Essay contributed by Jennifer Sapiel Neptune (Penobscot Nation), Old Town, Maine, as part of "Northern Threads: Two centuries of dress at Maine Historical Society, Part I", a physical exhibition hosted at MHS from March to July, 2022.
The stories these moccasins tell—beauty, resilience, change, invisibility. At first look they speak of beauty. Designs old and ancient, planned and then patiently stitched bead by bead, expertly folding and shaping silk ribbon into colorful points and curves. Glass beads, wool, silk, and cloth traded for and saved and shared from treaty annuities. New materials giving creative new possibilities to designs once painted with natural dyes or stitched with flattened porcupine quills.
Look a little deeper and see resilience to the incredible changes happening in the lifetime of the artist. The moccasins are written with a date of 1834, and while it is not clear if this was the date of their creation or the date of their collection, we can assume the maker would have been born during, or shortly after the wars and bounties of the late 1700s. They would have seen firsthand the aftermath and trauma of those wars and experienced the influx of settlers after the Revolutionary War, changing and reshaping our world. They would have seen Maine become a state, and experienced northern Penobscot territory and hunting grounds stolen and resold to enrich the lumber barons of Bangor.
Now listen to hear the story of invisibility and erasure. After statehood, Penobscot and Wabanaki people didn’t disappear. We were simply ignored and unwritten from the history lessons, from the stories told. The truth of the past isn’t easy, it’s difficult to reconcile, uncomfortable to hear, and sometimes painful to look at full gaze. We are easier to deal with as ghosts without our human form, without voices that would tell a different story.
In the early twentieth century, museums and anthropologist began collecting in earnest with the belief that Indigenous people were destined to vanish. It is revealing that so much of Penobscot and Passamaquoddy culture collected during this time was purchased by museums out of state—New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington D.C. Maine Historical Society, until very recently, had very few examples of Wabanaki clothing in its collection.
Now take a step back and look at the moccasins again. Do you understand them differently? Can you imagine the life of the person who stitched the beads? Can you see, hear, and feel the story she stitched for you in leather, wool, glass, and silk? For myself, the full story reveals something even more beautiful—that you can stand here now and view them, that the world continues to change, and that you can hear the story told from the voice of a Penobscot beadworker. We persevere, we will keep telling our stories, and we will always be here creating beauty in this place that will forever remain our Homelands.
To learn more about the colonial wars and scalp bounties, please visit mainememory.net/beginagain
Friendly URL: https://www.mainememory.net/exhibits/moccasins
