LEWISTON — Bates College Associate Professor Joseph Hall will give the talk, “What Does Androscoggin Mean?” at the annual meeting of the Androscoggin Historical Society on Tuesday, May 23, at Marco’s Restaurant, 12 Mollison Way.

Hall is researching the history of Wabanakis, the collective name for the Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Mi’kmaq and Maliseet tribes and other peoples indigenous to Maine and the Canadian Maritimes. He is especially interested in the ways that Wabanakis cultivated their ties to their homelands, even as European-American colonists dispossessed them of most of that territory.

“My favorite class is a course on the history of Wabanakis in Maine,” Hall noted. “Students are almost always surprised to learn that Maine has Native-American inhabitants, and they are even more surprised to learn that Wabanakis continue to play a prominent role in our state.”

Hall, in partnership with Bates students and Wabanaki scholars, has developed a map of Wabanaki place names for the western part of Maine. As he will discuss during his talk, these names describe how Wabanakis made this place their home. In some circumstances, they also describe how Wabanakis were making claims to the land that the English thought they were purchasing.

Hall received his Bachelor of Arts at Amherst College and his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He teaches courses at Bates College about colonial North America, the Revolutionary War, environmental history and Native American history.

He is the author of a book exploring how European and Native American understandings of trade and gift-giving shaped the history of the Southeast between 1350 and 1740, “Zamumo’s Gifts: Indian-European Exchange in the Colonial Southeast.”

The annual business meeting will begin at 5:30 p.m., followed by a social time. Tickets for the dinner, which starts at 6:30 p.m., are $20 for members and $25 for nonmembers. Reservations must be made by Friday, May 19.

FMI, reservations: 207-784-0586.

Joseph Hall