When I go on vacation, I always like to buy a book about the place I’m visiting. A few years ago, my wife and I went to the Everglades, and I picked up a copy of Marjory Stoneman Douglas’ The Everglades: River of Grass. Understanding that the green wetlands at Shark Valley were essentially an enormous, shallow, slow-moving river transformed my experience of southern Florida. I would have appreciated the beauty of the Everglades without having read River of Grass, but I doubt I would have understood their unique majesty.

I didn’t read Indians in Eden: Wabankis and Rusticators on Maine’s Mount Desert Island, 1840s-1920s on my last trip to Bar Harbor, but this history by Bunny McBride and Harald E.L. Prins struck me as exactly the sort of mind-bending book I like to bring on vacation. As someone who’s visited Mount Desert Island more times than I can count, I was surprised to discover a text that could totally upend my preconceptions of a familiar place. This one did.

I’d known from prior reading and trips to Bar Harbor’s Abbe Museum that Maine’s indigenous people, the Wabanakis, once made seasonal migrations to Mount Desert Island. What I hadn’t realized was that they continued to do so after MDI had become a high-end vacation resort during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To learn that an Indian encampment (page 100) sprang up every summer on the outskirts of Bar Harbor, with the inhabitants selling baskets, canoes, and moccasins to a generation of Rockefellers, Fords, and Pulitzers, came as news to me. These Native Americans survived by catering to the wealthy rusticators, not just by selling souvenirs and guided canoe trips, but also by performing in “Wild West Shows” that owed more to dime-novel stereotypes than to authentic Wabanaki culture. Meanwhile, their white neighbors were forming fraternal organizations with names like the “Improved Order of Red Men Society.” The rusticators believed they were honoring the Wabanakis; what the Wabanakis thought of tourists running around town in buckskins and war paint can easily (and awfully) be imagined.

As you’re vacationing in the Pine Tree State this summer, I’d encourage you to take along a Maine book. You’ll return home with a deeper understanding of how Maine became the weird, wild, warped, and wonderful place it is. A little local knowledge makes for a better keepsake than a souvenir T-shirt or keychain. I say that from experience.