Vermont Public Docs

Greg and Jordan Camp are the fourth and fifth generations running the Cabot Funeral Home in Woodstock, Vermont, which has been in business for more than a century. Funeral homes can seem so mysterious, like they're in their own world. But at the same time, they're almost unavoidable. They're the place most people go to when there's a death in the family. What is that like to be the person who's he...

July 1st, 2025 marks the 25th anniversary of civil unions in Vermont. This legal alternative to marriage was the first of its kind in the United States. In the Vermont Supreme Court case Baker v. Vermont , the court ruled that the state had no legal basis to discriminate against same-sex couples. If the legislature would not allow same-sex couples to get marriage licenses, lawmakers would have to...

For Tibetan-American artist Migmar Tsering, music and dance are inextricably linked to being Tibetan. Migmar first learned traditional dance in the village of Langkor in the county of Tingri. He was born there almost 3 decades after the invasion of Tibet by communist China in 1950. Since the 1950s, the Tibetan diaspora has expanded, with multiple groups of Tibetans relocating to India and later th...

Since at least the 1870s, people in central Vermont have cut, chiseled, hoisted, polished, and carved local granite, creating monuments, statues, and especially memorial grave markers. The granite industry brought Italian, French, Canadian, Scots, Scandinavian, Irish, Greek, and Spanish workers to the city of Barre, each bringing their own stone carving traditions. Over time, these artisans and th...

“There is a lot of change from the beginning up to now, and we are still learning every day.” The experience of resettling in Brattleboro has changed not only the Afghan women who had to rebuild their lives, but also the people and the town that helped them do it. There are many challenges—a housing shortage, the loss of federal funding that supports refugee programs, pockets of resentment among l...

“My daughters will be raised in America, so their lives will be different from mine.” Some Afghan women in Brattleboro left their country because their husbands had jobs connected to the Afghan military or to the U.S. government evacuation in 2021, which put them in danger. Coming from traditional families, these women focus on the same things in Brattleboro as they did at home: raising their chil...

“Many of us who are here in Brattleboro ... we had a good life in Afghanistan.” Afghan women in their 40s and 50s grew up surrounded by war. They went to school off and on, depending on how much violence was happening in their neighborhoods. They raised children. Many built careers. But those careers put them in danger when the Taliban returned in 2021. Today these women face the double burden of...

“I grew up with all these stories, all this history. How can I accept in one night, everything is changed?” Many young women who came of age during Afghanistan’s 20 years of democracy went to high school and university and were charting their futures when the Taliban took power. Their lives were in danger so they fled. In Afghanistan, they had been academic powerhouses, artists, educators, rising...

“Is any place in the United States of America called Vermont?” As Afghan women left their country and embarked on a journey halfway around the world, they mourned their losses: family, homes, careers, comfort. They mourned their loss of Afghanistan. They landed in Vermont, a place they’d never heard of before. A brand new resettlement agency and a cadre of volunteers were waiting for them. The Afg...

“The day the Taliban took control of our country, how much we cried no one can imagine.” When the fundamentalist Taliban seized power in 2021, Afghan citizens were shocked and terrified. They fled the country for different reasons: their education, jobs, or activism put them in danger; they were connected to the Afghan military or a western government; or all of the above. The U.S. evacuated close...

Dr. Bob Primeau is the only primary care doctor for miles. He has spent his entire career taking care of patients from the day they’re born until the day they die. But his field is changing, and Primeau is nearing retirement age. "At the end of the summer, I'm leaving the primary care practice," Primeau says. "I'll have more time to devote to our local trail network, to play music, maybe even do s...

Homeless Vermonters face many deadly risks. But the state doesn't track how many have died, or what kills them. A first-of-its kind analysis by Vermont Public and Seven Days identified at least 82 people who died either living outside or sheltered in motels between 2021 and 2024. See photos and read more at vermontpublic.org. Support Vermont Public's longform audio storytelling with a donation.

A downtown apartment building stitched Plainfield together. On July 10, floods washed it away. The Heartbreak Hotel was the kind of place where neighbors saw each other every day, where generations of people, from all walks of life, found belonging and someone to wave to in the morning. Twelve people were living there at the time, and they all survived. Most of their beloved cats did not. In the d...

"Uncomfortable conversations need to happen." Raneen Salha and Sarah White discuss their thoughts, feelings and personal connections to the war between Israel and Hamas. See photos and read more at vermontpublic.org. Support Vermont Public's longform audio storytelling with a donation.

More than four years after the COVID-19 pandemic began, the state judiciary is still struggling with an enormous backlog of criminal cases and competing public pressures around how justice should be pursued. To better understand how the system is working, Seven Days and Vermont Public embedded two reporters at the Burlington criminal courthouse for one week. Read the accompanying print story on Ve...

Two Abenaki First Nations are continuing to call for Vermont institutions not to work with state-recognized tribes, and to reconsider the process that led to the state recognizing those groups as Abenaki tribes. Those nations — Odanak and Wôlinak — are receiving a mixed response. 2024-04-02: This story has been updated to more accurately reflect the response of Vermont's state-recognized tribes to...

John Harrison traveled Vermont as a preacher in the 1880s. A racist name in town records preserved his memory. Note: This story contains sensitive material, including racial slurs. Please listen with care.

Ashley Messier is the co-chair of the Corrections Monitoring Committee in the Vermont Legislature, and she’s the reentry services program manager for Vermont Works for Women. She grew up in Essex with an abusive father and with little money, and she found herself repeating the cycle in early adulthood. This is a story about multigenerational poverty and abuse, and the temporary relief of opiates....

Many people don’t want to talk about class, because class differences are the source of cultural division and tension. In this story, Erica talks with old friend Susan Randall, a private investigator based in Vergennes, about the luxuries of growing up upper middle class. "What class are you?" is an occasional series from Vermont Public reporter Erica Heilman. In it, she talks with people from all...

In 2023, around 70% of the total wealth in this country was owned by the top 10% of earners. The lowest 50% of earners only owned 2.5% of the total wealth. In this story, Vermont writer and poet Garrett Keizer, who has written extensively on the history of labor unions, talks about what happens when we address gender and race equity, but we ignore income inequality. Here's Garret Keizer. "What cla...

Stephanie Robtoy works as an account manager at Working Fields, a staffing agency that helps people with barriers gain and maintain a job. She grew up in St. Albans in a huge family of Robtoys, some of whom are pretty notorious in town for criminal activity. In this story, Stephanie talks about what it was like to grow up poor, with a last name that was hard to escape. "What class are you?" is an...

Irfan Sehic and his family fled the war in Bosnia and arrived in Barre when Irfan was 17. He worked a number of jobs, went to college and started his own insurance agency, which he still runs out of his house. And for the last few years, he's been a club soccer coach. Irfan lives with his wife and son in Milton, and in this story, he describes the American class system as he sees it, starting with...

Who gets to decide who is Abenaki? Vermont’s four state-recognized tribes — and the state recognition law — have different definitions and criteria for what it means to be Indigenous than many Indigenous Nations. In this episode, we look at this disconnect, and lay out what’s at stake, including power, money and authority. This is Chapter Three of “Recognized,” a special series from Brave Little S...

After the original group of self-proclaimed Vermont Abenaki failed to gain federal recognition, Vermont lawmakers created a state recognition process of their own. One theory in particular informed the state’s consideration: that Abenaki peoples hid in Vermont to avoid persecution, including statewide eugenics policies. In this episode, we look at recent evidence, as well as older reports, that ca...

Two Abenaki First Nations in Canada contest the legitimacy of the four groups recognized by the state of Vermont as Abenaki tribes. This is a dispute that goes back at least two decades, and has gained more prominence in recent years. In this episode, we trace Abenaki history up to 2003, when Odanak First Nation first denounced Vermont groups claiming to be Abenaki. This is Chapter One of “Recogni...