About

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Ancestry 

Joseph Edward Bruchac was raised on Splinterville Hill in Greenfield Center, New York, by his maternal grandparents, Marion Dunham Bowman and Jesse Elmer Bowman. Marion was the daughter of Edward Hobbs Dunham (1862–1934), a documented black ash fancy fan and basket maker from the Greenfield–Milton uplands of Saratoga County. Jesse was a son of Lewis, or Louis, Bowman (1844–1918), who was born at East Farnham in the Eastern Townships of Québec and later lived in Vermont and the upper Hudson Valley, including Cohoes and Greenfield.

Available records identify Lewis Bowman’s mother as Sophie Sénécal dit Laframboise, while his father has not yet been securely identified. Although branches of the broader Sénécal dit Laframboise family lived in several parts of Québec, including the greater Saint-François River region, no direct documentary connection between Sophie’s immediate line and the Abenaki community of Odanak has yet been established.

Records also place members of the extended Bowman family among families variously recorded as Beaumier, Goyette or Guyette, Phillips, and other names found on both sides of the Québec–Vermont border and later in eastern New York. Some relationships within this network are documented, while others remain under investigation.

The Saratoga region has long been home to Indigenous and Indigenous-connected families, including noted basketmakers such as the Tahamont family. Lewis’s presence in these communities is historically significant. This deeply hidden root of the family is explored in the 1997 autobiography, Bowman's Store: A Journey to Myself.

The strongest presently documented Indigenous ancestry in the Bruchac family comes through multiple colonial-era Hudson Valley and Long Island lines. 

Through Van Slyck, Van Olinda, Van Buren, Fonda, Groot, Van den Bergh, DeVoe, and Van Antwerp, documented genealogy leads to the seventeenth-century Mohawk woman known in later family and regional histories as Ots-Toch, wife of Cornelis "Broer" Antonissen Van Slyck. Their children became important interpreters and intermediaries between Mohawk communities and colonial New Netherland. Through multiple documented lines of descent, three of their children are direct ancestors, illustrating how these closely related Van Slyck branches later converged again in the family's genealogy. One of those children, Jacques (Itsitsiosokwachka) Van Slyck, received a deed in 1667 from Mohawk leaders for land at Cohoes Falls. The transaction reflects his place within both Mohawk and Dutch kinship networks.

Through Van Tassel, Storm, See, Cole, Dunham, Devoe, and Van Antwerp, the family also descends from Catoneras, an Indigenous woman identified in an eighteenth-century petition as a sachem associated with Long Island. Later traditions have variously described her as Canarsee, Munsee, Montaukett, or the daughter of a prominent sachem, but those more specific identifications are not all supported by the surviving records. The strongest evidence establishes her as an Indigenous female leader and an ancestor of the Van Tassel family.

The family takes pride in its complete ancestry, including its Slovak, English, Dutch, French, and Indigenous lines. Its history does not depend upon a single ancestor or an isolated family story. Rather, it reflects several documented lines of descent within the interconnected Mohawk, Munsee-speaking, Dutch, French, English, and Abenaki-communities of the Northeast. For more then three hundred years several branches of the family have called Schaghticoke their home.

The most responsible account therefore holds two truths together: substantial Indigenous ancestry is documented through several direct family lines, and the surviving evidence reveals a family shaped by centuries of kinship, intermarriage, migration, and continued residence within the Indigenous homelands of the Hudson–Mohawk Valley, Long Island, the Champlain Valley, southern Québec, and the broader Northeast.

[Documented Indigenous Lineage]

Work

Joseph Bruchac — Awards, Honors, and Filmography

Joe is the founder of the Greenfield Review which  has published over 150 multicultural books and anthologies of  contemporary poetry and fiction, giving voice to the otherwise voiceless  and marginalized. Including, Words from the House of the Dead: An Anthology of Prison Writings from Soledad, Breaking Silence: Asian American Authors (winner of an American Book Award) and Returning the Gift. Joe's poems, articles and stories have appeared in over 500 publications, from Akwesasne Notes and The American Poetry Review to National Geographic Magazine and Parabola.

Appointed as the 2023-2024 Poet Laureate of Saratoga Springs, NY, he just finished he second term for 2025 in this esteemed position. As an ambassador for poetry, the Poet Laureate is expected to promote citizens' awareness of poetry as well as heighten appreciation of the art.  

Joe is a prolific poet and author, who has had over 180 books published. In 1971 his first book of poetry entitled Indian Mountain and Other Poems was published. In 1996, he was awarded the Knickerbocker Award for Juvenile Literature, and is the winner of numerous other awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts writing fellowship and a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship. He later received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas.

Joe worked for three years of volunteer teaching in West Africa from 1966-1969 which led to his becoming friends with some of the best known African writers of the 20th century, including Wole Soyinka, who would later win the Nobel prize for literature, and the Nigerian novelist  Chinua Achebe, returning to Ghana in 1979 to do research for his Ph.D and to Mali in 1992 (with his son James) to research traditional stories related to environmental survival among the Dogon people in the village of Tireli.

"One of my major influences was Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian author. His book Things Fall Apart is a masterpiece of storytelling and an example of how one can draw on one’s own folk culture. Chinua was a close friend and an advisor for my PhD."

Education & Achievements

Joe earned his B.A. from Cornell University, his Master's from Syracuse, and his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the Union Institute. A proud citizen of the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation (Band #1101), Joe's Abenaki (literally, dawn land) ancestry has inspired him to study deeply and write about important aspects of Indigenous traditions, peoples, and experiences in the Americas. 

"If you want to write, write every day.

And then, try to love the process of revision." 

Some of his notable works include Keepers of the Earth and Code Talker selected by TIME as among The 100 Best YA Books of All Time. At 84 winters young, Joe is still constantly reading, training, and learning. With every new book the journey of understanding and sharing begins anew. 

"Indigenous identity as a writer  is a combination of blood, heritage, and deep personal commitment, which  includes connection to your community and your elders.  “Give back at least as much as you are given,” as Stephen Laurent, an Abenaki elder who was a dear friend expressed it to me." 

Joe was also a varsity heavyweight wrestler at Cornell University. For more than five decades, he has also been a devoted student and instructor of the martial arts. He has been awarded the rank of black belt in Penjak Silat and Brazilian jiu-jistu.

He currently trains with his two sons Jesse Bowman, and James Edward at Alliance Saratoga Jiu Jitsu.

"In  addition to that eight years creating and coordinating the Skidmore College University Without Walls (UWW) program at Great Meadow Correctional Facility from 1974-1981, I have also done many writing workshops since 1971 in prisons from Maine to Alaska. Further, for two decades, my late wife Carol and I sent donated poetry books and   magazines to men and women in prison all over the American continent."