Thoreau, Joseph Nicolar, and the Penobscot World
A Conversation with John J. Kucich, Professor of English at Bridgewater State University and co-President of the Thoreau Alliance
In this inaugural episode of Living Texts, Gosia Sklodowska speaks with John Kucich about Henry David Thoreau’s “The Allegash and East Branch” and Joseph Nicolar’s Life and Traditions of the Red Man.
The conversation places Thoreau’s account of the Maine Woods alongside Joseph Nicolar’s Life and Traditions of the Red Man, a Penobscot-authored work of history, memory, cosmology, and cultural preservation. Read together, these two texts open questions about Indigenous knowledge, spiritual encounter, environmental perception, cultural diplomacy, and the limits of Thoreau’s understanding.
Kucich invites us to encounter Thoreau not simply as an observer of the Penobscot world, but also as a student—sometimes receptive, sometimes surprisingly limited—grappling with forms of knowledge that challenged his assumptions about nature, science, religion, American identity, and Indigenous adaptation.
The episode explores the role of Joe Polis, Thoreau’s Penobscot guide, as teacher, diplomat, and cultural intermediary; Thoreau’s engagement with Indigenous botanical knowledge and spirituality; the relationship between Transcendentalism and Native traditions; and the ways Nicolar’s text allows us to hear a Penobscot voice from within a world that Thoreau only partially understood.
Video Conversation
Featured Texts
Henry David Thoreau, “The Allegash and East Branch,” in Maine Woods
Joseph Nicolar, Life and Traditions of the Red Man.
Select Passages
From Thoreau, "The Allegash and East Branch," Maine Woods (1864)
"And not less interesting is it to the white traveller, when he is crossing a placid lake in these out-of-the-way woods, perhaps thinking that he is in some sense one of the earlier discoverers of it, to be reminded that it was thus well known and suitably named by Indian hunters perhaps a thousand years ago."(p295)
The Anglo-American can indeed cut down, and grub up all this waving forest, and make a stump speech, and vote for Buchanan on its ruins, but he cannot converse with the spirit of the tree he fells, he cannot read the poetry and mythology which retire as he advances. He ignorantly erases mythological tablets in order to print his handbills and town-meeting warrants on them. Before he has learned his a b c in the beautiful but mystic lore of the wilderness which Spenser and Dante had just begun to read, he cuts it down, coins a pine-tree shilling (as if to signify the pine's value to him), puts up a district school-house, and introduces Webster's spelling-book.(p.251)
The character of the logger's admiration is betrayed by his very mode of expressing it. If he told all that was in his mind, he would say, it was so big that I cut it down and then a yoke of oxen could stand on its stump. He admires the log, the carcass or corpse, more than the tree. Why, my dear sir, the tree might have stood on its own stump, and a great deal more comfortably and firmly than a yoke of oxen can, if you had not cut it down. What right have you to celebrate the virtues of the man you murdered?(p.251)
As we lay there, he inquired if I ever heard "Indian sing." I replied that I had not often, and asked him if he would not favor us with a song. He readily assented, and lying on his back, with his blanket wrapped around him, he commenced a slow, somewhat nasal, yet musical chant, in his own language, which probably was taught his tribe long ago by the Catholic missionaries. He translated it to us, sentence by sentence, afterward, wishing to see if we could remember it. It proved to be a very simple religious exercise or hymn, the burden of which was, that there was only one God who ruled all the world. This was hammered (or sung) out very thin, so that some stanzas wellnigh meant nothing at all, merely keeping up the idea. He then said that he would sing us a Latin song; but we did not detect any Latin, only one or two Greek words in it,—the rest may have been Latin with the Indian pronunciation.(p.196)
From Nicolar, The Life and Traditions of the Red Man (1893)
KLOSE-KUR-BEH, ‘The Man from Nothing,’ first called the minds of the ‘Red Children’ to his coming into the world when the world contained no other man, in flesh, but himself. When he opened his eyes lying on his back in the dust, his head toward the rising of the sun and his feet toward the setting of the sun, the right hand pointing to the north and his left hand to the south. Having no strength to move any part of his body, yet the brightness of the day revealed to him all the glories of the whole world; the sun was at its highest, standing still, and beside it was the moon without motion and the stars were in their fixed places, while the firmament was in its beautiful blue. While yet his eyes were held fast in their sockets, he saw all that the world contained. Besides what the region of the air revealed to him, he saw the land, the sea, mountains, lakes, rivers, and the motion of the waters, and in it he saw the fishes. On the land were the animals and beasts, and in the air the birds.(p7)
The teaching of the Great Being to Klose-kur-beh was very lengthy. In the first seven nights the Great Being made known to Klose-kur-beh that the world was all spiritual, that there was a living spirit in all things, and the spirit of all things has power over all, and as the spirit of all things center in Him, he was the Great Spirit; by His will, all things move, all power comes from Him; and he ‘Klose-kur-beh’ must teach the people that there is but one Great Spirit.
When Klose-kur-beh was teaching his people, he points out to them where the Great Spirit was: in the sun, moon, stars, clouds of heaven, mountains, and even in the trees of the earth.(pp13–14)
The white man will feel it as a duty to his children to seek new lands for them, and that he will not rest until he finds the land the Great Spirit gave unto you. He shall not pass away without first having put his foot upon all the lands that have been made; therefore look for him always. [...]
When he brings his women and children, he will come to stay, and he shall want all the land, because the land will be so sweet to him. The first that come shall not want to allow his own kind to share with him; they shall slay one another for the possession of it. Take no hand in their fights, because the Great Spirit did not make the land for brothers to fight for; He made it for love’s sake.(p31)
John Kucich
John J. Kucich is a professor of English at Bridgewater State University. He is the former editor of The Concord Saunterer, the journal of the Thoreau Society, the author of Ghostly Communion: Cross-Cultural Spiritualism in 19th Century American Literature (Dartmouth, 2004) and several recent essays on the intersections between Native and European American cultures in the 18th and 19th centuries. He edited the essay collection Rediscovering the Maine Woods: Thoreau’s Legacy in an Unsettled Land (University of Massachusetts Press, 2019) and co-edited Henry David Thoreau and the Nick of Time (Mercer University Press, 2025). His latest book is Unsettling Thoreau: Native Americans, Settler Colonialism and the Power of Place (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024). He currently serves as the co-president of the Thoreau Alliance.
