Mi'kmaq, Who I Am

I was born at 3:30 on a Wednesday afternoon in 1953. My mother brought me home to a one bedroom walk up in Taint Town on the seacoast of Maine. It was called Taint Town because it was in the same community as Kennebunkport but it wasn’t Kennebunkport, and it was Kennebunk but was a long way from the Kennebunk community. Folks around here said, “Taint Kennebunkport and Taint Kennebunk”.   My brother was seven then. I have an old photograph that shows a red kitchen with red plaid linoleum and a child’s overstuffed rocking chair covered in a red plastic upholstery. I was an auburn haired 6 month old propped on Bobby’s lap. When I came home as a brand new baby my bed in that apartment was the bathtub – or so the story goes.

This blog is the story of my life as a Mi’kmaq Indian in southern Maine. It’s the story of this neck of the woods from the last of the ice age until yesterday as seen through my own lense. I don’t speak for anyone else. My life is uniquely mine. The ways in which my life unfolds as an off-rservation Indian are completely different from other off-reservation Indians. My experience doesn’t even look like my siblings' experiences. The time and place in which I grew up between the white world and my Mi’kmaq family contributes to this story, and my unfolding lifetime is a combination of my childhood in Arundel, the long ago history of my people, and the far northern places where my ancestors lived before coming to Arundel. Many people talk today about a ‘sense of place’. I believe that we all carry within us the history of the times and places that make up our families, and I believe that those elements are an integral part of who we are as individuals. Logic points to the truth of this, and people would not refute the question if asked as an objective observer. People won’t argue that the horrors that were experienced by survivors of the holocaust have a major impact on their children and still manifest themselves in their children’s children and that those horrors help to define the character of those families. But on another level our society has long been in the business of stripping people of their roots, denying them their hertitage, stamping out their meanings. Many people in our culture today are of the mind that should a family choose to leave their homeland and come to the United States, they should melt quietly into the American pot. Now, if that family was escaping poverty and injustice, that fact seems to play no part in how much of themselves it is judged that they should leave behind. Fear of persecution and attempting to blend into a new society move most traditional practices and activities well underground. The practices that defined a family in their original habitat lives on, though. It is where their memories of their own younger lives are, and it is how they express their joy. The essence of life in their previous culture never goes away, but exists covertly, and only somewhat overtly, in their new surroundings.

I was not privy to the traditional practices of the Mi’kmaq that our greataunts observed. The years kept passing, children were to be seen and not heard, and I never dared to ask the most burning questions. I learned some words and phrases in Mi’kmaq and heard the folks talk about how Aunt Lou went out to the woods on the new moon (or on her moon) and that Gigu, my great grandmother, made the medicines. Mi’kmaqs came and went from the reserve in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, to stay with us for gatherings and the blueberry harvest ceremonies on the blueberry plains in Sanford. There was drum and song at the gatherings, but my siblings and I never knew about the yearly harvest celebration until our cousin told us years later. I don’t know why no one took us.  There is no one left to ask now, and, ironically, it’s their passing that has prompted me to seek the meaning of these secretiveness.

There are 12,000 Mi’kmaqs living in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador. There are 2000 Mi’kmaqs living in Boston, a band of 150 near Houlton, and around 350 off-reservation Mi’kmaqs in Maine. York County alone has 150. Several years back at the 1st Wabanaki Summer Institute at Orono I had a brief opportunity to speak with Dan Paul, a Mi’kmaq and author of We Were Not the Savages. I told him that I still wonder why my family just up and moved to southern Maine one day. He said that perhaps it was the the prejudice and lack of work up around Acadia Reserve; that those were very hard times for the Mi’kmaq.