Folklife Center produces first online publication

ORONO – The Maine Folklife Center is using modern methods to make ancient tales available.

Now, with just a few clicks of a mouse, Internet users can access the Folklife Center’s first online publication, “Northeast Folklore VI: Malecite and Passamaquoddy Tales.”

This long out-of-print volume was first published in 1965 by the Northeast Folklore Society under the auspices of the University of Maine department of English. That volume sold out and has been in high demand ever since.

The book was posted in August at the Maine Folklife Center’s Web site: http://www.umaine.edu/folklife.

Pauleena MacDougall, the center’s associate director, says the popularity of this book contributed to the decision to make it the center’s first online publication.

“There’s been a lot of demand for this book in particular. There isn’t a lot of material on Maine’s Native Americans that’s in print,” she says.

MacDougall says the advantages of online publication include easy access for Internet users and eliminating the cost of reprinting. She says the Folklife Center hopes to make other volumes available online. But when and how many of those books will be posted depends on the feedback the Folklife Center receives about the use of this present volume.

The book was edited by Edward Ives, the founder and former director of the Maine Folklife Center. It is a compilation of tales related by Viola Solomon of the Malecite reservation in Tobique, New Brunswick, and stories collected by Ohio native Edwin Tappan Adney.

Solomon’s stories were recorded by three students who took Ives’ Saturday extension course in American folklore in 1962 at Presque Isle. Solomon lived on the reservation all her life. Ives accessed Adney’s manuscripts through the Peabody Museum in Salem, Mass. Adney became interested in American Indian culture when he met a Malecite man while on vacation in Woodstock, New Brunswick.

The Malecite and the Passamaquoddy nations are of the eastern or Wabanaki group of Algonkian stock. Malecite territory once stretched from the St. John River Valley toward Fredericton, New Brunswick, and into Aroostook County. Passamaquoddy territory once may have encompassed all of present-day Washington and Hancock counties as well as Charlotte and southern York and Sunbury counties in New Brunswick. Many of the tales focus on the heroic deeds of Kluskap, a superhuman character. Kluskap was neither god nor judge nor creator, but a transformer of the world in which the Malecite and Passamaquoddy lived.