The past didn’t go anywhere, as the folk singer Utah Phillips said.

Watie Akins knows this well. The Penobscot Indian Nation elder felt the history of his people following him around throughout his life, as he worked as a structural engineer for 40 years living in Maine and Massachusetts. The songs he heard as a child growing up on Indian Island always echoed in his head.

“I had been thinking about my culture for so long, but I had been working so hard I never had time to really get into it. It was really missing from my life, and the older I got, the more I missed it,” said Akins, a Brewer resident. “When I retired at 62, it was time. I thought, ‘Now I can get into what I really want to do.'”

Akins made good on his promise. Earlier this year, he recorded an album’s worth of those songs he remembered so well, titled “For the Grandchildren: Pageant Songs, Plus Songs from the Past.” The road back to the past took him right up into the 21st century, with these centuries-old native songs committed to digital media, preserved for posterity.

“It has opened up a whole new field for me. It’s a new career at 73,” he said.

Before his incarnation as a recording artist, Akins spent the decade since his retirement devoting himself to researching the traditions of the Penobscot tribe. He amassed a large collection of Penobscot baskets, some of which he donated to the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor. He received a fellowship to go to Chicago to study at the huge American Indian history collection at the Newbury Library. He also received a Maine Arts Commission Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Award for himself and fellow Penobscot James E. Neptune to continue their work at the tribal museum on Indian Island.

Having grown up in a musical family, Akins started to learn and relearn those songs, plucking out melodies on a tiny keyboard in his basement. He knew some from memory, and he relearned some from the younger members of the Penobscot tribe who were still performing them, albeit in a slightly different way from how he remembered them.

“I started hearing our songs over 65 years ago, growing up on the reservation. People were still doing those same songs, but they had lost parts of them. Things had changed quite a bit,” he said. “And I thought, ‘All this stuff I hear is going to be lost.’ I had to try to get them down and save them somehow.”

A meeting with Lynn Pritchard, a Micmac musician and scholar, at a tribal gathering in Red Bank, New Brunswick, provided Akins with a musical partner. Pritchard and Akins collaborated over the course of a few years, transcribing the different songs and writing down the melodies and drum rhythms. Eventually, Akins had close to 100 songs down on paper.

“These are Penobscot songs but actually they really are all Abenaki songs. Passamaquoddy, Maliseet. We’re all part of the Abenaki group. We share ancestors and traditions. The Penobscot tribe absorbed so many other smaller tribes, too,” said Akins. “So I try to collect everything, not just Penobscot. And there’s just so much. It’s like an upside-down pyramid.”

The overabundance of material made Akins decide to commit the music to CD. He hooked up with My Thrill Studios in Winterport, a recording facility owned and operated by Mark Francis, and Pritchard made the trip from New Brunswick to record with him over the course of several days in February. The result is “For the Grandchildren.”

This album contains music from as far back as the 1890s and continues up through the 1940s. The first half of the disc features pageant songs that would have been performed at various gatherings – songs for welcoming guests, for the harvest, for battle and for honoring the dead. The ‘Songs from the Past’ part features Penobscot, Passamaquoddy and Maliseet songs, some of which have been regularly performed for more than 100 years.

Akins received a grant from the state for the album, which is being used in Maine classrooms in compliance with a law that requires the teaching of American Indian culture in public schools. Akins has taken the music into schools around the state in an effort to combat negative stereotypes against American Indians.

“I talk to kids at different schools, and when you hear what kind of stuff actually goes down and the misconceptions and racism, it’s disheartening,” he said. “So this is, I hope, combating that.”

There’s so much music that Akins plans to re-enter the studio later this year to record a follow-up to “For the Grandchildren.” For his next album, Akins hopes to start in the 1940s and bring the collection up to contemporary times.

“When I started to really research, I just found so much,” he said. “I knew I needed to do two CDs. I couldn’t just contain it to one.”

Playing the songs of his people brings Akins a deeper connection to his family. Often, he’ll be working on a particular song at the tribal museum and he’ll be struck by how close his grandparents and great-grandparents feel to him.

“Doing the old songs while you’re sitting in the museum and there’s a picture of your grandmother dancing? I can’t think of a better place to do it,” said Akins. “It gave it a very strong connection for me. It has been a very rewarding experience.”

To order a copy of “For the Grandchildren,” you can e-mail Akins at chimusums@hotmail.com.

eburnham@bangordailynews.net