Micmacs work to restore ‘basket trees’

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PRESQUE ISLE – In northern Maine, money almost grows on the tall trunks of what Micmacs call “basket trees.” For generations, members of the tribe have woven strips of brown ash into the baskets they once produced by the dozen for potato farmers and now sell to art collectors.

But brown ash populations are declining in Maine, and it’s getting harder and harder to find a good basket tree. So this summer, the Micmacs will plant more than 3,000 ash seedlings and begin studying the trees growing on tribal lands in hopes of boosting future production.

“The ash tree has seen a major decline in the state and there’s no consensus of why,” said Fred Corey, environmental director for the tribe.

Brown ash, also known as black ash and basket ash, lives along riverbanks and in swampy areas. The tree holds a tremendous amount of moisture in its wood, making it pliable and perfect for basket making, explained Donald Sanipass, a Micmac basket maker from Presque Isle who learned the craft from his grandfather and has been weaving baskets side by side with his wife, Mary, for nearly 50 years.

Last week, water ran out of a stick of ash wood onto the floor as Sanipass squeezed wood from a recent ash harvest, using a vice in his basement workshop. As the wood is bent, its growth rings split apart, forming thin, flexible strips of wood. Other trees, even other species of ash, just won’t work, he said.

A good basket tree should have at least a 6-foot section of trunk that is perfectly straight with a diameter of at least 20 inches. That provides the wood for as many as four baskets, but it takes between 80 and 110 years of growth for an ash to reach that size.

“We don’t cut every tree we see,” Sanipass said.

Yet even with responsible harvests, ash is declining. The biggest challenge to bringing back the basket tree is a simple lack of data, explained Michael Bridgen, a professor at the State University of New York’s Ranger School of Forestry. Brown ash trees grow slowly, and they live in places that are difficult to harvest, so there’s never been an economic incentive to study their biology, he said.

Bridgen has been working with Mohawk basket makers in New York for the past decade and has agreed to serve as a consultant for the Micmacs, studying the trees’ ecology and designing a forestry plan to make the most of the ash that grows on about 30 acres of the tribe’s 1,000 acres of tribal land in Aroostook County.

Though it doesn’t sound like much compared to the millions of acres of forested land in Maine, even a few acres of brown ash can make a difference. Many ash habitats have been drained for development or agricultural uses.

“It can only live on certain types of land, so it’s restricted to very few sites,” Bridgen said.

In fact, the Maine Forest Service estimated in its latest forest inventory report that fewer than 400,000 acres of the state’s forest are covered by the ash-maple-elm ecological community that tends to include brown ash.

So the Micmacs will plant brown ash seedlings in hopes of establishing a new resource for future generations of tribal members. The entire brown ash project is being funded by an $80,647 grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service – one of the first to be given to a tribe – which is expected to arrive soon.

“Any day now, hopefully, the final paperwork will be in place to allow us to start the project,” Corey said. “We’re just waiting for the word go.”

The Micmacs have been concerned with the fate of the basket trees ever since a mysterious ailment struck the ash about 15 years ago, causing the leaves, and then the branches and bark to fall off.

“The entire top of the tree dies,” Corey said.

The disease struck throughout the Northeast, and although just a handful of trees actually died from the stress, their growth was slowed and some became so dry that they were of little use to basket makers.

“The bark all came off, and it was no good for anything but firewood,” Sanipass said.

University of Maine scientists, including associate professor William Livingston, researched the phenomenon, which they called “dieback.” They learned by studying tree rings that it had occurred several times in the past – with slight declines in growth observed in the 1920s, ’50s and ’70s. But in 1993 alone, more than 30 percent of all Maine’s brown ash trees had died back by 80 percent, according to the Maine Forest Service.

The culprit appears to be drought, said Livingston. The trees weren’t getting enough water to sustain their leaves, so they dropped the unnecessary growth and in that way managed to survive the drought.

“It’s like malnutrition in people,” he said.

Within a few years, the trees had recovered, and today, those that survived the disease are healthy, if slightly smaller than they might have been.

“The ash wood is coming back healthy now,” Sanipass said.

But some scientists worry that air pollution could be making the trees more vulnerable to disease. Livingston doubts the theory, saying the dieback was no worse in more polluted regions of the state, but many Micmacs are convinced.

“Air pollution may be stressing these trees so when something happens like a drought, they’re not able to withstand it,” Corey said.

Regardless of the cause, a larger ash population would have a better chance of surviving a future dieback. So later this month the Micmacs will plant 3,200 seedlings on about 8 acres of land on the former Loring Air Force Base in Limestone.

“There’s just not enough ash out there now,” said Dave Macek, an environmental specialist for the Micmacs.

The tribe has already planted 94 trees on a small parcel near Greenlaw Brook at Loring, as part of the federal government’s ongoing environmental restoration project, said David Strange, environmental coordinator at the former base.

“It certainly matched up with our need to reforest the area,” he said.

And the tribe will likely take control of the land once a deal between the Air Force and the Bureau of Indian Affairs is finalized and 423 acres of the base are turned over to the Micmacs, Strange said.

Prior to the 1947 construction of Loring, the land was part of the Micmac homeland – something that modern tribal members didn’t even know until archaeological evidence was turned up during environmental restoration projects after the base closed in 1994.

“They didn’t dig everything up, but everywhere they dug they found evidence,” Macek said.

Eventually, much of the Micmac land will be dotted with ash plantings. Though this particular grant is limited, the tribe expects to pursue other funding and considers caring for the ash a long-term project, Corey said. “We’ll do it in little patches and places and make it natural,” Macek said.

When Don Sanipass’ grandchildren are teaching their grandchildren to weave baskets, the brown ash should be flourishing. But Don’s son, Dave Sanipass of Biddeford, wonders if coming generations will embrace the tradition that he learned as a child. “I’m afraid the trees will outlast the basket makers,” Dave Sanipass said.

For information about buying baskets made by Micmacs or artisans from Maine’s other tribes, contact the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance in Old Town at 859-9722.