Preserving a Nation

We are citizens of the U.S., but we are also tribal people,” says Penobscot Nation member Susan Hammond. “We don’t want to assimilate. We’ve been around for thousands of years, and we don’t want to die out as a people.”

Hammond directs the organization Four Directions Development Corporation, which helps tribal members get financing for their homes and businesses.

“On reservations, the tribal land is held in common by tribal members,” Hammond says. “As a result, they don’t typically own the land. Banks and other institutions can’t come in and make loans because they can’t collect collateral. Before Four Directions came along, there were very few housing transactions taking place.”

Negotiating that dual citizenship—economically and culturally—is at the core of tribal life in Maine, especially for those who live on Maine’s four reservations. Part of Hammond’s work is also helping both tribal members and non-Natives see the wisdom of keeping Wabanaki culture alive.

“We want to be thought of as assets to the state of Maine. There’s a richness to our culture and heritage and traditions. The tribes should embrace that and speak about it to the rest of the world,” Hammond says.

From authors to artists, linguists to land-use planners, members of Maine’s four tribes are simultaneously stepping forward into the young century and attempting to preserve what’s best about their past for future generations.

Speaking forth a new dawn

“Today our community is divided between old and new values,” says Allen Sockabasin, the 63-year-old author of An Upriver Passamaquoddy, a memoir of his youth in Washington County. “The old remains in traditional survival mode, while the new is without language, culture, traditions, or historical knowledge about our way of life.”

Sockabasin remembers his childhood at Peter Dana Point as one of near-total isolation from the outside world. He was the second-youngest of 11 children, raised by parents who spoke their native language in the home. “I learned English when I was 12,” he says. “I didn’t learn to read or write until I was 27.”

Sockabasin remembers growing up in the shadow of racism. “The Jesuits taught us that our language was heathenistic,” he says. “Their ultimate goal was to mainstream Native people, who had survived well for 15,000 years in North America.”

But acceptance proved elusive. “As a young boy, you’d go downtown, and people wouldn’t look at you. You weren’t a part of that community.”

Today, in addition to his counseling work with the Wabanaki Mental Health Association (a division of Sweetser), Sockabasin is the author of a children’s book as well as a memoir, and he’s one of the leading activists in keeping the Passamaquoddy language alive.

Sockabasin has developed a text and computer system for transcribing the Passamaquoddy language, which, like other indigenous Indian languages in Maine, has no written form. “We’re talking about a language that’s actively spoken by fewer than 100 people,” Sockabasin says. “During the last century, it was almost shamed out of existence. My people wouldn’t speak their language openly. Our language was the foundation of who we were. Our tradition was always to be welcoming and giving, and to share, not ‘everyone for himself.’ I’m trying not only to preserve our language, but to restore a smile that my people used to have when our language was spoken freely.”

He’s not alone. In December, the University of Maine Press released a 1,200-page Passamaquoddy-Maliseet dictionary, which publisher Michael Alpert describes as “the culmination of more than 30 years of work.” (Passamaquoddy and Maliseet are considered dialects of the same language.) The book is authored by Passamaquoddy tribal elder David A. Francis; Robert M. Leavitt, former director of the Mi’kmaq-Maliseet Institute at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton; and Margaret Apt, community research coordinator and Passamaquoddy language teacher at Eastport’s Shead Memorial High School.

“In my opinion, there’s never been a book published by the university press that’s more important than this one,” Alpert says. The dictionary contains more than 18,000 entries. “Many of the words are used in sentences, and those sentences are full of cultural information,” he says. “You can read this book and really get a sense of who these people are and what they care about.”

The Penobscot language has even fewer surviving speakers. Only a handful of older tribal members can speak the Penobscot language fluently, though children at the Indian Island School now begin language lessons at the age of 5. “We all have a responsibility to learn the language,” says Maria Girouard, director of cultural and historical preservation for The Penobscot Nation.

Like most Penobscots of this generation, Girouard grew up speaking English in a household with English-speaking parents. Now she tries to spend 15 minutes a day practicing the language of her grandparents. “I drive my two teenagers nuts around the dinner table,” she confesses. “We have a chart hanging up in the kitchen with Native terms for the weather, and I talk to them about it, using the words.”

Sockabasin and others are encouraged by the growing number of young people interested in preserving their tribal language. Gabe Paul is a 23-year-old University of Maine graduate with a degree in sociology. He’s spent the past six years learning the Penobscot language, and now teaches at the Indian Island School, the day care center, and the Cultural and Historic Preservation Center.

Paul acknowledges the difficulty of reviving a language that is no longer used in daily conversation. “It’s the same story you hear all the time—people were taught not to learn it. The first step is to know that we have it, and that it’s worth preserving. It’s a process. It’s taken us many years to almost lose our language; it could take twice as long to get it back.”

Sometimes that means borrowing from mainstream American culture. Allen Sockabasin uses music as part of his strategy to help others learn the Passamaquoddy language. Sockabasin is a Hank Williams fan and an accomplished mandolin and guitar player. He’s never forgotten the Catholic hymns he grew up with, either. Today he plays music whenever he can, adapting Passamaquoddy lyrics to old tunes like “Amazing Grace” and “I Saw the Light.”

“Country and western was very popular in many of the Native villages in both the United States and Canada,” he writes in An Upriver Passamaquoddy. “I believe it was the first music from another culture to be embraced by our people.” He still uses that culture-bridging music—along with other styles (including Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog”) and traditional Native storytelling songs—as a means of keeping the language alive while also expanding its influence. “Music breaks down barriers between people,” he says.

Art revival

Recent years have seen a resurgence of traditional arts as well, from baskets to beading to birch bark canoes. Theresa Secord is the executive director of the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance, and a Penobscot. “We began 15 years ago, when we learned there were fewer than a dozen of us under the age of 50,” she says. “We counted about 55 basketmakers statewide, and their average age was 63. At the 10-year mark, five years ago, we had lowered that average age to 43.”

As with Native language revival, the key to preserving the art of Wabanaki basketmaking lies in teaching young. The Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance, whose board of directors includes two members from each of the state’s four tribes, is accomplishing that through a program of apprenticeships and outreach. At workshops in each tribal community, young people are taught the art of basketry “from log to finished basket in two days,” Secord says.

With the advent of the mechanical potato harvester in the 1950s, handpicked potatoes—harvested using strong yet lightweight Native-made baskets—began to become a thing of the past. Today’s baskets, though largely decorative rather than functional, are still made the same way: Long strips of brown ash are peeled from just below the bark and then separated into still-thinner layers. Their bases are tied together with sweetgrass harvested from coastal areas.

Despite a growing non-Native market for Native crafts, the future of Maine Indian basketry remains precarious, now due to a scarcity of materials. Access to coastal sweetgrass (which is also used in smudging rituals) has become more limited, and healthy brown ash trees have become harder to find. Private property issues have made it more difficult for Indians to gather the materials they need. “People just aren’t as generous as they used to be regarding land use,” Secord says.

A separate threat comes from the emerald ash borer, an Asian beetle that was discovered in Michigan in 2002 and has been moving eastward ever since, decimating ash populations. “The brown ash is part of our creation myth,” Secord says. “It’s irreplaceable.”

Spiritual waters

One of the most sweeping efforts at restoring the “irreplaceable” has been a wave of Native-led river restoration projects.

For thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans, Maine’s Native people used the rivers as highways between the sea and the vast, wooded interior. The rivers were more than their roads and a primary food source: They are considered a life force to tribal peoples. As then-Penobscot chief Barry Dana said in a 2002 speech to the Maine Legislature, “Our rivers, our waters, are not just a resource, they are us.”

Though the days of primary travel by canoe and fishnets teeming with salmon are long over, the lives of Maine’s four Wabanaki tribes are still tied to the banks of the Penobscot, St. Croix, Meduxnekeag, and Aroostook Rivers.

“Our cultural and spiritual well-being is tied to the well-being of the ecosystem of the river,” says John Banks, natural resources director for the Penobscot Nation. He is part of the Penobscot River Restoration Project, an ambitious plan to clean up the river and bring back 11 species of seagoing fish. The project is taking place through an unprecedented partnership between the Penobscot Nation and six conservation organizations, including Maine Audubon, the Atlantic Salmon Federation, American Rivers, and the Nature Conservancy.

The Penobscot River Restoration involves purchase and removal of the two dams farthest downriver, and the construction of an upstream fish passage at the Milford Dam, just south of Indian Island, and ongoing efforts to rid the river of toxins that accumulate in the bodies of fish.

The two dams to be removed, the Veazie Dam and the Great Works Dam south of Old Town, are owned by the PPL (Pennsylvania Power and Light) Corporation, which bought them from Bangor Hydro in the 1980s. “When that happened, the dams became a smaller part of the portfolio of a much larger corporation,” Banks says. “Dams come up for re-licensing every 30 or 40 years. They saw the wisdom of sitting down with the tribe and reaching a settlement based on long-term business interests.”

Tribal fishing rights in the river were recognized by the 1980 Land Claims Settlement, but for the past century, few seagoing fish have made it past the dams. The Penobscots and their partners in the restoration project established a trust to raise money to purchase the two dams, which PPL has agreed to sell. A letter of intent to purchase has been signed, and Banks anticipates that the permitting process leading to decommission and removal will begin this summer. If all goes well, the dams should be removed “in a couple of years,” he says.

Restoring a free-flowing river below the Milford Dam will enable people once again to paddle from Indian Island to the sea for the first time in over 200 years.

Of course, no one is going back to subsistence fishing. Maine’s Native people are looking resolutely forward, and a river restored to fish- and swim-ability is part of that larger vision. Indian Island sits in a beautiful spot where the river splits into several channels, creating a group of islands. On a sparkling sunny day in early October, just upriver from a spot where construction work on a new dock and public landing area had begun, over 150 students and teachers at the Indian Island School participated in a giant “living painting” of a Penobscot paddler in a traditional birch bark canoe. Blue-clad human beings played the part of drops of water to create a piece of art designed to be viewed from an aerial perspective. The project was the culmination of a four-day residency led by Oregon conceptual artist, author, and educator Daniel Dancer.

It’s just one of the latest examples of Maine’s oldest communities emerging from years of isolation to become valued partners in creating a brighter future. “You’re starting to see more and more of our youth going on to higher education, and more women in leadership positions,” Susan Hammond says. “The tribes are taking the lead in innovative alternative energy projects, healthcare issues. The communities are changing, and becoming more vibrant. We all have our unique culture and heritage.”

And they’re ready to share it with the rest of us, as evidenced by the recent proliferation of books by Native authors. Donna Loring recently participated in a gathering of Native writers on Indian Island. “When has that ever happened?” she says.

“When I was a boy, I never imagined having such influence,” Allen Sockabasin says. “I never anticipated fan mail from kids—it’s wonderful. It’s the kids, both Native and white, who are going to carry on our work after we’re gone.”