Dawnland en · PROPN
Etymology
From dawn + land. In reference to New England, calque of Abenaki Wôbanaki, see Abenaki for more. In reference to Japan, from the Fandom site "The Anglish Moot", a calque of Japanese 日本.
Meanings
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A real or mythical place where the dawn first breaks and the day begins, from a given perspective or frame of reference.
the damsel Bolina, […] [and] the nymph Arethusa [prayed and] Diana opened a secret passage for her under the earth and sea, […] All which^([sic]) merely means, if we may believe Sir G. Cox, "that she fled to the Dawnland where Eos closes as she begins the day, and where the sun again greets the love whom he has lost."
1887, John Holmes Agnew, Walter Hilliard Bidwell, The Eclectic Magazine, page 466:
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New England, in Native American (especially Abenaki) contexts. (Sometimes particularly with regard to it being the homeland of the Abenaki, and thus sometimes functionally meaning "Abenaki". Occasionally uncapitalized: dawnland.)
Dawnland Encounters : Indians and Europeans in Northern New England (Hanover, N.H .: University Press of New England, 1991), 12.
2003, Historical New Hampshire:[see title]
2014 September 1, Siobhan Senier, Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing from New England, U of Nebraska Press, →ISBN, page 14:... tension in the Dawnland. Three times since 1675 the Abenaki had pushed English settlers out of the region, which they claimed […]
2017 January 1, Jeffers Lennox, Homelands and Empires: Indigenous Spaces, Imperial Fictions, and Competition for Territory in Northeastern North America, 16901763, University of Toronto Press, →ISBN, page 81:
- Japan.