables not in a specific language but that serve as rhythmic or melodic accompaniment.

Obomsawin performs at the Flynn Space in Burlington this Friday, September 29. She spoke to Seven Days from her home in Old Town, Maine, just outside the Penobscot reservation.

Tell me a little about the origins of your music.

It comes from various strains of musical lineage from the Northeast: folk music, fiddle music and traditional Wabanaki music. I also grew up playing jazz. So my music is really just a representation of the sounds of this area. There are a lot of Indigenous people who played jazz, so it all informs each other. In the beginning of what today we call jazz, everybody was playing a little bit of everything. Back in Appalachia, especially, people who played some fiddle tunes also played country tunes and swing tunes, and it was that mixing pot from the very beginning. Then the music industry separated things into different genres for marketability's sake.

There's a track on Sweet Tooth called "Blood Quantum," a reference, presumably, to the controversial practice of measuring who is Native based on their genetics and thus who qualifies for tribal membership. What are you saying about this notion?

There are two poles of the album. It starts with "Odana" and "Lineage" and ends with "Fractions" and "Blood Quantum." The overall shape of the suite is that we have this very strong philosophy of community and family, and that is the heart of what it means to be Indigenous: You come from a specific family in a community that is related to each other and related to the land.

Through colonization, we get away from that grounding and that philosophy — or the state tries to push us away from that — and it becomes about blood measurements. And that fractures the community. I'm aware of the waters I'm treading in, in that this interview will be [published] in Vermont, where we have a really serious pretendian problem.

You used that term at the "Beyond Borders" event last year. There, you said the Abenaki identity is "not based on DNA. It's not a race. It is a community. That means that you cannot claim to be Indigenous if the Indigenous community doesn't claim you back." If Abenaki is not a race, is it a religion, an ethnicity or an identity?

We are not a race because we have collective rights, not individual rights. In the United States, a lot of the federal court cases that are trying to strip away [tribal] sovereignty are trying to characterize us as a race and say that we can't have rights as a race because that is racial privileging. But we are sovereign nations and we hold collective rights, not because of our race but because of agreements our ancestors made.

That being said, it's not just a religion. I really try to stay away from the word "identity" because it's vague and confusing. We are a nation, as simple as that, and we inherit our rights from our families and our ancestors who were here first.

How did Vermont's Abenaki community respond to your comments last year?

Indigenous women are the strongest voices talking against race-shifting and pretendianism, and we are often met with pushback from men, especially in the misogynist culture we are all swimming in. Men make us out to be hysterical and crazy for bringing this stuff up and making a big deal out of nothing. That's definitely very much the attitude I've gotten from the very misogynist pretendian Abenaki movement in Vermont.

You see all the major figureheads of their groups are men, and they take on very domineering tactics. They talk over women and scoff at them. Being the only Indigenous woman in the [Vermont Commission on Native American Affairs] meeting, I've definitely been surrounded by that attitude. I'm glad that I'm going to have my crew with me when I roll into Burlington, because I'm not exactly comfortable being on my own in Vermont.

No other religious, racial or ethnic group is asked to document its heritage the way Native people are. If I interview the rabbi at our local synagogue, I wouldn't ask her to verify that her great-great-grandmother was Jewish. Why do we expect that of those who identify as Abenaki?

This is something that people often get confused about, conflating it with the white government having opinions about blood quantum. But in Indigenous communities, long before colonization, if you walked up to an Indigenous community from the outside, people would ask you, "Who are you related to? Why are you here?"

The explanation has to do with your family. The first thing you do when you meet other Indigenous people, even in your own community, is say, "Who's your mom? Who's your cousin? How am I related to you?" You have to acknowledge and respect that, in the Indigenous community, we have the protocol of asking people who their ancestors are and who their family is. It's not offensive to us.

When you perform at tribal venues, do those shows differ from playing other venues?

For sure! My first tour of this album actually focused on rezzes and towns and cities near reservations. In Bar Harbor, Maine, we played at the Abbe Museum, which is the Wabanaki-focused museum that's understood as intertribal territory, especially between the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy.

Last November we played at the Musée des Abénakis. It was cool to perform in that particular venue, which is the first Indigenous museum in Québec, founded in 1965. The building that it's in used to be the Catholic school on the rez. So we reclaimed that space and turned it into a place where we can learn about our own culture and history. It was a really powerful show.

How so?

There were elders in the audience. I have some source recordings [from the mid-20th century] that I play during "Pedegwajois," and there were elders in the room who'd known [the Abenaki storyteller] Théophile Panadis. For them to hear him speaking and recognize his voice, especially in the building where they taught us to not speak our language, was really, really powerful. It was a beautiful moment.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity and length.