Penobscot

The Penobscot were an Algonquian-speaking people of the Northeastern Woodlands, who lived along the Penobscot River in Maine; their self-name, Panawahpskewi, means the people of where the white rocks extend out. They lived in seasonal bands, hunting, fishing and gathering wild foods, and belonged to the Wabanaki Confederacy.

Contact in the sixteenth century brought fur trade but also smallpox and measles: perhaps ten thousand Penobscot lived around 1600 and fewer than five hundred by the early nineteenth century. They sided with the French in the colonial wars, and a British scalp bounty was proclaimed against them in 1755; after France's fall at Quebec in 1759 they backed the Patriots in the American Revolution.

From about 1800 they were confined to the Indian Island reservation. Between 1794 and 1833 treaties ceded nearly all of their territory to Massachusetts and then Maine.