Debut of Century Old Restored Electric Locomotive

It takes 600 volts of electricity to power the locomotive known as “ASL No. 100” down Seashore Trolley Museum’s tracks. Starting today, the public can view this fully-restored, century-old locomotive in operation for the first time in more than five decades.

Yesterday, descendants of the men who operated this locomotive after it was built in 1906 attended a private dedication ceremony, along with state senators and representatives, museum members, and educators, to celebrate the completion of a $180,000 project funded by the Federal Highway Administration and the Maine Department of Transportation, as well as several railway societies, local businesses, and individuals. The ceremony also commemorated the opening of a new gallery exhibit that I curated: History in Motion: Public Transportation Connecting Maine Communities and the launch of an elementary school science and technology educational initiative, which I will continue to develop this year.

The ASL-100 project has fully restored the last surviving, original piece of rolling stock from the historic Atlantic Shore Line Railway system, one of only two locomotives of its style to survive in North America. The Atlantic Shore Line (ASL) moved freight back and forth between the mills and the Boston & Maine Railroad, transported coal from Cape Porpoise, Maine’s harbor to power the looms of the Sanford mills, and carried passengers to a number of southern Maine resort destinations. As an artifact, the locomotive helps us interpret the history of both the textile industry in the Sanford-Springvale area and the resort industry in the Kennebunks.

ASL #100 is one of the Museum’s ten Maine vehicles listed in the National Historic Register. It's a significant landmark in the history of public transportation and its restoration is one of a dozen projects underway in the Museum’s Town House Restoration Shop, according to Jim Schantz, Board of Trustees Chairman.

Wabanaki Studies

Yesterday's post may have been a disheartening one for those with an interest in Native American Studies or in Wabanaki communities of Maine. I refer to the probe into the craigslist sale of scalps, purportedly of 'Maine Indian' origin. I ended the blog entry talking about how our educational system needs to 'humanize' Wabanaki peoples in order to get beyond the popular stereotypes and beyond the legacies of the violent colonial history. Today I wanted to offer a couple of starting points for those who wish to identify resources that may assist them in doing this.


The Maine Department of Education's website on Wabanaki Studies in Maine Schools includes a chart of K-12 learning targets that have been integrated with Wabanaki Studies content that supports LD 291: An Act to Require Teaching of Maine Native American History and Culture in Maine's Schools. It also includes links to a lot of other key Wabanaki resources (make sure you don't miss the especially the rich websites of Betsy Sky-McIlvain and Joseph Charnley, among others):


Also, Debbie Reese's fabulous blog on American Indians in Children's Literature is one you shouldn't miss. It helps educators tackle a number of the national myths and stereotypes pertaining to Native Americans that are embedded in some of our most beloved texts, such as Little House on the Prairie or Sign of the Beaver.

Using just these two starting points, a whole world of resources will open up to you.

Bones and Scalps Coming out of the Closet

"What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it" -Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1770 - 1831

Many readers of the Portland Press Herald may have been surprised this morning to see the story headlined

"Offer to Sell 'Maine Indian' Scalps Probed."

Anyone who has consumed popular Westerns, in film or literature form, might not be surprised by the association of the term "Indian" and "scalping" since the skulking and scalping savage hidden in our woods stands as one of most prevalent and pernicious Indian stereotypes in our nation's history (take Seth Eastman's 1847 Death Whoop, for example, at right). Countless cowboy and Indian movies, sports mascots (think tomahawk chop), dime novels, and juvenile literature have replicated this savage imagery.

Many Mainers might not know, however, that early colonists, including those in what is now Maine, scalped Wabanaki peoples and received a bounty for their efforts. The current investigation into the craigslist posting of "Maine Indian scalps" for sale brings this ugly history to light. Since LD291 became state law, in 2001 (an "Act to Require Teaching of Maine Native American History and Culture in Maine's Schools") it's worth reviewing this history.

The Native American practice of taking scalps as a trophy of war is thought to predate European colonization, although it was not nearly as widespread nor as predominant as stereotypes would purport. To put things in perspective, Europeans themselves came with a well-developed heritage of taking and displaying the heads (and other body parts) of enemies as trophies. When Wampanoag sachem, Metacom (also known as King Philip), was killed in 1676 during a war that bears his name, Plymouth settlers posted his head on a pike for over two decades. In the context of trying to wrest homelands away from Native peoples, European settlers started with their own brutality in war, adopted, and effectively institutionalized the scalping practice, making it their own.

One of the significant landmarks in this violent history was February 20, 1725 when a posse of New Hampshire volunteers attacked a Native American encampment and took 10 scalps, receiving a bounty of 100 pounds per scalp from colonial authorities in Boston. Bringing it closer to home, in 1755, Lieutenant Governor Spencer Phips of Massachusetts Bay colony issued a proclamation calling upon his Majesty's subjects to "embrace all opportunities of pursuing, captivating, killing and destroying all and every of the aforesaid Indians." Phips promised a payout from the "Publick Treasury" of 40 pounds for the scalp of every male Penobscot Indian; the scalps of women and children earned 20 pounds. The Phips Proclamation endorsed this colonial violence and widened the cultural divide between settlers and Native residents.

But you might be thinking, that was a long time ago, right? What does it have to do with us today? Let's return to how the scalps of Native American individuals from Maine might have ended up on craiglist. It goes far beyond taking trophies amid warfare. Colonization of the Americas rendered Native peoples as other-than-human, categorizing their bodies and possessions as "artifacts" attractive for collection, exhibition, and interpretation. This legacy lives on with museum and private collections whose holdings have historically included human remains, particularly Native American ones. If this isn't a prank, what the craigslist incident may show is that these scalps were passed down in a family from generation to generation, held in a kind of private cabinet of curiosities.

Public outrage in the 1980s over the coveting of human remains as "artifacts" fortunately led to the passage of a federal law called the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990, also known as NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act). Now, it's not only illegal to traffic in human remains (Illegal trafficking), it's also illegal to curate human remains in museum collections if a tribe is eligible to reclaim them, usually for reburial.

The repatriations completed in compliance with the federal law have enabled at least some progress and healing. According to statistics compiled by the National NAGPRA program in November 2006, in the sixteen years since the passage of NAGPRA, 31,995 Native American human remains had been repatriated to tribes, as well as 3,584 sacred objects. Some Wabanaki human remains reported as eligible for repatriation were recovered by archaeological or construction activity. or were recovered from shell heaps and later donated to a museum.

As John Bear Mitchell (Penobscot) said to the press about the possible sale of scalps, "This doesn't just affect people in the past. It affects us today, people who are living." One of the first steps in securing the human rights and civil rights of the indigenous inhabitants of what is now Maine is to recognize the humanity of the Wabanaki peoples and cease identifying them as extinct or exotic artifacts of the past. Let's hope Hegel was wrong and that we can learn from history.