ORONO – Growing up fatherless in Pleasant Point, Denise Altvater used to dream that her father would burst back into her life. He would ride onto the Passamaquoddy Indian Reservation on a white horse, rescue her from poverty and make all the people who had ever hurt his daughter very, very sorry.

That dream never came true for her, but Altvater was honored Wednesday at the University of Maine with the Maryann Hartman Award for her efforts to help the young people who live on the reservation today.

“I try at least to be that person on that horse for them,” she said in an emotional acceptance speech. “Sometimes a kind word, letting them know that they don’t suffer alone is all I can offer.”

Altvater, director of the Wabanaki Youth Program of the American Friends Service Committee, was one of three women to receive the award that is sponsored by the Women in the Curriculum and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Maine. She is one of the few women without a college degree to receive the award since it began in 1986.

Leigh Saufley, chief justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, and Vivianne Holmes, a Cooperative Extension agent and farmer from Buckfield, also received this year’s award named for the late Maryann Hartman, a former speech professor.

In accepting the award, Altvater recalled a life of extreme hardship and poverty on the reservation. Speaking without a prepared text, she emotionally recalled a childhood foreign to a majority of the more than 100 people in attendance.

“If it hadn’t been for my husband’s father, who was a fisherman, providing fish for us, we wouldn’t have survived,” she said. “Then, my sisters and I were scattered in foster homes around the state where the abuse was worse than it had been at home.”

As a survivor of the foster care system, Altvater has helped train workers in the Maine Department of Human Services on how to comply with the law designed to reduce the high number of American Indian children being sent to live with non-Indian families. She also helped create the Wabanaki Youth Alliance.

“I want to show young people that no matter how difficult your life is you can be somebody who can make a difference in the world,” she said. “I hope that is what I do.”

That is also what Safia Nur is trying to do. The 18-year-old freshman Wednesday was awarded the Young Women’s Social Justice Award. The award included a $1,000 scholarship.

Nur moved to Lewiston three years ago from Somalia. She was a member of the civil rights team at Lewiston High School and the first Muslim student to attend the Upward Bound residential program at Bowdoin College.

In January 2003, she spoke to more than 2,000 people at a pro-diversity rally in Lewiston when a white supremacist came to Maine.

“I didn’t do this by myself,” she said, wearing the hijab or traditional head scarf. “I cannot begin to say thank you to them. It didn’t matter where you came from, they talked to you, anytime about anything and about nothing.”

Nur is majoring in international affairs.