Award-Winning, Inspirational, Standard-bearing: Malaga Island exhibit closes this weekend

Malaga Island descendant Marnie Darling Voter speaks to Thornton Academy students

If you haven't yet seen the Maine State Museum's exhibit Malaga Island, Fragmented Lives, then run -- don't walk -- to view this exceptional project before it closes this weekend. In prior articles going back to 2009, I've shared behind-the-scenes stages of this culture history project whose success has been bringing people together, encouraging them to see the world in a new way, and creating the possibility for an alternative future full of healing. This is everything a museum should do. Apparently, the American Association for State and Local History couldn't agree more because they've just given the exhibit an Award of Merit, as well as a prestigious History in Progress Award. Curator Kate McBrien explained that less than 5% of the national Award of Merit awardees receive the History in Progress Award.

I can think of no better way to describe the power of this project than to share what I saw when over forty middle school students from Thornton Academy in Saco, Maine visited the exhibit. When I designed the gallery-based educational program, I wanted the students to experience inquiry-based "fieldwork." This was an approach that I worked with at the Washington State History Museum's History Lab and online lesson plans whose development predated Stanford's Reading Like a Historian project. Drawing from prior program experience, the Malaga Island design concept cast the students as archaeologists/historians who pursue research questions, and their imagination, by exploring the primary resources on display - historic photographs, archaeological artifacts, and archival documents. From this gallery program, and the classroom-based lesson plans, students could learn about civil rights, race, social justice, environmental history, as well as hone their critical thinking skills. Sounds good, right? But to see the students eagerly raise their hands and take the lead in recounting the complex history of Malaga Island, to hear the accuracy of their answers, and to witness their passion for meeting (and hugging) descendant Marnie Darling Voter who worked with them in the gallery, well, it surpassed even my expectations. Neither my eyes, nor those of the visiting teachers, were dry. It wasn't just good, it was inspirational and standard-bearing museum work.

Hats off to documentarians Rob Rosenthal and Kate Philbrick, archaeologists Nate Hamilton and Rob Sanford, Maine State Museum curator Kate McBrien, and all the many descendants who shared photographs and oral history for bringing forth their expertise and sharing. Great healing has taken place already and it's just the beginning.

"Malaga Island, Fragmented Lives" will be closing on May 25 after a successful year-long run. To celebrate the exhibit and encourage everyone to see it one last time, museum admission on May 25 will be free of charge.

[Patricia Erikson is a Peaks Island-based writer, educator, and anthropologist who blogs here and at Peaks Island Press.] 

 

 

Maine Civil War Trail opens

Photograph from Fifth Maine Regiment Museum collection showing veterans on the porch of the retreat - now a museum - that they built

If you're a history buff and you're looking for things to do in Maine this year, you might want to know about a collaborative, statewide effort to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the Civil War - the opening of the Maine Civil War Trail. The museum exhibits along the Maine Civil War Trail tell their stories of the individuals, families, and businesses that were caught up in the war, both on the battlefield and at home here in Maine.

The Maine Civil War Trail follows the coast from Saco to Castine, then heads inland to Bangor and Augusta, and doesn't neglect the western mountains – Kingfield, Bethel and Bridgton.

Be sure to make it out to Peaks Island and visit the Fifth Maine Regiment Museum that played a lead role in the creation of this statewide trail.

Although it's not a museum, the Portland Freedom Trail is very much related to Civil War history and offers a walking tour approach to the subject. I highly recommend that you check that out as well.

Peek into the Malaga Island Exhibit Gallery Program at the Maine State Museum

In prior articles, I explained how I consulted for the Maine State Museum to develop lesson plans and an inquiry-based education program for their Malaga Island: Fragmented Lives exhibit that continues through May of 2013. I'm excited to share that the museum has recorded one of these sessions in action and posted it on YouTube so that you can peek into how it encourages youth to tackle historical issues of racism and cultural history by researching primary sources in the gallery itself. After viewing it, Professor Randolph Stakeman of Bowdoin College said, "Most excellent. Giving kids a chance to think like historians, question their government and address racism can only benefit everyone. Kudos to the many dedicated people who have turned Malaga into something positive."



This is one of my passions: inquiry-based learning in classrooms, in the field, and in museums. I'm so honored to have worked as a consultant with the Maine State Museum to design this Malaga Island program. Watch how much the kids do the talking!

Congratulations to the staff and volunteers of the museum for working so hard on this exhibit!

If you are interested in other projects on which I've consulted, feel free to visit my Whitecap Consulting Services site.

How one white lady grew up in Maine knowing nothing about Wabanaki people (Part II)

One of the most iconic portrayals of the anticipated fate of Native peoples

Part I of "How one white lady grew up in Maine knowing nothing about the Wabanaki people" described what the title suggests, that I was a white lady who grew up in Maine knowing absolutely nothing about Wabanaki peoples, the indigenous people of my own state. I shared details of how my childhood was steeped in Indian stereotypes - Indians of wood and plastic, dead Indians - but, ironically, devoid of visible, living, contemporary Wabanaki people. Here, I share some of why I think Wabanaki people have been, and often remain, invisible to Maine citizens.


When I was studying Anthropology and Native American Studies at the University of California Davis, I came to recognize the persistent way people think and believe that Native American peoples are always, everywhere, on the brink of cultural extinction or biological extinction. Another term for this way of thinking is the "Vanishing American Paradigm."  James Earle Fraser's sculpture, "End of the Trail," and all of the popular material items that copied it, represented the anticipation that Native peoples were doomed.

The research of Thomas Doughton, a Nipmuc tribal historian, showed that between 1825 and 1895, obituaries in major New England newspapers marked 150 deaths of individuals known as the "Last of the __" - fill in the blank with a tribal name. Of these 150 individuals, 15 of them were the "Last of the Nipmucs." In other words, the Last of the Nipmucs died 15 times. You might be thinking "Last of the Mohicans" right about now.

A very close friend of mine used to teach high school English in a New Hampshire boarding school. She assigned the novel, "I Heard the Owl Call My Name," by Margaret Craven and opened discussion by asking the students what they knew about Native Americans. One student sincerely replied, "They are all dead." Another remarked that he knew about teepees, and bows and arrows. You should know that this teacher is herself Anishinabe and had, at times earlier in the semester, shared with the class details about her Native culture and community. Despite literally standing in front of her students, and despite self-identifying, she still faced the erasing effect of the Vanishing American Paradigm.

The effect of the Vanishing American Paradigm renders pre-Contact indigenous peoples as "pure," "wise," "authentic" Ancient Ones and casts post-Contact, historic, and contemporary Native Americans as "assimilated," "unrecognized," or outright invisible, something Abenaki scholar Marge Bruchac calls "hiding in plain sight."

My public statement on the urgent need to take apart, or deconstruct, the Vanishing American Paradigm resonated with the Native American Indian Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts enough that they have published it on their website as part of explaining their mission. Certainly, recognizing this paradigm changed the way I saw my home state when I returned to it.
 
-to be continued (in the meantime, you can read more Wabanaki-related articles here)

[Patricia Erikson is a Peaks Island-based writer, educator, and anthropologists who blogs here and at Peaks Island Press.]

How one white lady grew up in Maine knowing nothing about the Wabanaki people

Patricia Erikson with Makah Cultural and Research Center staff

Part I - When I lived on the Makah Indian Reservation on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State, I was referred to as "the white lady with the yellow dog." I had never thought of myself as "a white lady" before, but that was because I grew up in skin that was not marked as "of color." I occupied that privileged position of not having to think about my own skin color at all. My work with the Makah Indian Nation taught me something that I didn't know: that I was a white lady who had grown up in Maine knowing absolutely nothing about the indigenous peoples of my own state, the Wabanaki people. But I am skipping ahead to when I knew this. Let's start at the beginning.

Growing up in rural Maine, my exposure to Native American peoples was, well, complicated.  I was lucky enough to experience one field trip at a very young age to the American Indian exhibits of the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  The clouded, scratched glass exhibit cases and hushed, tomb-like nature of the galleries shaped my memory as much as the Native artifacts themselves.  I didn't know it at the time, but this prominent museum, in the 1970s, existed as a hybrid between colonial cabinets of curiosity and 19th c./20th c. natural history exhibits.  These type of museums reportedly confused children - and why wouldn't they - leaving them with notions that primitive peoples of dioramas were stuffed or dead, just like the moose or elephant in the adjoining exhibit?

More accessible to those of us in rural Maine, were the "cigar store Indians" that towered stoically over us on the porches of trading posts and general stores.  Since my father loved to hunt and fish at Moosehead Lake, I can't count the number of times that I edged around one of those frowning, garish sculptures. Closer to home, my favorite B-grade Westerns on late Saturday afternoon TV offered more animated versions of Indians, complete with the proper doses of romance and violance.  And where the Westerns left off shaping my perception of Indians, Girl Scouts and Campfire Girls picked up.  Weekly meetings and occasional summer outings as a Girl Scout associated Native Americans with outdoor survival skills. And, I shudder to admit that late-night lore of Campfire Girls taught me the cliche that our campground - with the unlikely name of Camp Pesquasawassis - was built on an Indian burial ground. There, huddled together with other girls in canvas tents, we listened breathlessly to nighttime tales of Indian ghosts that kept us from sleeping. In short, my childhood was steeped in Indian stereotypes, Indians of wood and plastic, dead Indians, but, ironically, devoid of visible, living, contemporary Wabanaki people.

None of these - not the cigar store indians, not the ones shot by cowboys on TV, and not the ones that childhood clubs and summer camps emulated or feared - had anything to do with the Wabanaki people who were fellow citizens in my home state, who played critical roles in the history of our region and continue to contribute in important ways to our modern life while preserving tiny fractions of their original homelands; about them, I had grown up in Maine knowing nothing.

-to be continued

[Patricia Erikson is a Peaks Island-based writer, educator, and anthropologists who blogs here and at Peaks Island Press.]

Tourists by the Boatload Nothing New for Peaks Island

A few years ago, I wrote a curriculum for the Fifth Maine Regiment Museum called "The Captain, Smiling Bill, & the Carousel Horse." The lesson plans encourage students to examine historic photographs, images of artifacts and historic documents, as well as historic architecture in order to interpret what historical forces brought together Captain William Trefethen, sharpshooter “Smiling Bill” Leavitt, and a little girl who loved a carnival horse named Jewels, on Peaks Island.  

Horatio Hall. Courtesy Fifth Maine Museum

After leading a professional development workshop with teachers, I realized how much adults loved the subject matter as well. Who can resist ferries?

******************* 


By 1900, most people worked regular hours for six days a week. For the first time, families began to take vacations once a year.  The regular pattern of work created a new experience – leisure time for workers. More leisure time and more income created a demand for recreation, especially traveling as tourists to see and experience new places.

Machigonne. Courtesy Fifth Maine Museum

Tourists rode on a steamboat, like the Horatio Hall, directly to Portland from Boston, New York, or Philadelphia.

The steamship Horatio Hall was built in 1898 and served the New York to Portland route until she sunk in 1907. Once passengers arrived in Portland, twelve different steamboat lines ferried ferried them to the islands of Casco Bay. During the summer, Peaks island became crowded with tourists. They traveled to enjoy the seashore and the Greenwood Garden amusement park.

Peaks Island sits approximately three miles east of Portland. It is one of four islands that protect Portland Harbor from the open sea.

Map of Casco Bay, Maine and ferry lines. Courtesy Fifth Maine Museum

The Machegonne was built in Philadelphia in 1907.  She ferried passengers from Peaks to Portland and back until 1913.  People called her “the queen of the fleet.” The Machegonne was built with carpeted floors, upholstered seats in the cabins, and a special men’s “smoking cabin.”  The ferry had stewardesses, and a brass band played on Sundays. 

A crew member and passenger sitting inside the luxurious cabin of the Machigonne. Courtesy Fifth Maine Museum.

-Excerpt from “The Captain, Smiling Bill, & the Carousel Horse” curriculum written by Patricia Erikson for www.fifthmainemuseum.org

"This Day in Civil War History" Blog from Bowdoin College Library

Drum Corps, 8th Regt. Maine Volunteers, McArthur Family Papers, Bowdoin College Lib.

 Guest article by Richard Lindemann, Director
George J. Mitchell
Dept. of Special Collections & Archives
Bowdoin College Library


Throughout 2013, the Bowdoin College Library is hosting a daily blog, "On This Day in Civil War History," to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. You can read it at:  http://library.bowdoin.edu/arch/civil-war-blog/ .

The posts derive from among the historical resources in Special Collections: a passage from a letter to a soldier; a note of condolence; a daily surgeon's morning report; an account of activities on the home front. Cumulatively, these entries provide a panoramic view of the lives, emotions, and occupations of the individuals who experienced a sometimes horrific, often mundane existence during the difficult year of 1863.

The image above comes from our McArthur Family Papers—William McArthur began service in the Civil War as captain of Co. I, 8th Regt. Maine Vols., and his papers include numerous documents relating to the 8th. You can read the collection description at: http://library.bowdoin.edu/arch/mss/mafg.shtml

Richard Lindemann,
George J. Mitchell Dept. of  Special Collections & Archives
Bowdoin College Library  |  1 College Street  |  3000 College Station  |  Brunswick, Maine  04011  |  207.725.3096  |  rlindema@bowdoin.edu