Penobscot Indian artifacts focus of exhibit at Abbe Molly Molasses’ cap in local collection

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BAR HARBOR – Molly Molasses’ peaked woolen cap has made a long journey home.

The traditional beaded ceremonial cap was worn by the legendary Penobscot trader and shaman in the photographs she sold on the streets of 19th century Bangor.

It spent years lost to dusty antique shops far from the Penobscot homeland until an unlikely anthropologist, the late Frank Siebert, secretly recovered the scrap of history. Siebert stashed the cap among hundreds of priceless documents and artifacts in his tiny home.

Today the cap is displayed lovingly in a temperature-controlled exhibit honoring Molasses and other Wabanaki women at Bar Harbor’s Abbe Museum, thanks to a long-term loan of 350 artifacts from Siebert’s collection recently made by his daughter, Stephanie Finger.

“It represents the accumulation of a lifetime,” Abbe curator Rebecca Cole-Will said Tuesday.

Until Siebert died in 1998, few knew of his collection, which includes hundreds of artifacts and documents from native cultures throughout North America and represents nearly 70 years of research.

Siebert began studying Maine’s dying native languages in the 1930s after hearing stories of a native Penobscot speaker on a family vacation when he was 19 years old.

He studied medicine at Pennsylvania State University and worked as a pathologist for years, but in the 1960s, Siebert retired to a home in Old Town to dedicate all his time and money to recording the knowledge of the last few native speakers of Penobscot.

Siebert’s work transcribing Penobscot and writing a dictionary of the language is well-known and respected among the small group of people who study the languages of Algonquin people, Conor McDonough Quinn, a linguist studying at Harvard University, said. Quinn spent three summers working with Siebert in Old Town.

Siebert’s lifework was a tremendous undertaking, scholars said.

“About the only thing Penobscot has in common with English is that it was spoken by human beings,” Quinn said.

“He [Siebert] had all the hallmarks of a true fanatic,” Harald Prins, a professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, said.

“From early on, his real love was always for the study of native people,” Prins said. “All his energy and his money and his free time went into the study of the linguistics and cultures of Algonquin-speaking people.”

Siebert’s broad knowledge of native cultures gave him an eye for cultural artifacts that had been overlooked by art and antique dealers.

“Frank had an uncanny eye because he was so extremely well-informed,” Prins said. “He had, some would say, the foolishness to purchase these things at a very great personal expense.”

Prins and his wife, Bunny McBride, an anthropologist and author of “Women of the Dawn,” the book that inspired the current Abbe exhibit, have worked with native cultures in northern Maine, and they struck up a relationship with Siebert near the end of his life.

They were shocked by the collections of artifacts and research materials stored in Siebert’s home.

“I’ve heard that even his own neighbors didn’t have a clue,” Prins said. “Here’s an extraordinary man, and almost no one around him knows it.

“He was in the middle of a never-ending research project. There were so many documents, so many papers and books and artifacts, in such a small space,” Prins said. “We were fearing that he would meet his death in an inferno.”

Siebert’s research on the Penobscot language alone filled more than 200 notebooks, and that information still is being cataloged, Quinn said.

Personal items such as Molasses’ cap or the intricate silver trade jewelry she once owned are priceless to historians. Siebert knew his antiques, however, and two 1999 Sotheby’s sales of documents and books from Siebert’s research library raised $12.6 million.

“The irony, of course, was that he lived extremely simply,” Prins said. “All of his finances went into his projects. He never benefited, other than rescuing it and knowing he could pass it on to the next generation.”

A financial value has not been placed on the artifact collection on loan to the Abbe, but many of its items are extremely rare, and in “fabulous condition,” Cole-Will said.

“There are pieces that I’d only read about in books, that I’d never seen before,” she said. “We’re excited about letting people see these items, many of which are master works that have never seen the light of day.”

A majority of the collection comes from East Coast Algonquin-speaking cultures, with a substantial core of Penobscot artifacts such as clothing, baskets, birch-bark boxes and beaded and silver jewelry. Items such as clothing and beadwork from the Sioux and other Plains tribes also are represented, Cole-Will said.

Finger, who lives in Pennsylvania, offered to lend the complete collection to the Abbe after Cole-Will approached her to request the use of several Penobscot items in the current “Women of the Dawn” exhibit.

Finger could not be reached for comment. Cole-Will said, however, that the family’s priorities included keeping the collection together and safe while giving the Maine public access to the artifacts.

“She was thrilled that it was going to be available for research, and to be exhibited so near the Penobscot homeland,” Cole-Will said.

An exhibit looking at the Siebert collection as art is planned for 2003, and the items are being made available to researchers. A maximum length of time for the loan has not been set, and additional exhibits using the Siebert artifacts likely will be mounted in coming years, Cole-Will said.

For more information, call the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor at 288-3519.