Over the years, members of the Penobscot tribe have left Indian Island to pursue educational and career opportunities elsewhere. When they left, a diminished cultural and language foundation remained.

The result of this, and the fact that for a long time American Indians were looked down on by others for maintaining their culture, is that the traditional Penobscot language nearly has been lost.

Few fluent speakers of the Penobscot language remain, but several Penobscot elders remember the language and they and other tribe members are working to revive its use in the Penobscot Nation today.

In 2002, the tribe formed the Department of Cultural and Historic Preservation, which was headed by Bonnie Newsom and now is directed by Maria Girouard.

The department was started with a grant from the Administration of Native Americans and has been refunded a couple of times, Newsom said.

“Funding is always an issue, and keeping people funded is always a struggle,” she said. “We’ve come a long way.”

The program has grown and reached out to the island’s day care center, the Boys and Girls Club and the school to bring traditional language lessons to the tribe’s youth. The department also is bringing language to families through immersion camps held in the summer months.

The most recent advance made by the department is getting a native speaker at Indian Island School to complement the other programs going on throughout the island.

“You actually hear children using the language,” Newsom said. “It might be only one or two words, but before there was nothing really.”

In 2001, a bill was passed that requires the teaching of American Indian culture in Maine schools. The tribe has been called on to assist in providing curriculum for that effort, and there remains a strong need to focus on teaching that very same culture to members of the tribe.

“It’s advancing,” Penobscot Nation historian James Eric Francis Sr. said of the tribe’s efforts to preserve the language. “It was clear in the immersion camp we had (in July) that children were forming sentences. The elders were very pleased that children were structuring and using sentences.”