Greg Jalbert is a writer and former Maine Guide who grew up along the Allagash River in northern Maine. He now lives in Colorado, where he writes about wilderness, family legacy and the cultural history of French-speaking communities in the St. John Valley.

In 2018, the Allagash Wilderness Waterway Foundation published “Storied Lands & Waters,” a document designed to honor the cultural and ecological legacy of the Allagash River. It was a chance to recognize those who carved out lives of meaning and permanence along its banks — Scots-Irish and Acadian-Québécois families who endured isolation, brutal winters and hard labor to build something lasting.

My family was among hundreds of working-class immigrant families who wrestled a living from that raw, unforgiving wilderness. Brutal cold split rafters. Ice clawed through chinks. Hunger taught us thrift. Hard ground taught us patience. We forged tools from scrap, warmth from rock maple and meaning from silence.

The foundation’s publication echoes Maine’s callous indifference to immigrant odysseys, including 35 years of triumph and tragedy as my great-grandparents established a farm above Allagash Falls in 1870 — alongside Joseph’s brother Fleurent, Helen’s sister Susan and neighboring O’Learys and Moirs.

Their lives swung from joy to grief without warning. My grandfather, Willard Sr., recalled flying up a snow-packed tote road with his brothers in a sleigh harnessed to a bull moose. He was 5 when his mother called him and 10 siblings to her bedside as she lay dying from childbirth complications.

The document excludes the story of cultural heroes like my grandfather, who balanced on a black spruce log through the Long Lake Dam sluice gate — a 14-foot plunge — without losing his hat. He killed two charging bears with an ax. Lumber barons depended on him to lead log drives from the deep woods before water levels dropped and stranded timber up and down the river.

Later, he rose to legend as the “Old Guide,” running tent camps on Round Pond — outposts of canvas and cedar pitched at the mercy of storms and bears. The Old Guide earned barely enough for his family to scrape by — paid not in coin, but in solitude, in self-reliance and in the sacred trust of those he guided.

His sons — my father, Robert, and my uncle, Willard Jr. — returned from World War II like many in the St. John Valley: determined to lift their parents out of poverty and restore their dignity.

Without a lease the landowner refused to grant, they built sporting camps by sweat and grit. The Old Guide cut the trees, while the brothers dragged 500-pound logs down the ridge to the lakeshore. They ferried lumber, windows, doors, beds and stoves 30 miles upriver by canoe and outboard motor, portaging around Allagash Falls. What they built was a bloodline made visible. Dignity made permanent.

And yet “Storied Lands & Waters” makes no mention of Bob and Willard’s accomplishments, including working with U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and state lawmakers to balance scenic preservation with cultural continuity within a state park.

To erase my father and uncle — while ignoring my repeated efforts to correct the record — is more catastrophic than their tragic deaths: my father in a plane crash and my uncle in a car accident. The exclusion isn’t just editorial oversight. It’s a covert form of cultural extermination.

The foundation’s cultural assault stretches back more than a century. In the early 1900s, the Ku Klux Klan marched through French Catholic towns in Maine. In 1919, the state legislature criminalized the use of French in public schools.

For families like mine — Acadian, Québécois, Catholic — the law wasn’t just an attack on language. It was forced assimilation. Generations were mocked, punished and shamed out of our native tongue. The bridge between generations collapsed. Oral histories vanished.

As Milan Kundera wrote, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

I apprenticed year-round with my father, uncle and grandfather. They taught me how to run a canoe and outboard along narrow channels, to stalk deer so quietly we startled the trees and to know by scent in the air when trout would rise. What I inherited wasn’t just skill. It was reverence.

Committed to preserving our cultural odyssey, I’m building a public archive — a living record rooted in film, letters, interviews, photographs and publications. Every family erased from the record should consider doing the same. Only by preserving our immigrant experience can we resist the violence of exclusion.

The Allagash runs through us still — cold, clear, eternal. It carries the memory of those who paddled canoes through mist, cast flies into shadowed pools and built lives farming hard ground, cutting timber and dedicating themselves to family. We remember. And we will not allow the world to forget us.