The First Adirondackers: 12,000 Years of Indigenous Peoples in the Adirondack Upland (Globe Pequot/North Country Books, 2025) challenges the widespread, long-standing belief that the Adirondacks of Northern New York were uninhabited before the arrival of European colonizers.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. Through local indigenous traditions and supporting findings by natural science, authors David Fadden and Curt Stager expose, document, and honor the long human presence in the Adirondacks, helping not only to redefine what it means to be an Adirondacker, but also contributing to a more complete understanding of America itself.
Like the mosaic of public and private lands that it describes, The First Adirondackers is a cultural crossroads in which Indigenous and Western worldviews meet, both figuratively and in the personal lives of the co-authors.
Together, they use their different cultural backgrounds and professional expertise to reveal the human history of the “Adirondack uplands,” the region they define as everything between 1,000 feet elevation and the top of Mount Marcy, a mile above sea level.
Fadden, a storyteller and painter, uses traditional oral history and art to capture the humanity and vitality of Indigenous peoples of the region.
Stager, a natural science professor at Paul Smith’s College, explains in scientific terms how people are elementally linked to the land, species, and waters through his own research on the environmental history of the region and by documenting more than three dozen locations where materials of Indigenous origin have been found.
The book challenges the predominant Eurocentric narrative of the Adirondacks, by offering a fuller, more complete history.
Read more about Northern New York.
Book Purchases made through this Amazon link support the New York Almanack’s mission to report new publications relevant to New York State.
Here is a long-overdue book that I will add to my Adirondack bookcase or library. As an owner of a log cabin in the central Adirondacks, I have found Native American implements on the shore of my remote lake, know of the history of Inlet, NY, where Arrowhead Park is one site of multiple finds documenting an early Indian trail and settlement on the shore of Fourth Lake, as well as the documented finds of arrowheads atop Cascade Mountain in Big Moose Station, written by Forest Ranger Bill Marleau. Look forward to this read.