Maine Memory Network

Indians, Furs, and Economics

When Europeans arrived in North America and disrupted traditional Native American patterns of life, they also offered other opportunities: trade goods for furs. The fur trade had mixed results for the Wabanaki.

Gifts From Gluskabe: Maine Indian Artforms

According to legend, the Great Spirit created Gluskabe, who shaped the world of the Native People of Maine, and taught them how to use and respect the land and the resources around them. This exhibit celebrates the gifts of Gluskabe with Maine Indian art works from the early nineteenth to mid twentieth centuries.

Hannibal Hamlin of Paris Hill

2009 marked the bicentennials of the births of Abraham Lincoln and his first vice president, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine. To observe the anniversary, Paris Hill, where Hamlin was born and raised, honored the native statesman and recalled both his early life in the community and the mark he made on Maine and the nation.

The Devil and the Wilderness

Anglo-Americans in northern New England sometimes interpreted their own anxieties about the Wilderness, their faith, and their conflicts with Native Americans as signs that the Devil and his handmaidens, witches, were active in their midst.

Gluskap of the Wabanaki

Creation and other cultural tales are important to framing a culture's beliefs and values -- and passing those on. The Wabanaki -- Maliseet, Micmac, Passamaquoddy and Penobscot -- Indians of Maine and Nova Scotia tell stories of a cultural hero/creator, a giant who lived among them and who promised to return.

Holding up the Sky: Wabanaki people, culture, history, and art

Learn about Native diplomacy and obligation by exploring 13,000 years of Wabanaki residence in Maine through 17th century treaties, historic items, and contemporary artworks—from ash baskets to high fashion. Wabanaki voices contextualize present-day relevance and repercussions of 400 years of shared histories between Wabanakis and settlers to their region.

Amazing! Maine Stories

These stories -- that stretch from 1999 back to 1759 -- take you from an amusement park to the halls of Congress. There are inventors, artists, showmen, a railway agent, a man whose civic endeavors helped shape Portland, a man devoted to the pursuit of peace and one known for his military exploits, Maine's first novelist, a woman who recorded everyday life in detail, and an Indian who survived a British attack.

Land Claims, Economic Opportunities?

The landmark 1980 Maine Indian Land Claims Settlement Act provided $81.6 million to Maine Indians for economic development, land purchase and other purposes. The money and increased land holdings, however, have not solved economic and employment issues for Maine Indians.

400 years of New Mainers

Immigration is one of the most debated topics in Maine. Controversy aside, immigration is also America's oldest tradition, and along with religious tolerance, what our nation was built upon. Since the first people--the Wabanaki--permitted Europeans to settle in the land now known as Maine, we have been a state of immigrants.

Father Rasles, the Indians and the English

Father Sebastien Rasle, a French Jesuit, ran a mission for Indians at Norridgewock and, many English settlers believed, encouraged Indian resistance to English settlement. He was killed in a raid on the mission in 1724 that resulted in the remaining Indians fleeing for Canada.

Les Raquetteurs

In the early 1600s, French explorers and colonizers in the New World quickly adopted a Native American mode of transportation to get around during the harsh winter months: the snowshoe. Most Northern societies had some form of snowshoe, but the Native Americans turned it into a highly functional item. French settlers named snowshoes "raquettes" because they resembled the tennis racket then in use.

Lillian Nordica: Farmington Diva

Lillian Norton, known as Nordica, was one of the best known sopranos in America and the world at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. She was a native of Farmington.

Bookplates Honor Annie Louise Cary

A summer resident of Wayne collected more than 3,000 bookplates to honor Maine native and noted opera singer Annie Louise Cary and to support the Cary Memorial Library.

Popham Colony

George Popham and a group of fellow Englishmen arrived at the mouth of the Kennebec River, hoping to trade with Native Americans, find gold and other valuable minerals, and discover a Northwest passage. In 18 months, the fledgling colony was gone.

Elise Fellows White: Music, Writing, and Family

From a violin prodigy in her early years to an older woman -- mother of two -- struggling financially, Skowhegan native Mary Elise Fellows White remained committed to music, writing, poetry, her extended family -- and living a life that would matter and be remembered.

Redact: Obscuring the Maine Constitution

In 2015, Maliseet Representative Henry Bear drew the Maine legislature’s attention to a historic redaction of the Maine Constitution. Through legislation drafted in February 1875, approved by voters in September 1875, and enacted on January 1, 1876, the Sections 1, 2, and 5 of Article X (ten) of the Maine Constitution ceased to be printed. Since 1876, these sections are redacted from the document. Although they are obscured, they retain their validity.

Northern Threads: Penobscot mocassins

A themed exhibit vignette within "Northern Threads, Part I," about telling stories through Indigenous clothing, featuring an essay by Jennifer Sapiel Neptune (Penobscot.)

Music in Maine - MAKE

"… instructions on Church-music, in order to aid the Native Americans to sing the praises of the Lord…but also to preserve several unwritten national…"

Music in Maine - Community and School Marching Bands

"… and meeting the audiences’ expectations of what Native peoples looked like. Band members wore typical Penobscot-style upright feather headdresses…"

State of Mind: Becoming Maine

The history of the region now known as Maine did not begin at statehood in 1820. What was Maine before it was a state? How did Maine separate from Massachusetts? How has the Maine we experience today been shaped by thousands of years of history?

Music in Maine - Community Music

"… and Music Alive By Cindy Larock A “Franco-Yankee” native of Lewiston, I've been happily involved in the traditional music and dance scene in Maine…"

Begin Again: reckoning with intolerance in Maine

BEGIN AGAIN explores Maine's historic role, going back 528 years, in crisis that brought about the pandemic, social and economic inequities, and the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.

Horace W. Shaylor: Portland Penman

Horace W. Shaylor, a native of Ohio, settled in Portland and turned his focus to handwriting, developing several unique books of handwriting instruction. He also was a talented artist.

The Schooner Bowdoin: Ninety Years of Seagoing History

After traveling to the Arctic with Robert E. Peary, Donald B. MacMillan (1874-1970), an explorer, researcher, and lecturer, helped design his own vessel for Arctic exploration, the schooner <em>Bowdoin,</em> which he named after his alma mater. The schooner remains on the seas.