Lost in the Maine Woods: Henry David Thoreau, Joseph Nicolar and the Penobscot World

and moose—testify to the role his Penobscot guides played in his growing understanding of the New England environment. While he was quickly canonized as the patron saint of the environmental movement, Thoreau s long and complicated relationship with Native Americans has proven more troublesome. His earliest friends and biographers noted his deep interest in Indians, while readers in the last half century have in turn celebrated Thoreau tor a rare sympathy for Indians, stemming from his radical naturist creed, and excoriated him for at best idealizing indigenous peoples and at worst treating them with savagist scorn. The fullest account of the topic, Robert F. Sayre's Thoreau and the American Indian, captures this ambivalence. Sayre argues that Thoreau's early immersion in savagist ideology gradually (though never completely) gave way to a more realistic and admiring perspective. |oshua bemn s more recent account, drawing largely on the vast Indian Notebooks Thoreau accumulated, suggests that Thoreau never escaped the era's savagism. Thoreau may have admired Indians, Jbellin argues, but he barely understood them, and what he published about them served primarily to advance the arguments ot racial succession and while Thoreau read widely about continually, he did nothing on themselves.1 Indian vanishing. More tellingly, Indians and wrote about them behalf of Indian communities Eng/zsh Dialogues