Authors detail a history of resistance Books examine lives of Maine’s Indians

Editor’s Note: Maine Bound is a column featuring new books written by authors, set in the Pine Tree State or with other local ties.

UNSETTLED PAST, UNSETTLED FUTURE: THE STORY OF MAINE INDIANS by Neil Rolde, Tilbury House Publishers, Gardiner, 2004, 462 pages, softcover, $20.

THE PENOBSCOT DANCE OF RESISTANCE by Pauleena MacDougall, University Press of New England, 2004, 250 pages, softcover, $24.95.

With a few notable exceptions, books written about Maine Indians either deal with the century of nearly constant bloodshed before the Revolutionary War or since the 1980 land claims settlement, when political bloodshed ruled.

It’s as if nothing happened in between, and the Indians, like Rip Van Winkle, went to sleep for 200 years. The end result was that some Mainers were surprised to learn any Indians still lived in their state when the ruckus over the land claims case began in the 1970s.

Two new books try to fill the historical gap. Pauleena MacDougall’s focuses primarily on the Penobscot Tribe, while Neil Rolde covers all the tribes. Both books delve into Colonial times and earlier, but they devote the bulk of their pages to the more modern period since the Revolution. It is not surprising that the authors’ unique backgrounds lead them to analyze different aspects of their subjects, while reaching similar conclusions.

MacDougall worked for the Penobscots as a research assistant on their dictionary project between 1979 and 1988. Then she studied their history while earning a doctorate at the University of Maine. Today she is associate director of the Maine Folklife Center at the university.

Her book focuses primarily on the Penobscots’ culture – their beliefs, language and traditional skills – and how they used it to resist white society’s efforts to get them to assimilate.

Rolde was actively involved in Maine state government, first serving as an aide to Gov. Kenneth Curtis and later as a legislator when the land claims battle and other fights over Indian issues were under way. As House majority leader he was one of the leaders in the victorious effort to seat Indian representatives in the House chamber. While his book cuts a wide swath, it is rich in anecdotes and his emphasis on political matters is clear throughout.

MacDougall’s title puzzled me at first. She explains it this way: “I thought of resistance to oppression as a type of dance. One side advances and another retreats, but just so far; then they pause, clutch one another and spin, break apart, then stop and swoop back, link hands in friendship, then break apart” and so on.

Anyone who has watched the ebb and flow of Indian-white relations in the past few decades can see the validity of this metaphor.

Despite the Penobscots’ ability to preserve their society and traditions, MacDougall shows how the tribe has changed in enormous ways just as the wider society has in the past couple of centuries. Many tribal members have gone out and gotten college degrees and good-paying jobs in the white world. Yet, the reservation is still there, a bastion of tradition, and efforts are still under way to preserve and transmit the older culture.

She explains how the Penobscots successfully retained control over at least a small portion of their lands – the islands in the Penobscot River – and this was important for their sense of identity, although they sank into extreme poverty because they no longer were able to live the way they had before, hunting and fishing over wide expanses of territory.

MacDougall describes how they resisted being turned into farmers or otherwise assimilated by turning to other occupations involving traditional skills such as canoe manufacturing, river driving, basketmaking and guiding. Even though they worked for and with whites, they maintained their separate identity.

She concludes, “Clearly the Penobscots made numerous changes in their lives as a means of resisting assimilation and extinction. Sometimes the changes meant accommodating to the larger culture or dominant politics. But they were always accommodations under protest.”

Although Rolde’s book covers the full extent of Indian history in Maine, especially the “lost period” I mentioned at the beginning of this review, the high point for me was his description of the events leading up to the Indian land claims settlement in 1980 in the first 54 pages. Some of the anecdotes about characters including Donald Gellers, the Indians’ first lawyer, and Gov. James Longley are hilarious. The author deftly threads his way through the thicket of sovereignty issues that have popped up since the settlement, causing some Indians to declare it an utter failure.

While Rolde’s book is lengthy and sometimes discursive, it is full of interesting anecdotes such as the incredible battle between the Rev. Elijah Kellogg Sr. and some priests over whether Protestants or Catholics would educate Passamaquoddy children. Kellogg’s goal, of course, was to teach them to be English farmers. This donnybrook resulted in violence and threats of violence, a nervous breakdown and one extraordinary trip in which Deacon Sockabason and others allegedly were blown to Virginia in their canoes in a storm and then went to visit President Andrew Jackson who gave him a federal grant.

Rolde comes to a conclusion similar to MacDougall’s. The Indians have resisted all efforts from military incursions to land grabs to cultural pressure to change or eliminate them. “We … are at last slowly learning to let them be, to accept that they will not dissolve into a generalized melting pot, and to agree that they may well have something to teach us,” he says.

Given their tenacity, which both of these books do a good job of describing, this sounds like a wise attitude.

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.