SWEETGRASS MEMORY
by Patricia Pierce Erikson
As a child, I would travel with my father to Sebago Lake or Moosehead Lake for summer fishing trips. We would always stop at the trading posts or general stores that beckoned to travelers from a crossroad corner. There always seemed to be a wooden Indian towering over me from the leaning porches of these shops. On the shelves inside, beaded headbands in the Plains Indian style tempted me to wear them back to our camp so that I could better experience "the Maine wilderness." By that point, my imagination had already been fed by Girl Scout outings at places with names like Camp Pesqawasawassis. There, huddled together with other girls in canvas tents, we had listened to nighttime tales of Indian ghosts that kept us from sleeping.
Beyond the place names, ghost stories, and plastic kitsch, where were the Native people anyway? I spent my entire childhood in Maine, yet I had never met a Native American person nor learned any Native American history, until I went to graduate school in California. I thought that "Indians" were either communities that didn't survive into the 1800s or were people who lived west of the Mississippi. After graduate school, when I moved back home to Maine and onto Peaks Island, I discovered that the island was crisscrossed by a path that everyone called the "Indian Trail" yet island history was silent about Native American presence here, in the past or present. I recognized that this silence was created by the "invisibility" that has plagued Native Americans in the East for more than a century.
One evening at a public gathering at the Fifth Maine, our island history museum, I was visiting with an elderly woman who was reminiscing about her childhood on Peaks Island. As she sat on a folding chair with her slender hands folded in her lap, she took me back to the early 1900s. In those days, Peaks Island hosted several grand hotels, roller skating rinks, theaters, and an amusement park. Known as "Coney Island of Maine," Peaks Island was far from an isolated coastal community. Travelers could book direct boat trips to Peaks from Boston or New York. When they weren't patronizing the many amusements, they could stroll along the crowded wooden boardwalk that looked out over Portland Harbor. Little shops lined the boardwalk, elbowing each other and vying for the tourists' business. Mrs. Hussey was a child then, one of many island children who lived amid this hubbub.
When I asked Mrs. Hussey if she remembered any Native American people on Peaks, it triggered a memory of an encounter she had had, down by this boardwalk. Her eyes looked beyond me, seeing the waterfront all those years ago and she said, yes, she remembered Indians:
"I remember the bowling alley down front. I was just a small child and I remember going down to the beach to the right of that bowling alley. There was a seal in their boat down there. Of course, I wouldn't have anything to do with them. I had a lot of ancestors killed by Indians so I know what they look like. They didn't dress in fake costumes. But I know what they look like. They used to come by boat and come up to a little storefront. It was just a little cubby, really, with no name on it. They sold their baskets there. They would just close up the storefront at night and go. But I still remember the smell of that sweetgrass - oh!"
Although her story was short, it was intense, packed full of links to other stories. I decided to pursue these links and break the silence on Native American history in Casco Bay. Just as Mrs. Hussey's family history contains accounts of "a lot of ancestors killed by Indians," stories of "Indian massacres" are frequently woven into the town histories of Maine. Although most written histories refer to these violent encounters, few help us to understand that it was most often about land -- who had the right to use it and occupy it, and the betrayal, confusion, and desperation that led to its transfer.
In the late 1600s, Abenaki peoples responded to incursions upon their traditional territory by attacking some of the farms located in what is now Portland, killing settlers, taking captives, and destroying property. This almost succeeded in staying the flood of settlers. By the 1750s, however, settlers had returned in force. Organized hunting parties sought to chase down and kill Abenaki families. Bounties were being offered to settlers for the scalps of Abenaki men, women, and children (men's scalps winning the highest price). In the face of these threats, some Abenaki families moved inland and northward seeking safety. Others stayed to struggle for land rights and to carve out a living by tentative association with village populations. At this time, mapmakers began to remove Abenaki settlements from the artographic landscape, replacing most Native place names with English or French names, or the names of notable leaders, such as Skittery Gusset. Writers spoke romantically of "Indians" as vanishing race. The invisibility problem began here.
For Mrs. Hussey, the pungeant, vanilla-like smell of sweetgrass wafted across nine decades from that storefront on the Peaks Island boardwalk.
For the century prior to Mrs. Hussey's birth, Abenaki peoples were using sweetgrass, and splints of brown ash and a handful of other trees to make their way in an economy that they did not control. They had been pushed from their traditional land and prohibited from using their hunting and fishing grounds. Making baskets to sell to tourists was an important way for Native Americans in Maine to honor traditional skills and values, yet generate badly needed cash. Basketmaking skills once used to make baskets that held berries and clams or caught fish and eels were applied to weaving fancy baskets, molded into pocketbooks, hat boxes, handkerchief holders and fans to suit the tastes and needs of mainstream society.
Resorts were ideal destinations for Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Micmac, and Maliseet basketweavers, who were all looking for places where tourists eager for souveneirs would gather in large numbers. "Coney Island of Maine" (Peaks Island) joined Poland Springs, Old Orchard Beach, and many others as desirable locations for basket sales. Weavers travelled with their families from place to place, camping as they went and selling their craft. The collections of many museums now hold examples of these baskets, often woven of ash splints and decorated with sweetgrass braids. Today Native American weavers in Maine still value the skill and artistry of their ancestors by making baskets and passing on the tradition.
The basketweavers that Mrs. Hussey encountered as a child had traveled by canoe to sell their baskets. And, they had caught a seal along the way. Archaeologists have shown through their excavations that several thousands of years prior to the arrival of Europeans, the ancestors of modern Abenaki people lived through efficient use of the natural resources of the forests, streams, lakes, and ocean of Maine. They also travelled and traded extensively with other tribes as far away as Newfoundland and Ohio. Prized pieces of quartz obtained from such great distances ended up tipping the spears that they used to hunt seals. Canoes were one of the most efficient and reliable means for plying the lakes, streams, and rough coastal waters, except when ice created the need for toboggans. Lightweight birchbark canoes that could be easily portaged around rapids and falls and between rivers and lakes were favored to the east of the Kennebec River. Dugout canoes, carved and burned from the trunk of a single tree, were used further west where large birches were unavailable. With the help of thesecanoes and cordage woven from eel skin or plant fibers, Abenaki peoples crafted nets and fishing lines and added a wide variety of fish to their diet.
Native Americans in Maine today contribute to the local and regional economy by holding permanent and seasonal jobs, running businesses, and
supporting cultural tourism. They also work to counteract a long history which often reduces their presence to Indian massacres in the 17th and 18th century - massacres that few recognize were retaliatory rather than "first strike" offenses. Some do this by establishing their own community museums, as the Passamaquoddy and Penobscot Nations have, in order to tell their own stories to the public. Others honor and share cultural traditions, such as music, dance, and basketry with those who wish to learn. Still others continue the struggle to regain traditional lands and the rights to relate to and use the natural resources there.
If you decide to explore Peaks Island, notice the expanses of cattails and flocks of ducks in the marshes, the abundance of chicory plants and
rosehips, and the field of seaweed on the rocks at low tide, all natural resources that were highly valued. Think of how the clams, mussels, snails, sea urchins, and seals surrounding the islands of Casco Bay provided generously for the indigenous peoples who once lived here and are still among us today. You may wish to join me in learning more about past and present Native American peoples by exploring some of the resources below.
Patricia Pierce Erikson is a cultural anthropologist who specializes in Native American Studies and Museum Anthropology. She has taught at Smith College and the University of Southern Maine and has recently published "Voices of a Thousand People: The Makah Cultural and Research Center" with University of Nebraska Press. She would like to thank Twain Braden and Bunny McBride for helpful suggestions on an earlier version of Sweetgrass Memory.
Links to many northeast tribal web sites
http://millennianet.com/slmiller/abenaki/links.htm
Fifth Maine Museum, Peaks Island
http://home.att.net/~fifthmaine.peaks/
Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance
http://www.umaine.edu/hudsonmuseum/miba/
Maine Historical Society
http://www.mainehistory.org/
Penobscot Nation Language Project
http://www.umaine.edu/hudsonmuseum/penobsco1.htm
Tree and Tradition: Brown Ash and Maine Native Basketmaking exhibit
http://www.umaine.edu/hudsonmuseum/tree.htm
Penobscot Indian Nation
http://www.penobscotnation.org/
Micmac, Maliseet Nations
http://12.39.209.165/xp/EDAPublic/PDF/21Maine.pdf.
Gulf of Maine Aquarium site on historic importance of waterways
http://octopus.gma.org/streams/roots.html
For further reading:
Bourque, Bruce
2001 Twelve Thousand Years: American Indians in Maine. Lincoln and
London: University of Nebraska Press.
Calloway, Colin
1991 Dawnland Encounters: Indians and Europeans in Northern New
England. Hanover: University Press of New England.
Eckstorm, Fannie Hardy
1980 Old John Neptune and Other Maine Indian Shamans. Orono:
University of Orono Press.
Ghere, David L.
1993 The "Disappearance" of the Abenaki in Western Maine: Political
Organization and Ethnocentric Assumptions. American Indian Quarterly
12(2): 193-207.
Harley, J. B.
New England Cartography and the Native Americans IN American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture, and Cartography in the Land of Norumbega, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 287-313.
McBride, Bunny
1995 Molly Spotted Elk: A Penobscot in Paris. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
1999 Women of the Dawn. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
McMullen, Ann
What's Wrong With This Picture? Context, Conversion, Survival, and the Development of Regional Native Cultures and Pan-Indianism in Southeastern New England. In Enduring Traditions: The Native Peoples of New England, Laurie Weinstein, ed.
Noble, Mildred
1997 Sweet Grass. Mashpee, Mass: C. J. Mills.
Speck, Frank
[1940] 1970 Penobscot Man: Life History of a Forest Tribe in Maine.
New York: Octagon Books.
Thoreau, Henry David
1972 The Maine Woods. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University P