Employing the Local

N 1939, the oral history project of the Works Progress (later Work Projects) Administration recorded the life story of exactly one Native in New England-a Penobscot man living on Indian Island, near Old Town, Maine.' Totaling fiftyone typescript pages, Henry Mitchell, Indian Canoe Maker was never published, though a transcription of it now appears on the American Memory website of the Library of Congress.' The selection of an Indian canoe maker, and only one, was both a predictable approach and a happy accident. As a national, and nationalizing, project, the WPA trafficked in familiar notions about vanishing races, particularly the strangely tenacious conviction that Indians had long before disappeared completely from New England.3 Still, the WPA had an inchoate and

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• "Constructing" Nations within States

  Anne Merline Mcculloch, David E Wilkins•The American Indian Quarterly•1995

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