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Wabanaki

Indian Mascots: Maine and the Wabanaki

March 30, 2023
by Peter Feinman

On February 21st, the Atlantic Black Box (ABB) hosted an online film screening of “Fighting Indians” followed by a conversation with filmmakers Mark Cooley and Derek Ellis and Passamaquoddy language-keeper Dwayne Tomah. According to its website, ABB.is a “grassroots historical recovery project that empowers communities throughout New England to research, reveal and  begin reckoning with the region’s complicity in the slave trade and the global economy of enslavement while recentering the stories of its Black and Indigenous communities.”

The presentation drew over 250 people which I consider to be a lot. A few days later there was a follow-up conversation which drew 30 people. We divided into 5 groups of six with half my group being from outside Maine.

The impetus for the movie was the decision by the State of Maine passing on May 16th, 2019, An Act to Ban Native American Mascots in All Public Schools, which ABB claims was the first legislation of its kind in the country.

The film “Fighting Indians” chronicles the last and most contentious holdout in that struggle, the homogeneously white Skowhegan High School, known for decades as “The Home of the Indians.” This is the story of a small New England community forced to reckon with its identity, its sordid history, and future relationship with its Indigenous neighbors. It is the story of a small town divided against the backdrop of a nation divided, where the “mascot debate” exposes centuries-old abuses while asking if reconciliation is possible. (ABB)

The framework for the movie was a series of school board meetings, sometimes contentious, where the school board gradually shifted from maintaining the Indian mascot to removing it. The film included the board meetings themselves, interviews particularly with some Wabanaki, historical textual screens about horrific events in colonial times, the Washington Redskins, Buffalo Bill, Indian boarding schools, and a local baseball player Louis Sockalexis who preceded Jackie Robinson by decades and caused the Cleveland baseball team in 1915 to name itself “Indians” in his honor.

The sentiments of the filmmakers were evident throughout.

Here are my thoughts about the film.

FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS

Friday Night Lights is a book, movie, and TV series about the place of high school football in a fictional town in Texas (but based on a real one). While its ratings weren’t high, Friday Night Lights became part of American vocabulary for evoking the significance and importance of small-town football in the identity of a community. Part of its appeal was it showcasing its place as part of the very fabric of the community.

Election Results: Amazon versus Hallmark November 27, 2018

Friday Night Lights: Risking Lives for the Dow May 21, 2020

I didn’t get the sense from the filmmakers that they appreciated the role of Friday Night Lights in small-community America. Rather it was somewhat derisive of the Americans with their century old traditions about the high school.

PALEOINDIANS

By contrast the Wabanaki claim of having been in the area for 10,000 years was accepted on face value. For me the claims of having been in the land for 10,000 years demands the same scrutiny as does any other such claims. I do not know if there has been any archaeological work involving Paleoindians in Maine but if there has been it should have been mentioned in the film. In addition, if such people have been discovered, then one would need to substantiate a link between those people thousands of years ago and the Wabanaki today.

Such considerations also lead to the question of the Wabanaki historical legacy. At what point did they start to refer to themselves as having been in the land for 10,000 years. If one were to examine the records from colonial times, would one find reference to a Wabanaki claim to having been in the land for 10,000 years? Was such a claim made in the 17th century? Was such a claim made in the 18th century? Was such a claim made in the 19th century? How about the 20th? It seems to be that the Wabanaki learned this number from Americans and incorporated it into their own heritage stories.

WABANAKI/EUROPEAN-AMERICAN HISTORY

According to the Wabanaki website:

The Wabanaki Confederacy, translated to “People of the Dawn,” was unified in 1606. The confederation was comprised of the principal nations, Abenaki, Micmac, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy and Penobscot. At the time these tribes came from present day Maine and eastern Canada. of the territory that would become Maine in 1820 and eastern Canadian tribes. 

The Wabanaki Confederacy played a key role in supporting the colonials of the American Revolution against King George. The Treaty of Watertown of 1776 formalized the relationship. The Treaty was signed by the Micmac and Passamaquoddy tribes, two of the Wabanaki Confederacy’s members. General George Washington expressed his appreciation for the alliance in a letter.

Despite the tribes’ support of the colonials the favor of support was not returned after the war. During the time of the Wabanaki Confederacy (1606-1862) and beyond the Wabanaki people were radically decimated due to many decades of warfare, but also because of famines and devastating epidemics of infectious disease. 

This information was not in the film, only the atrocities were. But consider this passage from a book review of Andrea Smalley of Snowshoe Country: An Environmental and Cultural History of Winter in the Early American Northeast by Thomas Wickman (American Historical Review April 2020):

In the First Anglo-Wabanaki War of 1675-1678…the English carried out a preemptive early winter massacre against the Narragansetts, signaling a frightening departure from their previous military tactics. The initial success of [the] colonists’ wintertime attack, however was answered in resounding fashion in both the First and Second Anglo-Wabanaki Wars. Indians employed a brutal attritional winter strategy against the colonists, taking captives, killing livestock, and burning buildings…. Wabanaki independence and autonomy remained generally unscathed throughout the seventeenth century, in large part due to their continued wintertime mobility.

Eventually, the colonists learned the ways of the snowshoe that provided the Wabanaki an edge. They then turned the weapon against the Wabanaki. “English settlers erased from memory the decades-long context for winter power, along with the Native Americans who had once skillfully wielded it.”

It would seem between the snowshoe and the baseball glove/bat, it should be possible to create a better logo in the event one wanted that draws from local history.

According to an article in my local newspaper in New York on October, 12, 2022, most schools in Maine fall short on teaching Wabanaki history. The study by the Maine Department of Education reported that the decades-old law requiring such teaching in the ten school districts was not being fulfilled. The Main Indian Tribal State Commission joined in the report.

WHAT SHOULD BE DONE?

In the Q&A following the screening of the film, I asked about education. I was told that the curriculum is under development. The article from October 2022 gave the same answer I heard in February 2023. What happens when it finally is developed remains to be seen. Will it be integral to the existing curriculum or stand-alone modules that teachers may or may not teach? Will the Wabanaki be treated as separate from American history or as part of American history? Decisions on what to teach in the classroom are made locally in Maine. The state provides resources on its website. I didn’t see anything about the training of teachers once the curriculum is created.

A bigger question is the reconciliation between competing views. During the Q&A and in the breakout session a few days later, I heard mention of civil discourse and of the need to practice when the community is so divided. Such conversations and dialog were considered essential to healing the divide which existed. Did the film contribute to the “reconciliation” ABB mentioned above asking if it is possible.

In this blog I have referred to the film as a “film” and not a “documentary.’ That choice was deliberate. I characterize it as a sermon. My guess based on my limited contact with the audience is that the film was preaching to the choir. It was not an attempt to reach across the aisle or to engage people with the opposite point of view. It evinced no attempt at reconciliation. That would require a different film than the one I saw.

Museum History: From Maine to the Met to the Erie Canal

July 22, 2019
by Peter Feinman
https://www.amazon.com/Nostalgic-Reproduction-Barnums-Museum-Circus/dp/B00LMILP7Q

Museums have a history, too. Museums today the repositories of historical artifacts available to scholars and the general public alike. However that was not always so. There is a history of how museums came to be what they are today. This topic was the subject of two presentations at conferences in June: “Entertainments at Taverns and Long Rooms in New England, 1700-1900” at Historic Deerfield and in the keynote address at the Massachusetts History Alliance conference at Holy Cross. In addition, there is an article in the current issue of Near Eastern Archaeology about the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 19th century that directly relates to this topic even though the specific artifacts in question are from overseas.

MUSEUMS ON THE ERIE CANAL CORRIDOR, 1820-1836
Paul E. Johnson, University of South Carolina

Abstract: In early 1820 there were no museums in New York west of Albany. By 1836 there were permanent museums in Utica (1820), Geneva (1830), Syracuse (c. 1830), Oswego (1836), Auburn (1832), Rochester (1825), Buffalo (1829), and Niagara Falls, Canada (1833). I…will focus on the museum of William Stowell and Justin Bishop at Rochester. It is well documented and its origins in New Haven, its itineracy before moving west, and its long tenure in Rochester permits discussion of the full sweep of early nineteenth-century museum history.

The upstate museums varied considerably, but they had much in common. First, none of them received support from governments or learned societies. They relied on ticket sales to stay in business. All maintained collections of minerals, stuffed birds and animals, paintings, and local curiosities. They used them to provide a respectable setting for variety acts ranging from trick dogs to giants and dwarfs to Indian war dances to demonstrations of laughing gas.

Professional entertainers drew visitors, but the principal everyday attraction was wax figures. While Charles Willson Peale [of mastodon fame in Orange County, New York] used wax figures solely as mannequins for his costume collection, the Boston and New York museums followed the lead of Madame Tussaud. She filled her London museum with kings and queens, poets, generals, and other notables. They were posed in quiet elegant surroundings. Museum patrons spoke softly and minded their manners.

Early seaport museums did not try to thrill visitors with their wax galleries. They tended to portray violence: Louis XVI preparing for the guillotine or Aaron Burr leaving the scene after mortally wounding Alexander Hamilton. Waxworks in early museums were part of the furniture of the room and not stand-alone attractions.

The western museums were less decorous. First they displayed most of their figures in tableau and not as individuals. The Rochester Museum put these groups behind glass. This action transformed the visitors into an audience that had not wished to join the scenes of Richard M. Johnson killing Tecumseh, an American officer who is killing an Indian who is scalping a boy, Chief Black Streak killing a settler, and Andrew Jackson killing Black Streak. Few sources describe the wax tableau in detail. Those that do reveal that the museums played up the violence. In Rochester, Othello was stabbing (not smothering Desdemona).

Finally, the upstate museums anticipated P. T. Barnum and hoaxed their patrons. When the Syracuse Museum burned down in 1834, customers discovered that the great sea turtle was made of leather and painted, and that the anaconda was a long sleeve stuffed with cotton. Rochester museum-goers always doubted the three-foot oyster shell. Patrons leaving the museum passed a picture of two donkeys facing each other. A caption read “We Three Will Meet Again.” A customer reported that he felt both cheated and entertained.

In his presentation, Johnson described museums as peaceful places but not scientific. But he also said the sensationalism of the wax figures were a chamber of horrors meant to cause children to scream: they show the moment the husband’s ax strikes the wife’s head! Museums were not educational as much as they were entertainment. The Canal Museum plied the waters of the Erie Canal showing its wares much as Showboat would do on the Mississippi but without the live performers.

DISCOMFORT AND RENEWAL: THE ABBE MUSEUM (MAINE)
Cinnamon Catlin-Legutko, President/CEO, Abbe Museum

Catlin-Legutko delivered the keynote address at the Massachusetts History Alliance conference. Her theme was the dismantling of the institutional racism of her museum.  According to the museum website:

One mission, two locations – Inspiring new learning about the Wabanaki Nations with every visit

In recent years, the Abbe has grown from a small trailside museum, privately operated within Acadia National Park, to an exciting contemporary museum in the heart of downtown Bar Harbor. In 2013, the Museum became the first and only Smithsonian Affiliate in the state of Maine. 

At the Abbe’s downtown museum, visitors find dynamic and stimulating exhibitions and activities interspersed with spaces for quiet reflection. The history and cultures of the Native people in Maine, the Wabanaki, are showcased through changing exhibitions, special events, teacher workshops, archaeology field schools, and workshops for children and adults.

From spring through fall, the Abbe’s historic trailside museum at Sieur de Monts Spring continues to offer visitors a step back in time to early 20th century presentations of Native American archaeology in Maine.

Catlin-Legutko referred to her museum as having been a colonial museum with a troublesome relationship with the Wabanaki. The museum exhibits were sterile display cases. The museum tended to homogenize the multiple Indian nations and tribes of Maine into one individual group. One might think from the presentation at the museum that it was referring to an extinct people.

For the Indian audience, the visit was painful. They had no rapport with the museum.

The museum board was elitist and white.

Under Catlin-Legutko’s stewardship the Abbe Museum underwent a “decolonizing” program. Now the term pre-history was out [technically the term “prehistoric” refers to a pre-writing people although the popular usage is different]. Now a place of privilege is given to the Indian history. They are not simply a people who were removed. Archaeological worked was stopped until new protocols could be developed. The conversations within the board and between the board and Indians were “difficult.”

In the Q&A, someone asked about DNA research. Apparently now everybody wants to be “native.” There is a romanticization in being connected to a vanishing race. This question and answer directly relates the topic of Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day, a topic to which I shall return.

My own question was about education. What is taught about the Wabanaki? Catlin-Legutko acknowledged the issue of the state-mandated curriculum. The museum has increased teacher training, school contacts, and posting curriculum on its website.

Other presentations from the Massachusetts History Alliance conference will be covered in future blogs.

THE METROPOLITIAN MUSEUM DISPLAYS IN THE 1870s

The article in question is by Ann-Marie Knoblauch: “The Mainstream Media and the ‘Shocking Bad Art’ from Cyprus: 1870s New York Reacts to the Cesnola Collections” (Near Eastern Archaeology 82 2019 67-74). While there are vast differences in the story at the Met and the Abbe, there are similarities as well. One obvious similarity is in the questionable means for obtaining the objects in the first place. One obvious difference is the international competition for objects in which the Met participated against museums in England and France whereas this was less of an issue in Maine.

One area in common was the putdown of both the Wabenaki and the Cypriots. The article refers to the ideal standard of beauty with which the museums operated: it was based on the Greek art of classical and Hellenistic periods [before and after Alexander the Great]. No surprise there. But this shows that “white” civilizations could be perceived as substandard as well.

The display of the objects at the Met was overwhelming and sterile although that word was not used in the article. As reported in the New York Herald (August 4, 1878), the public response was one of apathy. Luigi Palma di Cesnola responded by besmirching the New York audience. Again as reported by the New York Herald:

It is that unfortunate word “museum” that the General [Cesnola] attributes in a great measure the lack of popularity of the institution. To the scholar “museum” means “temple of the museums,” but to the untraveled New Yorker it means Barnum, mermaids, wooly horses and Bowery shows of fat women exhibited by shouting ruffians to the sound of a hurdy-gurdy.

So when did museums stop meaning Barnum and become the educational and scientific institutions it means today…while still being entertaining?