LAKE CHAMPLAIN VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY:
Bringing History Home

Project Overview

The Champlain Valley of Vermont, New York, and Quebec was at the center stage of world history in the late 17th & 18th centuries. Long before this, for almost 500 generations, the lake served as homeland, transportation artery, boundary, and sacred place for Iroquoian and Abenaki peoples. Nearly 400 years ago, Samuel de Champlain "discovered" the lake that he named after himself, and from that point on political and cultural transformations began. Alliances that existed among Native peoples of northern New England and Canada play key roles in the period's historic rivalry between the French and British to control the region. The Valley became a battleground, both symbolic and real, and key events in the region forever changed the history of the New World and the globe. It was also a place where people from France, at first, and then Britain, lived and traded with the already well-established residents: the Abenaki and Haudenosaunee (known to many as the Iroquois). Many contemporary traditions are connected to this diverse cultural heritage.

The Quadricentennial of Champlain's arrival will be commemorated in 2009. The heritage of those cultures who have lived in the region since long before Champlain arrived are not widely understood. Neither is the new era begun in 1609. This project proposes to fill those voids, and to inspire communities to learn about links between their own local area and world and national history. It is designed to bring history home, working from the local, participatory level up to a broader audience. Through the community-based, "hands-on" archeological survey and field investigations of French settlements, creation of 21st century web-based teaching/learning tools, and a television documentary chronicling stories from the 17th and 18th centuries about the lake region's diverse people and amazing places, this project will offer our region's residents multiple voyages of discovery and will bring history to our doorsteps. In the process, the partners hope to encourage historic preservation projects in this internationally significant place and conservation of its abundant natural resources.