Maine Memory Network

Maine Historical Society (MHS) installed CODE RED: Climate, Justice & Natural History Collections from March 17 to December 30, 2023 in Portland, Maine. Curated by Tilly Laskey, MHS curator and Dr. Darren J. Ranco (Penobscot) Professor of Anthropology and Chair of Native American Programs, University of Maine.

Listen to the curators discuss CODE RED.

Advised by: Denise Altvater, Richard “Dick” Anderson, Andrew Beahm, Charlene Donahue, Gabriel Frey, Gal Frey, Bernd Heinrich, Doug Hitchcox, Avery Yale Kamila, Genevieve LeMoine, E. Christopher “Chris” Livesay, Bill McKibben, Jennifer Neptune, Mali Obomsawin, Jill Pelto, David Reidmiller, Lokotah Sanborn, and Frances Soctomah. Collaborators include: Abbe Museum, Bar Harbor, Maine, Gray Herbarium at Harvard University, Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library, Bates College, The Hodgdon Herbarium, University of New Hampshire, Hudson Museum University of Maine, Lewiston Public Library, Lillian Nordica Association, Peary MacMillan Arctic Museum, Pejepscot History Center, Maine State Archives, Maine State Museum, Massachusetts Audubon, New England Botany Society, Northern Maine Museum, University of Maine Presque Isle, Portland Public Library Archives, Donald Soctomah, and Sunlight Media Collective.

Supported by: Elsie A. Brown Fund, Inc., Margaret E. Burnham Charitable Trust, Horizon Foundation, Inc., William Sloane Jelin Foundation, The Morton-Kelly Charitable Trust, Rines Thompson Fund, a component fund of the Maine Community Foundation, Elmina B. Sewall Foundation, and The Phineas W. Sprague Memorial Foundation.

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The Portland Society of Natural History (PSNH) was one of America’s earliest natural history museums. Starting in 1836 it operated under various names in several Portland locations, and legendarily burned to the ground twice. PSNH merged with Maine Audubon in 1961, closed to the public in November 1970, and officially became part of Maine Audubon in 1972. PSNH staff spent years disbursing millions of items from the museum, library, and herbarium to institutions in Maine, and around the globe. Maine Historical Society holds the PSNH archives, but it took detective work to find the PSNH specimens. Reuniting them aims to put extinction, global warming, water contamination, and cultural representation into context.

The same centuries-old systems that legalized colonization of Indigenous Homelands also promoted scientific research, and collecting activities. The origins of natural history museums as places for White, educated men to study science places Indigenous peoples into a “primitive” past—ironically separating people from the very nature they were studying, and excluding diverse perspectives.

Indigenous science uses place-based understandings and care-taking strategies adapted over millennia to inform decisions about sustainable practices. Through self-determination, Indigenous peoples—who make up 4% of the earth’s population—have stewarded 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity in just 20% of the earth’s land base. If we are to find a way forward in this challenging and changing environment, Indigenous science and Indigenous peoples are central to finding climate solutions, and why we are prioritizing Wabanaki knowledge in CODE RED.

Humans have already fundamentally changed the earth, with the effects detailed in the United Nations’ 2022 report, Code Red for Humanity. Weather is changing so rapidly that much of this exhibition will be obsolete in a few months. Heat waves, wildfires, droughts and severe storms are more common. The Arctic is melting, and seas are rising. Supported by contributions from scientists and specialists across Maine, we hope visitors will find wonder in the old Portland Society of Natural History specimens, learn about past actions, and develop new strategies for building sustainable communities to navigate a new climate future.

Indigenous Science

Indigenous science and traditional ecological knowledge is intimately tied to Indigenous peoples’ roles, responsibilities, and ecological caretaking. Based upon thousands of years of observation, generations of peer review, and active care-taking practices, Indigenous science systems create obligations of care not usually found in Western science. For example, Wabanaki teachings often require communities to care for the thing they have knowledge of—teachings related to sweetgrass require taking care of it so that it will take care of Wabanaki peoples. Methods of picking sweetgrass, used as medicine and in basketry traditions, leads to the proliferation of sweetgrass in following years. To know about sweetgrass creates an obligation to care for it. Because of these knowledge traditions, Wabanaki people continue to know and engage the non-human relations in their Homeland, despite colonial disruptions in active care-taking.

Indigenous science and connections to place are rooted in the fact that Indigenous people are tied to specific places and ecosystems—creation stories put them in this landscape. For Indigenous people, one creation story often cited by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people involves the Wabanaki cultural hero and creator Gluskabe shooting an arrow into a Brown ash (basket) tree, bringing forth the people and animals of that place/ecosystem into a river of life. As humans created in the locations of Wabanaki Homelands, whose “holy places” are here, not halfway around the world, care-taking responsibilities are critical to identity as Indigenous people.

Katahdin Arctic Butterflies

Western scientific practices include collecting, preserving, and storing specimens for research. Scientists and amateurs catch butterflies and prepare them in mounts or pin them to a background. Studying the preserved insects provides information for researchers to understand changes in butterfly wing shape over time, the genetics of extinct species, and sometimes even finding new species within the collections.

The Katahdin arctic butterfly is in the family Nymphalidae, a subspecies of the Polixenes arctic. They live in the arctic tundra from Alaska through northern Canada to Labrador. The Nymphalidae family includes satyr butterflies.

The Katahdin subspecies is listed as endangered. It is only found on the summit of Katahdin in Baxter State Park, an alpine environment where the Katahdin Arctic butterfly has existed over thousands of years. Warming temperatures could affect both the alpine plants and the butterfly’s existence.

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Maine's Warming Climate
by David Reidmiller, PhD, Gulf of Maine Research Institute

Climate change affects all aspects of life across Maine. In the state’s forested regions, new pests and diseases pose risks to cherished ecosystems and commercially valuable timber, in part because of more hospitable conditions brought about by climate change. A warmer, wetter atmosphere increases the risk of flooding and erosion—threatening scores of communities nestled along the banks of Maine’s rivers, creeks, and streams. Ocean water levels have risen by more than eight inches in Casco Bay over the past century, and the rate of that sea level rise is increasing.

As a result, risks are only going to grow in the decades ahead to biodiversity hotspots, such as salt marshes, as well as important tourism, recreation areas, and critical infrastructure (e.g. wastewater treatment facilities) in the coastal zone. The waters of the Gulf of Maine are experiencing some of the fastest warming rates among any part of the ocean around the world. This poses risks to—and opportunities for—commercially valuable wild harvest fisheries and aquaculture farmers.

Climate impacts from other regions affect life here, too. Increasingly, frequent and intense wildfires in the Mountain West reduce air quality here in Maine, posing health risks to asthmatics and impeding outdoor recreation opportunities. The long-term trend of declines in Arctic sea ice cover is altering large-scale weather patterns that influence the conditions in Maine. Increasingly, extreme meteorological events like hurricanes or typhoons, droughts, and floods overseas can disrupt supply chains, increasing consumer costs for food, electronics, etc.

In Maine, as elsewhere, climate change means the past is no longer an accurate predictor of the future. It means Mainers are now experiencing and interacting with the natural world in ways that are unprecedented on human timescales.

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Climagration

Wabanaki Nations, Abenaki, Maliseet, Mi’kmaq, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot, and other Tribal Nations in the region, like other Indigenous communities across the globe, will face an inordinate amount of impact from global climatic change. With these impacts already being felt, adaptation to new climate realities have already begun. For example, Moose are having trouble surviving the increased presence of winter ticks because of warmer winters, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous hunters are adapting to this new reality, as well as a shifting set of locations for harvesting fish and other game.

Climagration is when a community is no longer sustainable exclusively because of climate-related events and permanent relocation is required to protect people. While usually referred to the relocation of human beings, the same can be said about non-humans as well. Some climate models point to the fact that Maine will be too warm for Brown (basket) ash in 100 years—and the trees must move as well, away from Wabanaki people in Maine.

In the short term, climate change will also bring with it an increase of invasive species, such as the Emerald Ash Borer (EAB), responsible for killing millions of ash trees in North America, and discovered in northern and southern Maine in 2018—threatening Wabanaki basketmaking
traditions in the coming decades.

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Page navigation: Indigenous Science and Maine's Climate Page 1; The Portland Society of Natural History Page 2; Nature of Collecting and animal extinctions Page 3; Bird conservation Page 4; Pollination, Plants and Pesticides Page 5; Climate Change, Human Rights, and Foodways Page 6; Clean water, warming water Page 7; Anthropology and Natural History Museums Page 8

The Portland Society of Natural History

The Portland Society of Natural History (PSNH) began as the Maine Institute of Natural Science, organized in 1836 and later incorporated by a group of 24 White men in 1843, making it one of the first natural history museums in America. The PSNH rivaled organizations like Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, Yale’s Peabody Museum, the Boston Society of Natural History (Museum of Science), and Salem’s Essex Institute (Peabody Essex Museum).

PSNH members embraced the 1820s lyceum movement initiated in Massachusetts that offered attendees educational and self-improvement opportunities through lectures on literary, scientific and “moral” topics. Eventually the PSNH operated a renowned museum, library, herbarium, and collections archive, rebuilt three times over 135 years. First, after disbanding the organization in 1839, second after fire destroyed the museum’s rooms in the Merchant’s Exchange in 1854, and third after their Congress Street building burned in the Great Fire of 1866.

Undaunted, the PSNH commissioned Portland architect Francis Fassett to build a new facility on the corner of Elm and Congress Streets where the Society displayed natural history collections from 1880 to 1970. For financial reasons, the PSNH merged with Maine Audubon in 1961, sharing an executive board and membership but maintaining separate identities.

In November 1970, the Elm Street building’s decaying condition and the widening of Elm Street by the city led to the decision to close the PSNH. By 1972, the PSNH became part of Maine Audubon, whose mission to support live animals and conservation efforts outweighed curating museum collections. Maine Audubon staff spent years disbursing the collections—including over 3,500 mammal study skins, hundreds of taxidermy mounts, 100,000 shells, tons of minerals and fossils, over 30,000 herbarium sheets, thousands of linear feet of publications, and worldwide cultural materials—to locations from Maine to Hawaii.

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The first incarnation of the PSNH was the Maine Institute of Science in 1836, created, “To promote the General Good,” and to make “contributions in specimens of Metals, Minerals, Birds, rare Animals, Reptiles, Fishes, Insects, Shells, Plants & Co. & Co.” For unrecorded reasons, the Maine Institute of Science disbanded in 1839.

In 1843, former members of the Maine Institute of Science organized the Portland Society of Natural History, created a constitution and by-laws, and began collecting natural history specimens. They formally incorporated in 1850.

The Merchant’s Exchange on Middle Street was the first physical home of the PSNH. When fire destroyed the building in 1854, PSNH leadership noted the casualties of “rare and valuable specimens” including a first edition of Audubon’s Birds of America, mounted birds, minerals, and curiosities.” The PSNH records and a stuffed Passenger Pigeon specimen were the only survivors of the fire.

Other casualties included the shell collection amassed by Dr. Jesse W. Mighels, a founding PSNH member. Prior to moving from Portland to Ohio, Mighels sold his entire shell collection for $1,000 to the PSNH, consisting of more than 3000 mollusk species and nearly 10,000 specimens., Mighels wrote a telegram after hearing about the fire,

My Dear Sir: Is it possible that my beautiful collection of shells is destroyed? Is it all ruined? Must I know I can see that collection no more? The work of nine years of delightful enthusiastic industry—is it all gone? Your beautiful collections of shells, and birds, and minerals and fossils-alas, are they all lost?

In 1854, the Portland Society for Natural History rented rooms in Portland’s Old City Hall, the museum’s second location. Built in 1825, Portlanders also called the building Old Market House and Old Town Hall, depending on the era.

The PSNH moved to the second floor of the Merchants Bank at 34 Exchange Street in 1857 for its third location in Portland, where the Society displayed collections until 1859.

Within five years, donors added natural history specimens including shells, minerals, birds, insects, fossils, plants, animal skulls, and eggs to the PSNH. The library also was replenished. Of note was poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s donation in 1857, a commissioned copy portrait of naturalist Alexander von Humboldt.

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The watercolor attributed to Anna Bucknam of Maine’s original Statehouse in Portland on the right also features the three story Portland Academy brick building on the left side of the painting. The State established the Portland Academy by legislation in 1794.

The PSNH purchased Portland Academy building in 1859 and spent nearly a year transforming it. The building had a central room with a lecture hall, lit by a cupola, and contained specimen cases on two levels with rod iron balconies. Museum inventories from this era include worldwide materials such as fossils from Japan, taxidermy marmosets from Madagascar, and palm leaves.

During Portland’s Great Fire of 1866, which lasted for two days and destroyed over 1,800 buildings in the city, the PSNH also perished. During the fire, curator Edward Sylvester Morse saved the PSNH library and the adjacent portrait of Baron Von Humboldt. The rest of the PSNH–including the Passenger Pigeon saved in the 1854 fire–went up in flames.

Dr. William Wood, PSNH’s President described the fire, and the efforts of curator Edward Sylvester Morse to save the PSNH collections during the Great Fire of 1866,

Such was the scene and hour, when for the first time it became apparent that danger threatened the City Hall and other public buildings in that vicinity, and among them the Hall of the Portland Society of Natural History. When two or three of the members of the Society, wearied with their exertions in other parts of the city, entered the building, they found there only the General Curator. He had been busy making preparations to remove the cabinets, by unlocking and opening all the cases, placing empty drawers in front of them, swinging the table-cases athwart the tables so that they could readily be seized by their ends, and in other ways making the best and every arrangement that suggested itself for effecting a rapid clearance of the Exhibition Hall.

PSNH member George Frederick Morse painted this scene of Congress Street, including the PSNH building, during the Portland fire of 1866.

Morse’s brother, Edward, served as curator to the PSNH. Reports detail Edward Sylvester Morse’s heroic efforts which saved the majority of the PSNH’s library, and his failed attempt to save a giant slab of redwood by rolling it through the museum. Due to the size of the specimen he left it to burn with the remainder of the collections.

On July 10, 1866, five days after the fire that engulfed the PSNH building and collections, membership voted, The Portland Society of Natural History still lives, notwithstanding the fearful calamity of fire that has again swept away its all. It will, under the blessing of Providence, still pursue its way, undismayed and earnest, believing that fortitude and courage will yet secure a good measure of prosperity.

The PSNH lost the entire ornithology collection in this fire, representing nearly every species of bird on the East Coast. The fire also took the only specimen of the Timber Rattlesnake (Crotalus horridus L.) indigenous to Maine (but no longer in the state). It was collected on Rattlesnake Mountain in Raymond and donated to the Society on February 20, 1862.

The PSNH met at the homes of President William Wood and other members until 1868, when the City of Portland offered a room, rent-free on the third floor of the reconstructed City Hall, located on the corner of Congress and Myrtle Streets, where the Society remained until 1880.

After fire destroyed the Portland Society of Natural History (PSNH) building and collections in 1866, membership asked for donations, imploring “the aid of the friends of science everywhere to enable” the PSNH to continue its work.

They established ten areas for donations: minerals, rocks, and marls; fossils and petrifactions; shells: marine, land, or freshwater; corals, sponges, and seaweeds; insects, snakes, turtles, and lizards; birds and their nests and eggs; bones and skins of animals; pressed plants, seeds, and fruits; woods and barks; and mosses, lichens, and fungi.

Other museums donated collections. The Essex Institute of Salem, Massachusetts, sent crates of coral and shells, the Boston Society of Natural History sent publications, and the Smithsonian sent shells and ethnographic items from the Arctic and Fiji Islands.

The PSNH commissioned Portland architect Francis H. Fassett, known for the Maine General Hospital and the Baxter Building, to design their new home on Elm Street, on the site of Portland Public Library. as of 2023 The PSNH inhabited the building in 1880—its seventh and final location—opening to the public on October 3, 1881.

Many museums in the 18th and 19th centuries grew their collections through exchanges and gifts from around the world. Needing to fill their new Elm Street museum in 1881, the PSNH petitioned “seafaring” captains and men (not women) and fishermen to search the ocean and their nets for natural history items saying, “the most common things are the really desirable ones.” William Wood authored the appeal, deferring to the expertise of Charles Fuller, Keeper of the Cabinets. They asked that if “visiting foreign lands,” potential supporters of the PSNH could pick up starfishes, crabs, or shrimp and pack them in salt and seaweed or tie them up with paper. Perhaps a tourist to the South Pacific could drop some fresh fruits or seed pods into a jar with preservatives and bring them back to Portland. Nothing was mundane to the PSNH, with William Wood proclaiming, “They are sure to be objects of great scientific interest and more heartily welcomed to our collections than many other curiosities that are bought with gold and silver.”

By 1900, the library housed nearly 3,500 bound volumes and about 3,200 pamphlets. The second floor contained displays full of specimens. Two balconies of display cases existed above the main museum floor, and a skylight on top lit the entire building.

The Great Depression and changing times affected the PSNH. By 1931, only 75 members remained. In 1937, curator Edward Norton noted that “twelve had been elected to membership , three had died, and one resigned.”

Dr. William Wood, President of the Portland Society of Natural History

William Wood was an original founding member of the Maine Institute of Science in 1836, and the PSNH in 1843. Although he
practiced medicine, Dr. Wood dedicated his life to natural history.

When the Maine Institute closed in 1839, Wood purchased much of the collections at auction in 1840, storing it in his home. Wood also served as president of the Portland Lyceum and secretary for the Maine Historical Society.

In 1852, the PSNH elected William Wood as the third president, a term that lasted for 47 years until his death
in 1899. Wood oversaw the two devastating fires that destroyed the PSNH, moving to five different locations, and supervised the renovation and construction of two buildings for the Society. Newspapers conveyed Wood’s connection to the PSNH, writing, “It will be difficult for us to think of him and this Society as separate and apart.”

Curator Arthur Norton

Lewiston Journal reporter Alice Frost Lord visited the PSNH in 1937 and wrote, “Curator Norton takes one over the building as if it was all new to him! He does that with everyone, without a doubt. He’s the kind of curator that's born, not made. The museum never goes stale for him.”

Arthur Norton (1871-1943) was a naturalist, specializing and writing about geography, botany, mammals and birds. He was curator of the Portland Society of Natural History from 1905 to 1943.

Norton’s true calling was ornithology, or the study of birds. The newly incorporated Maine Ornithological Society—the first statewide league of people interested in birds, a precursor to Maine Audubon—elected Norton president in 1897. Norton led the Ornithological Society’s activist efforts in 1901, along with a newly created National Audubon Society, successfully lobbying the Maine Legislature to pass a law protecting all non-game birds, nests, and eggs. Norton later worked as Field Agent and secretary-treasurer for the National Audubon Society, served as a president and a secretary of the Josselyn Botanical Society, and was a charter member of the American Society of Mammalogists.

During Norton’s tenure, the Portland Society became the center of the Audubon movement in Maine. When Arthur Norton died in January 1942 at age 72, after 37 years as curator for the Portland Society of Natural History, the organization briefly closed, reopening only after the end of World War II.

The Portland Society of Natural History and Maine Audubon

Conservation combined with education and advocacy has been a constant throughout the history of Maine Audubon and its founding organizations—the Portland Society of Natural History (1843) and the Maine Audubon Society (1902). From general knowledge and the cataloging and collecting of species from around the world in the early 19th century, the study of natural sciences has evolved from observation to action, and the same can be said for Maine Audubon.

At its inception, the PNHS invited people into the museum to engage with its collection which included stuffed birds, mounted fish, Rocky Mountain elk horns, and a first edition of Audubon’s Birds of America, and loaned objects to Maine educational institutions. Founded in 1902 for the purpose of preventing the extinction of bird species due to the millinery trade, the Maine Audubon Society aimed both to discourage the destruction of birds and to encourage an interest in birds and the study of natural history.

As the 20th century brought new changes both to the organizations and the world at large, the two groups eventually merged. When the ground swelling of an environmental movement began in the 1970s, Maine Audubon was poised to lead the charge, getting a landmark bottle bill passed, fighting against the pesticide DDT, and much more. The science-based conservation and action which we are known for today was launched.

For the past fifty years, Maine Audubon has continued to focus on awareness combined with action—educating future generations of environmental caretakers, advocating for public policies on state and national levels, and engaging with community scientists, government officials, partner organizations, landowners, and countless other constituencies on conservation initiatives around wildlife and wildlife habitat in Maine. Collections and natural history observations now serve not just as tools for education, but also provide data for research that underpins our conservation and legislative work.

The Nature of Collecting

Natural History museums relied on a wide range of people for their collections, including scientists, rare art collectors, and tourists, often bringing together evidence of Indigenous people, their “artifacts”, and fossilized evidence of long extinct animals alongside one another. While this clearly places Indigenous people as part of a “Natural” past, these practices of collection and display had real consequences for Indigenous people.

As Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith points out in her 2012 book Decolonizing Methodologies,

The idea that collectors were actually rescuing artifacts from decay and destruction, and from Indigenous peoples themselves, legitimated practices which also included commercial trade and plain and simple theft.

For Indigenous peoples, including the Wabanaki, these collecting practices also prevented ongoing care-taking roles of these objects—and their removal caused harms to a range of cultural and ceremonial practices. As these “artifacts” make their way back to our Tribal Nations, Indigenous people re-engage them in ways that not only allows for Indigenous understandings of history, but also connects these pasts to the current day and make them a part of the future.

Cabinets of Curiosities

Museums are the keepers of “real stuff,” connecting us to knowledge that excites and promotes curiosity. The modern museum has roots in the 16th and 17th century practice of creating “cabinets of curiosities,” literal display cases filled with items like minerals, shells, fossils, mammal and plant specimens, and cultural items from Indigenous peoples and diverse cultures, mixed together in glass-door cabinets. The cabinets demonstrated the owner’s knowledge and expertise, and were subjects of conversation.

Sometimes, European collectors created entire “Wonder Rooms,” opening them to the public starting around 1650. However, the cabinets were often arranged for visual interest, without regard for an object’s context, or natural order.

The PSNH operated like a cabinet of curiosity, often lacking consistent protocols for cataloging and displaying donations or scientific collections. LM Eastman recalled the PSNH saying,

Books, shells, birds, plants, and mounted animals all appeared together. The specimens were not inventoried in specific categories, and many times the name of the contributor was not recorded. It seems that as the specimens arrived at the Society’s doors, a partial description was randomly jotted down on an entry sheet. This lack of organization and focus would be the foundation for modern criticism of collections of this kind.

From Moon Rocks to Birchbark Canoes

The PSNH grew out of the Era of Enlightenment where regular people—citizen scientists—created societies and academies. Universities did not offer degrees in many scientific subjects, allowing individuals to self-professionalize through exploration and observation.

The term natural history is based on human domination of nature by naming, labeling, organizing, and creating theories about the environment. Today, we are living with the legacy of many artificial systems set in place by Europeans during the Enlightenment, which can actually distance humans from nature.

Natural history explorers created collections and mixed art, science, and history with biological specimens, taxidermy animals, fossils, and geology. PSNH Curator Edward Norton noted of the Elm Street location, “Nowhere in Maine or elsewhere can there be found such full representations of specimens from the State in so many departments of natural history under one roof.”

Over its 135 years of operation, the PSNH changed displays according to current scientific thought. After 1859, they embraced Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, showing how organisms evolved from single cells into the lifeforms we see today.

Arctic connections and exploration

Jennifer Sapiel Neptune's experiences in Greenland

In June of 2022 I traveled to Greenland as part of a small group of artists exploring cultural resiliency in this time of rapidly changing climate. Why Greenland?

We are connected by water and currents, by migrating Atlantic Salmon, by stories, ice, and climate change. As a traditional Penobscot basketmaker climate change is impacting the sweetgrass I harvest, the ash trees that I need for basketry splints, and access myself and other Indigenous cultural practitioners need to coastlines, rivers, plants, fish, and animals.

20,000 years ago where you stand now was covered in a mile of ice. An enormous ice sheet covered Wabanaki territory, and what we now call Maine. As the ice retreated north massive changes happened to this landscape, the Gulf of Maine, and all who inhabited it. Sea levels rose and fell, rivers were reborn from the ice, islands rose or sank under the sea, and some animals like Mammoths and Mastodons disappeared entirely.

Our people still pass down the stories of this time and how the world changed as we lived with, and beside, the Laurentide Ice Sheet. In Greenland I saw our stories come to life in their landscape. Witnessed shapes and otherworldly faces in the ice that had me constantly replaying in my mind every traditional story I know.

In a traditional story of how the Penobscot River was formed, a giant frog held back all the fresh water causing a water famine. The fish, the animals, and people were dying of thirst until Gluskap comes and smashes the giant, releasing all the water. Some people are so happy and relieved they jump into the flood and are turned into salmon, sturgeon, eels, turtles and whales. Imagine my surprise on day two in Greenland to stand in front of an ice formation shaped like an enormous frog with a smirk in his grin.

In Greenland I felt as if I was traveling with an entourage of ancestors, who shared in my joy and excitement of each experience that felt more like remembering than discovering. In Maine, Caribou were hunted out by unsustainable non-indigenous hunting practices a hundred years ago. In Greenland I cried when I tasted caribou meat for the first time, I felt surrounded by ancestors who had been starving, and my DNA and spirit had been starving too for nourishment that had been lost for so long I didn’t know I missed it.

Flying home, the clouds parted as we flew over the Labrador Sea. Looking down at the chunks of ice floating there, I thought about the endangered Atlantic Salmon who make the journey from their birth places in the Penobscot River watershed to the sea between Labrador and Greenland, to grow and return home to spawn another generation. Unlike Pacific Salmon they live to return to the sea again after spawning. Miracles with fins, too stubborn to die.

Looking out over the vastness of Labrador from my window, I recalled an old story about a woman from the far north who flew as a loon to our territory to warn the people about what was to come, to try to buy us a little more time before everything changed forever. There are things you can never get back. I wondered what she would say now, and would those that needed most to hear her warning most even be able to listen.

We belong to the same river
The salmon and us
pαnawάhpskewtəkʷ (Penobscot)
We were born for each other
Both as stubborn as the rocks
our home is named after.
We refuse to give up
We refuse to die.

In the spring if you are quiet
you might hear young skʷámekʷak (Atlantic Salmon)
Singing their traveling songs
as they swim for the Labrador Sea.
To grow strong and become wise
To meet the ice with the long memory
Where ancestors still dance the dance
of lights in the sky.

We remember
Far back, long ago, stories of the ice
The winters that didn’t end
Until Glooskap stole summer,
the ice retreated, defeated.
wαpskʷ, the white bear followed
those that stayed changed and adapted.
The rivers returned.

For thousands upon thousands of years
the land and waters rose and fell.
Change, adapt, in, out, retreat, advance
like a breath that takes eons.
Tundra retreated, abandoning plants and insects
that still hold their space on the very tops of the oldest,
most sacred mountains.

If I could, I would
Bend the straight linear west
back into a circle, back to the dawn.
Save us all from the pit of grief
which comes with living a dystopian race
of metal, greed, and longing
that moves too fast to adapt and
leaves the plants atop Katahdin weeping
as the summer marches further north.

There is no end to the loneliness
Grief over what can never, ever be returned
And it is not just the fate of fish
Or one small tribe of people
Our fates all tied to the smallest of beings
We are all endangered
We are all in danger .

--Jennifer Sapiel Neptune ~ January 2023

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Walrus and Narwhals and Robert E. Peary
By Geneveive LeMoine
Curator/Registrar
The Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum and Arctic Studies Center
Bowdoin College

Walrus and narwhal are quintessential Arctic marine mammals, adapted to living on and under sea ice. When PSNH member, Robert E. Peary, collected these walrus and narwhal specimens in northern Greenland in the 1890s there was considerably more sea ice in the Arctic than there is today. At the beginning of the 20th century sea ice began a steady, and now accelerating, decline that continues today, putting these animals at risk as their habitat disappears.

Walrus eat clams and other bottom-dwelling creatures, consuming thousands a day. When not swimming and diving, they use their tusks to haul themselves up on floating ice, called floes, in relatively shallow coastal waters close to abundant sources of food. This is particularly important for mothers and babies, as the calves can stay safely on the ice as their mothers forage on the bottom. Due to climate change, ice is no longer in the Bering Sea’s shallow coastal waters, forcing females to swim great distances to feed.

Narwhals eat mostly fish, often diving to great depths in search of halibut, polar cod, and squid. The males’ dramatic tusks remain something of a mystery to humans, although recent research has revealed that they may be able to sense changes in temperature, salinity, and water pressure.

Narwhals spend summers in ice-free bays and fjords. In winter these places develop solid ice that narwhals cannot break through, so they migrate to deeper water where they swim under dense pack ice, surfacing through cracks to breathe. Recent studies have shown that narwhals are staying longer in their summer feeding areas, as ice is forming later in the fall. This puts them at risk of entrapment if ice forms too quickly, as it can do, and also exposes them to more shipping traffic, which they find very stressful.

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We are all Connected

We are living during a rare time of geological change, moving out of the Holocene, that began after the last ice age about 12,000 years ago, into the Anthropocene, named because of the outsized human domination of the earth.

The world’s biodiversity is vulnerable to collapse during the Anthropocene era because of human activities that have compromised habitats and warmed the climate. According to 234 scientists from 66 countries who prepared the United Nation’s Code Red for Humanity report, the earth’s surface temperature has increased faster since 1970 than in any other 50-year period over the last 2,000 years and global mean sea levels have risen faster since 1900 than over any prior century in the last 3,000 years. Climate change, species extinction and biodiversity are linked. In 2019, United Nations scientists reported that one million species are threatened with extinction, the highest number in human history. The World Wildlife Fund observed in 2022 an average of 68% decline in the global population of mammals, fish, birds, reptiles and amphibians since 1970. Freshwater populations declined by an average of 83% since 1970, more than any other species group.

Modern human activities over the past 200,000 years have unintentionally brought the earth to this critical place. Biodiversity loss both contributes to climate change and is a result of climate change, showing our interconnectedness. Scientists suggest that we must treat climate change and biodiversity loss simultaneously, or neither will be solved.

Beavers and Top hats
At the PSNH’s Elm Street location, curator Edward Norton noted that in 1881, visitors saw two mounted Beavers and a Prairie Dog donated by Colonel Henry Inman (1837-1899). Inman was a soldier who participated in the US westward expansion and served under George Custer. Inman married Eunice Churchill Dyer (1842–1922), the daughter of a shipbuilder in Portland, Maine in 1862, explaining the connection of Kansas-based Inman to the PSNH.

Beavers are the largest rodents in North America, and although their populations are stable in 2023, people hunted them to near extinction in colonial Maine up to the late 1800s, when Beaver pelts were the most valuable trading item in North America. The loss of Beaver populations meant that their dams no longer maintained ecological balance and growth of plants by controlling runoff, erosion, and floods, causing an imbalance in the rivers.

Beaver fur top hats were popular because they are durable and water resistant. Manufacturers shaved off the animal’s hide, and pounded the inner beaver hair into felt, then steamed, shaped, rolled, pressed, and blocked it into the shape of a hat.

Top hats are a status fashion accessory, associated with wealthy White men wearing tuxedo bow ties and tails. But some Wabanaki people, mostly women, also embraced the fashion. Like other European objects introduced into Indigenous societies, Wabanaki people transformed top hats by adding silver adornment and other elements, making them their own.

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Sixth Mass Extinction?

Earth has experienced five mass extinction events, periods of geological time ranging from a few thousand to millions of years, where a high percentage of biodiversity dies out. The last extinction was 65 million years ago, when an asteroid changed the earth’s climate and wiped out Dinosaurs, along with three-quarters of earth’s plant and animal species.

Some scientists say we are in a sixth mass extinction because human activity has altered 75% of the earth’s land surface, degrading water, land, and air. Scientists estimate the current species extinction rate is up to 10,000 times higher than natural extinction rates because of human activity. The World Wildlife Fund calculates between 200 and 2,000 species extinctions occur every year. These rates of population declines and extinctions are high enough to threaten the ecosystems that support human life on earth.

Climate breakdown is happening faster than predicted. The United Nations calls for a 45% cut in emissions by 2030 to avert catastrophic warming. If not, irreversible impacts like melting ice caps, frequent and intense weather events, and massive biodiversity and ecosystem loss will displace almost 3.3 billion people living in vulnerable areas. Humans have caused the critical situation, but we can create potential solutions

The Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius), whose territory once extended into Maine, was once so common people said the sky darkened for days when flocks passed overhead during migrations. Dexter, Maine, was the location where the last reported Passenger Pigeon was shot in 1896. Mainly due to overhunting, Passenger Pigeons became extinct in 1914 when a solitary female bird named “Martha” died at the Cincinnati Zoo.

The Carolina Parakeet (Conuropsis carolinensis) was one of four parakeet species in the US, ranging across eastern North America from the Gulf of Mexico to southern Ontario. European colonization cleared Carolina Parakeet old growth forest habitat for agriculture, and farmers shot the birds to stop them from eating crop seed. The fashion industry was responsible for killing thousands of Carolina Parakeets, their bright feathers used on clothing and hats. The last captive Carolina Parakeet died at the Cincinnati Zoo on February 21, 1918, coincidentally in the same cage as Martha, four years earlier. A small population of the birds lived in Florida, after their decline the Carolina Parakeet was declared extinct in 1939.

The Northern Curlew (Numenius borealis) was one of the most common shorebirds in North America, with migration flights to Argentina. Without a confirmed sighting since 1963, the Northern Curlew is considered Critically Endangered or possibly extinct due to overhunting.

Large herds of Woodland Caribou used to roam the old growth forests of Maine, feeding on ground and tree lichen. European settlement, industries like paper making which reduced forests, and over-hunting by non-Indigenous game hunters led to the extinction of Caribou in the state around 1914.

Maine worked to reintroduce Caribou twice in 1963 and 1993, but Maine’s landscape no longer supports Caribou. The young trees don’t produce the correct lichen, versus old growth, and White Tail Deer populations, who carry a brain worm deadly to Caribou, have increased. Listed as an endangered species by the United States in 1984, the Woodland Caribou is one of the most critically endangered mammals in North America. This is a significant loss to Wabanaki people, as stories and ceremonies tied to Caribou have been impacted. One example is the Penobscot 10th moon or month, usually associated with the second half of September and first half of October, is mačewatohkí-kisohs, “moon of rutting moose and caribou.”

Ivory-billed Woodpeckers

The Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) was the largest Woodpecker in North America with a total length of 19 to 21 inches and a typical wingspan of 30 inches. It got the nickname the Lord God Bird because people would exclaim “Lord God” when they saw it because it was such a stunning bird, visually. The bird only lives in cypress swamps and needs very large tracts of this habitat. As we have changed the landscape through logging and development so there aren’t massive tracts of swamplands in the southern US, the species has (likely) gone extinct.

Pileated Woodpeckers can thrive in smaller areas and can still be found; they are often misidentified as Ivory-billed Woodpeckers.

The US Fish and Wildlife reports the last confirmed sighting as being in 1944 but is reviewing its 2021 decision to declare the bird officially extinct.

Dioramas in bell jar cases became popular in the Victorian era as home decor. Taxidermied animals, which would never exist together in the same ecosystem, put in “fantasy” habitats show how design fads, in addition to fashion, affected bird populations.

The popularity of learning about the natural world, and owning home dioramas were spurred by natural history societies like the PSNH. The PSNH was filled with biological specimens and taxidermy animals. Taxidermy mounts are human reconstructions of formerly living animals, their skin draped over a metal form, stuffed with straw and dusted with pesticides to repel insects, or a flattened flower faded and dried on a herbarium sheet of paper.

Starting in the late 1600s, taxidermists experimented with methods for preserving natural history items. Using wine, gin, rum, brandy or other “spirits” helped to stop mold and insects from damaging the skins, but often removed much of the color. Preservatives became increasingly toxic, with chemicals like arsenic widely used. For these reasons, many collections are sealed in boxes or under glass domes to keep people safe.

Bird Conservation

Fashion items like hats were the main products of the feather trade, but other items made from birds, including fans, household dusters, pens, and pillows also contributed to bird hunting. While these items are available today, the feathers come from farm-raised non-migratory species. PSNH Curator Arthur Norton was the conduit between the PSNH and the Maine Ornithological Society, the first statewide league of people interested in birds, established in 1897. Prompted by declining colonies of gulls, terns, and other seabirds, the Ornithological Society successfully lobbied for a Maine law protecting all non-game birds, nests, and eggs in 1901.

The Federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) of 1918 prohibits hunting, killing, trading, and shipping of migratory birds or their parts and regulates commercial plume trade.

In 2004, the MBTA was expanded to include all native Birds in the United States, including 1,093 species. The National Audubon Society credited the MBTA, “with saving numerous species from extinction...millions, if not billions of other birds.”

When the PSNH merged with Maine Audubon in 1961, the mission changed from education and understanding of the natural world, primarily through preserving and collecting of specimens, to protecting live animals and conserving wildlife habitat.

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The Canada Goose known for its iconic V-formation flying pattern and loud honking call during spring migrations northward and southbound in the fall, is a marker of the changing seasons. Canada Geese mate for life, and like other waterfowl, their populations were at risk during the early 1900s due to overhunting, egg harvesting, and feather use.

Some Canada Goose colonies are no longer migrating, instead becoming residents in park ponds and golf courses where the water no longer freezes over in the winter due to warming temperatures. Normally, Canada geese fly back to nest where they were hatched in Northern Canada, but resident geese have no migration memories.

Because of their flexibility regarding habitat, Canada Goose populations are at moderate risk to climate change, with a 17% loss at two degrees Celsius warming.

Dr. Henry H. Brock (1864-1953) of Portland was an avid bird hunter and donated over 600 mounted birds to the PSNH along with exotic bird skins. Brock’s collection included a European corncrake (Crex crex), one of the few in Maine that Brock shot at Falmouth in 1889, and a Steeler’s Eider (Polysticta stelleri), the first ever taken outside of Alaska, shot at Pine Point.

Henry Brock shot and prepared a Whooping Crane (Grus americana), around 1900 which became part of the PSNH collection and display. The Crane mount is in the care of the Maine State Museum as of 2023.

The Whooping Crane is the tallest bird in what is now called North America reaching up to five feet tall, weighing about 15 pounds, and has a wingspan of seven feet. Whooping Crane populations declined to around 20 birds in the 1940s because of over-hunting and agricultural operations taking over their nesting and feeding grounds. Whooping Cranes are a species of high concern in 2023, listed as federally endangered in the United States. Through captive breeding, wetland management with private and governmental landowners, and by using an ultralight glider that teaches young Cranes how to migrate, numbers have risen to about 800 in 2023.

By 1914, the breeding plumes of the Great Egret (Ardea alba) sold for up to $80 per ounce, about $3,500 in 2023. While no exact records exist or how many wild Egrets died for the hat and fashion trade, historians estimate plume hunters killed between five million to 200 million birds annually.

Fashion designers sought out long plumes, called aigrettes, that grow on the Egrets’ backs during mating season. Hunters killed the birds during breeding, meaning that mating pairs diminished and nests went untended, plummeting Egret populations by about 95% in 1900. Great Egret populations began to recover after legislation banned plume hunting around 1910. Although they are affected by habitat loss and environmental contamination in 2023, Egret populations have rebounded and are stable.

John James Audubon
The Great Egret is the symbol of the National Audubon Society, one of the oldest environmental organizations in North America, founded to protect birds from being killed for their feathers.

The Audubon Society named themselves after artist, naturalist, hunter, explorer, and slave owner, John James Audubon (1785-1851). Audubon was born in Haiti to a French ship captain who traded slaves. The identity of Audubon’s mother is not clear—some say she was French or Haitian Creole, he reported her as Spanish. Black ornithologist, J. Drew Lanham asked in 2021, "Does the possibility that John James Audubon may have been a man of mixed race give him a pass on his racism?"

Audubon visited Maine during 1831 and 1833 with his enslaved servants. He traveled to Eastport, and stayed with the Lincoln family in Dennysville on his way to Labrador, observing, drawing, and hunting birds. Some appear in his monumental, Birds of America. Audubon’s actions buying and selling people, working against the abolitionist cause in the US and abroad, and supporting theories of white supremacy places him in another light, and provides a space for re-evaluating Whiteness and past exclusivity in conservation movements.

For decades, hats decorated with feathers were a fashion staple in America. Women and men wore hats decorated with Bird parts, ranging from a single feather, to whole, taxidermy Birds. Just as some don’t realize their impact on climate change in 2023, people in the late 1800s had limited understanding about how the feathers got on their hats. Some thought the feathers were naturally molted without killing the Birds. Others thought there were never-ending populations of Birds in the world, and a few likely thought their human needs outweighed nature.

After the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, people adorned hats with the feathers of nonmigratory Birds like Chickens and Ostriches. However, advocacy groups continued to pressure the industry, and coupled with the advent of the automobile, large, feathered hats became impractical, and went out of fashion.

Men’s military and fraternal organization hats, like women’s hats of the time, often included feather decorations. William Sheafe (1861-1935) of Portland and Millbridge owned a General Regulation chapeau featuring a red Masonic cross emblem and Ostrich feather plume in the center.

Newell Gabriel, a member of the Penobscot Nation, wore an upright headdress made of Eagle feathers, and a beaded collar, both symbols of leadership in typical Wabanaki style.

Gabriel served as the Penobscot Representative to the Maine Legislature from 1925 to 1927. Because they are sovereign nations, Indigenous peoples in the United States have their own rules for collecting and keeping feathers, including Eagle feathers, and these rights are recognized by the United States in both law and policy. For non-Indigenous peoples, it is illegal to own any federally regulated feathers or even bits of eggshells without permits.

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Some cultures associate Owls with omens, or as messengers of death. According to Gabriel Frey, Passamaquoddy culture views the symbol of the Owl similarly, “though for us the message of death is really a message of change, and wapi-kuhkukhahs, the Snowy Owl, brings with him change for the better.”

wapi-kuhkukhahs / Snowy Owl basket, 2022 is the first collaboration between Gal Frey and her son, Gabriel Frey. Gabriel cut, pounded, and processed the ash, using only the very inner sapling sections that are snowy white. It took four years and many trees to get enough ash to weave this purse basket, using a porcupine or pointed technique in the front to mimic the owl feathers. Gal Frey beaded the Owl face on the lid of the basket, using over 20 different hues of white, creating the illusion of three dimensions.

Gabriel also notes, in Maliseet-Passamaquoddy language, Itasu, neke Koluskap nekolat skicinu, wapi-kuhkukhahs oloqiyess etoli-mocimkahqihkek. This translates as, "It is said that when Koluskap left the people, the Snowy Owl went into the thick woods." Kolusckap, also spelled Glooscap and Gluscabe, is the main figure in Wabanaki creation histories. He taught the Wabanaki how to make tools, how to live, and showed them ways to respect land and resources. The basket is a miniature of the traditional Wabanaki pack basket made to fit under the gunwale of a canoe, updated for 21st century uses as a purse.

The Snowy Owl’s winter territory includes Maine. They spend summers far north of the Arctic Circle hunting small rodents and other prey. Snowy Owls are white birds with varying amounts of black or brown markings on the body and wings.

Climate change is degrading and reducing the habitat that Snowy Owls require in order to reproduce and survive, since the melting polar ice is reducing habitat for their prey. In times when food is scarce, some Owls may not reproduce at all. Snowy Owl populations in North America declined about 64% between 1970 and 2014, and the 2023 population is estimated at 30,000 remaining.

The National Audubon Society reports that the Snowy Owl is at high risk to climate change. At two degrees Celsius warming, the Snowy Owl will lose 77% of its range; at three degrees Celsius, it will lose 93%.

Herring Gulls (Larus argentatus), generally called Seagulls, live near water, especially along the Atlantic Coast. They prefer isolated, predator-free sites like islands for breeding and nesting on the ground, but live away from the colony during the rest of the year to feed at sea, along coasts, and at landfills.

Gull populations are thriving in Maine today, but they were threatened to near extinction at the turn of the 19th century. Hunted
or their feathers and eggs, Gulls were at the center of the 1901 legislation the Maine Ornithological Society promoted, setting regulations for collecting bird nests.

According to the National Audubon Society, because of their large range, at two degrees Celsius warming, Seagulls will be minimally impacted by climate change, losing about 30% of their habitat.

As the largest and most sparsely populated state in New England, Maine represents a significant portion of the breeding range for many eastern woodland Bird species.

Since 1970, the United States and Canada have lost three billion breeding Birds, or one in four Birds. Over 70 species have reached a tipping point of losing 50% of their breeding populations.

Maine Audubon reported even greater declines for Maine in certain groups in 2019, including 74% of all grassland species, 68% percent of shorebird species, 73% of species that eat aerial insects, and 64% of all eastern forest Bird species. The only Bird group with increasing
numbers are wetland Birds, driven by increased numbers of ducks and geese.

Some of the Bird population losses are due to climate change, direct causes from loss of habitat due to development, and pesticide use that also contributes to collapsing Insect populations, important food sources for Birds.

Pollinators, Plants, and Pesticides

The Northern Forest
by Bernd Heinrich Professor emeritus in the Department of Biology University of Vermont, author, and artist

Pollination, the sexual reproduction by plants, is a relatively recent innovation of Earth’s life, starting after already billions’ years of prior evolution of ferns, mosses, and horsetails. In recent times, pollination is mainly among flowering plants that appeared about 300 million years ago, with insects and other animals increasingly substituting for wind in pollination. Wind-pollinated trees predominate in the Northern Forest.

Trees are the lungs of the earth, and an estimated 17% of the Amazon forest has been removed for agriculture, forest not available to capture the CO2 out of the air, that then remains to increase Global Warming, that will increase more forest death, as temperatures there are rising predicting its eventual replacement by savannah. The rate of increase of CO2 is increasing even more than it was 47 years ago, when in a physiology class on respiration a professor told us about CO2 and Nitrogen concentrations. I thought they were an unchanging given, but was hugely surprised that even then one of them was changing.

I have now over many springs had an impression that more was changing. I was wondering about something I could feel in my own forest in Maine: where I wondered, were the Blackfly hordes in spring? Where are the Cluster Flies that in fall blackened the window panes in my cabin? Where were the crowds of Bumblebees that clustered on the meadow-sweet bloom in late summer, along with the goldenrod bloom in the fall? Why were the car windshields no longer splattered with insect remains on any long ride? Is there something unseen in the air? What happens to the plastic wrapping of every few bites of food the millions of us buy, then eat? How long does it take for the fumes from an industrial process in the west reach the east, or perhaps to another part of the world? The northern and the southern forest, then, may not be so far apart.

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Each flower communicates to pollinators by different signals related to color, scent, and geometric patterns that provide rewards of pollen, nectar, or both to Bees.

The rise of insects’ using Gymnosperms, or seed-producing plants, as food transferred spores from plant to plant. This started the plants’ flower evolution where animals’ attractiveness to, and manipulation of flowers ushered in an animals’ preferences and behavior on flower structure, or morphology, as issues in plants’ reproduction.

Animals’ behaviors became selective agents for the evolving symbiotic plant-animal associations, leading to evolution of flower variety and complexity with no end in sight in shape, color, scent and food or other reward.

Bees and other pollinators are essential parts of all ecosystems on earth and are fundamental for the long term survival of flowering plants. The US Fish and Wildlife Service first listed Hawaiian Yellow-faced Bees on the Endangered Species list in 2016 and the Rusty Patched Bumblebee in 2017. Petitions to list the American Bumblebee, whose populations have decreased by 89% as an endangered species have not been successful as of 2023.

Bee populations are dependent on plants, and humans are dependent on Bees for food. Neonicotinoids (neonics) are pesticides people coat on seeds or spray on soil. Neonics saturate the tissue of plants, eventually showing up in pollen and nectar. Neonics disrupt learning and memory in Bees, and the chemicals impair reproduction resulting in Bee populations being reduced up to 75%.

A June 2022 report issued by the US Environmental Protection Agency noted that,

Widely used neonicotinoid insecticides likely harm roughly three-fourths of all endangered plants and animals, including all 39 species of amphibians protected under the Endangered Species Act… Species found to be harmed by all three of the neonicotinoids include Rusty Patched Bumblebees, Whooping Cranes, Chinook Salmon, Northern Long-eared Bats and Orcas.

The European Union, parts of Canada, and a few states including Maine banned neonicotinoids, but they remain one of the most popular insecticides in the United States.

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Butterflies

Natural history museum collections rely on specimens donated by amateurs or purchased from professional collectors. The PSNH sponsored butterfly collection trips where curators purchased preserved Butterflies from “Butterfly hunters” in places like Papua New Guinea, India, and Africa. Similar markets existed for shells, insects, plants, and animals.

When the PSNH closed in 1970, it offered its worldwide collections for sale, and lifelong Butterfly collector, E. Christopher Livesay purchased them. In the late 1900s, people interested in Butterflies, called lepidopterists, started “Butterflying,” where they identify and photograph the insects rather than capture them for physical study. However, collecting Butterflies is still important to gain scientific information. The largest threats to Butterfly populations are related to habit loss from climate change and destruction, for example being hit by vehicles on roads.

Maine Entomological Society by Charlene Donahue

How do we understand how ecosystems work if we do not know what lives in them? How do we know we are not damaging parts of the ecosystem cycles? To start answering these and many other questions, the Maine Entomological Society (MES) has partnered with various entities from Universities, State and Federal agencies, parks and land trusts to be the boots on the ground looking for insects and cataloging their presence. Over the past 25 years the MES has participated in dozens of surveys, collecting and identifying—or sending to specialists to identify—tens of thousands of insects to help answer basic questions about our world.

In one study in Baxter State Park, two MES members spent thousands of hours as volunteers going through the insect by-catch that would have been thrown out, from a study looking at how a forest recovers from a tornado. They discovered 54 species of Beetles that had never been found in Maine and two of these were new to the country! Most of these Beetles are less than 1/4 inch (6.4mm) in size—hard to identify when you did not even know they were in Maine.

The MES partnered with Acadia National Park for 14 years running 24-hour “bioblitzes” to get a snapshot of what lives in the park. The first nine years garnered 525 new park and 199 new State records of insect species. We learned what invasives have come in from overseas, what may no longer be here, what is moving in from the south or north, what people have brought in with them. We are respectful of the lives of insects that we take and try to ensure that it is for a higher purpose.

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Herbarium
When the PSNH closed in 1970, their preserved plant specimen herbarium contained over 30,000 sheets. PSNH Director Richard Anderson delivered 20,000 specimens to the University of New Hampshire (UNH), including many important “type” plants that serve as a reference point when a species is first named. The remainder of worldwide herbarium specimens went to the University of Maine, Presque Isle.

Renowned botanist Kate Furbish collected specimens for many organizations, and sent them to institutions such as the New England Botanical Club and the Asa Gray Herbarium at Harvard University.

Kate Furbish, Botanist
Kate Furbish (1834-1931) of Brunswick was an accomplished artist and scientist. Like other botanists, Furbish was self-taught since degrees in botany were not available in the 1880s.

Furbish explored widely, often alone in remote locations in Maine, noting,

I have wandered alone for the most part, on the highways and in the hedges, on foot, in hayracks, on country mail-stages, on improvised rafts, in rowboats, on logs, crawling on hands and knees on the surface of bogs, and backing out, when I dared not walk, in order to procure a coveted treasure. Called ‘crazy,’ a ‘fool’ – and this is the way that my work has been done, the flowers being my only society, and the manuals the only literature for months altogether.

Furbish collected and preserved more than 8,000 Maine plants. One of them was a snapdragon Harvard botanists recognized as a new species, and persuaded Furbish to name it Pedicularis furbishiae, or Furbish’s Lousewort. She initially declined, but reconsidered saying, “As a new species is rarely found in New England and few plants are named for women, it pleases me.”

Furbish’s Lousewort is only found in the Wolastoq/Saint John River region of New Brunswick and Maine. By the 1940s, it was listed as extinct. In 1965, the US Government proposed the Dickey-Lincoln dam hydroelectric project to answer growing energy needs. The proposed plan needed to flood 88,000 acres, including several communities. Dam developers deauthorized the plan after the University of Maine’s Professor Charles Richards found Furbish’s Lousewort thriving on the proposed site in 1976.

Furbish’s Lousewort
Furbish’s Lousewort has thin stems that grow up to three feet high with tiny yellow flower blooms. Kate Furbish first discovered the plant in 1880 in Van Buren, Maine along the Wolastoq (Maliseet-Passamaquoddy) or the Saint John River. It is the only place in the world where this plant grows.

People considered Furbish’s Lousewort extinct just a few decades after Kate Furbish found it growing along the Wolastoq in 1880. In 1976, rediscovery of Furbish’s Lousewort halted the construction of the Dickey-Lincoln dam. Public forums showed disregard for endangered species. During a 1977 congressional hearing, an Indiana congressman noted, “A thousand years from now we may have a nation of louseworts and nothing else. As far as anyone knows, they’re not good for anything.”

Furbish’s Lousewort was one of the first plants added to the Endangered Species list in 1978, and is still listed as Endangered, encompassing less than 1,000 plants. Climate change and rising water levels threaten the plant’s habitat.

What’s in a name?
People refer to plants and animals by their English and scientific Latin names. Who decides on a name, and why are scientific systems so entrenched in the Latin naming structure? How is this tied to colonialism?

The plants and animals in what is today called Maine have original names in the four distinct languages spoken by Wabanaki peoples—for example: wikpiyik, Penobscot word for Brown ash; welimahaskil, Maliseet-Passamaquoddy word for sweetgrass; masgwi, Mi’kmaq for the White Birch tree; and wigbimizi, the Abenaki word for Basswood. Living for over 13,000 years in this region, Wabanaki peoples have accumulated and refined knowledge of the region’s land, waters, rocks, animals, and plants, through care-taking the environment and sourcing items for food, medicine, tools, and artwork.

When colonial Europeans or Americans first encountered local plants and animals, they assigned the species English and scientific Latin names. In Western culture, Latin scientific names help categorize species by subtle differences, while they English names are more broad. The person who “discovered” the plant or animal assigned the names, a system which overlooks thousands of years Indigenous knowledge and first identifications.

What does it mean to discover?
Just as Christopher Columbus did not “discover” the Americas, American naturalists did not “discover” plants and animals, instead they were the first in Western culture to encounter a species, like Kate Furbish’s Lousewort (Pedicularis furbishiae). By reframing what it means to “discover” we can better understand a human’s place in the natural world and learn from both Indigenous and Western science for positive change.

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Silent Spring
Marine biologist and writer Rachel Carson’s influential 1962 book Silent Spring advanced the global environmental movement and exposed how commonly used pesticides were poisoning wildlife, including songbirds and America’s iconic Bald Eagles. She was a summer resident of Southport Island.

Carson was a blend of scientist and writer, making complex biological theories understandable to the general public. She worked for the US Bureau of Fisheries and the US Fish and Wildlife Services, where she was often the only woman in professional capacities.

Silent Spring awakened Americans to learn about our responsibilities to all forms of life on the planet. Carson documented the effects of harmful pesticides like DDT, or dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane on living beings on the land and in the water. Silent Spring inspired then President John F. Kennedy to launch an investigation into the public health effects of pesticides that resulted in laws governing the regulation of pesticides like DDT, and the eventual establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970. The EPA banned DDT in 1972.

Carson died from cancer in 1964. In 1969, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Carson’s employer for many years, named one of its refuges spanning Maine’s York and Cumberland Counties, the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge, to honor her memory.

Birds are uniquely affected by the chemical DDT because it alters calcium metabolism, resulting in thin eggshells and decreased reproductive rates. DDT is also highly toxic to aquatic or water animals.

DDT was a common pesticide for insect control in agriculture, and the US Government used it to mitigate malaria outbreaks during the 1940s. In addition to disrupting bird reproduction, DDT is persistent in the environment, lasting up to 15 years on land and 150 years in water.

Climate Change, Human Rights, and Foodways

Climate change has profound consequences for the habitability and sustainability of the planet. It also affects food, water, energy, economies, security, and quality of life through its impacts on human health, agriculture, ecosystems and water resources.

Some communities are disproportionately affected or considered more susceptible to impacts of climate change. Unfortunately, it has been a challenge to include universal human rights protections in climate change responses and vice versa. The most recent International climate treaty, the Paris Agreement (AKA Paris Climate Accords), adopted in 2015, recognizes universal human rights in the preamble, but does not include them in any of the actionable provisions contained in the Agreement itself.

This severely limits accountability by signatories, especially in protecting the rights of the most vulnerable as our climate changes. Developing countries, particularly those in the global south, are hit hardest by climate change. This is widening the economic gap between nations, damaging fragile ecosystems, and furthers inequality.

Wabanaki Sovereignty and Climate by Mali Obomsawin and Lokotah Sanborn
Waterways in central and western Maine, and their outlets to the Atlantic, were once home to countless Wabanaki communities engaged in food sovereignty. They grew diverse crop varieties along their banks, harvested salmon, sturgeon, and shellfish, and through food maintained a deep intertribal trade and political network.

Alongside warfare and financially incentivized genocide, Euro-American colonists targeted Wabanaki food systems in an attempt to disrupt self-sufficiency and political alliances. The damming and pollution of vital rivers that began in the 1700s aimed to starve communities from their homes and continues to inhibit safe and sustainable fish consumption today. The destruction of forest ecosystems which bolstered Maine’s proud timber industry severed many Wabanakis from their hunting territories, and European systems of private property ended millennia of communal landholding. Gradually over centuries, a landscape once teeming with food, medicine, and relationality has been destroyed in attempts to subdue Wabanaki people.

In 2023, our communities still experience these disruptions through food insecurity and diet-related disease. We lack access to lands where our cultural traditions can be practiced and are legally inhibited from collective landholding as Wabanaki people. Bomazeen Land Trust is working to secure Wabanaki land access and re-center our foodways in order to restore the traditional economies, alliances and cultural practices of our ancestors. Rematriation–the return of land to Indigenous peoples and the renewal of cultural traditions that accompany it–is Bomazeen Land Trust’s work across Abenaki/Wabanaki territory.

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Wabanaki leaders Wiwurna (Warumbee), Darumkin, Nimbanizett, Neonongansket, WeconDomhegon, and Wihikermett deeded lands in the Merrymeeting Bay, Androscoggin River, and Kennebec River regions to Richard Wharton for settlement in 1684.

Wabanaki ways of life radically changed with the coming of European explorers and settlers around 500 years ago. Epidemics, wars, genocidal bounties, treaties, land theft, the splitting of territory, damming rivers, and cutting forests all tried to erase Wabanaki culture and communities.

Baskets made in the forms of vegetables, fruits, and nuts are common in Wabanaki cultures, links to food sovereignty and connections to land. Wabanaki peoples, usually women, are the keepers of ancestral knowledge about Indigenous varieties of corn, beans, and squash in what they call Three Sisters planting mounds. Historically, Wabanaki diets also relied on foods like acorns and butternuts—trees that European harvesting decimated for timber and masts.

John Josselyn traveled to Maine in 1638, and again in 1663. His book, New-England’s rarities discovered in birds, beasts, fishes, serpents, and plants of that country, first published in 1672, recorded New England flora and fauna in colonial times, Indigenous uses of plants, and a listing of the invasive plants introduced by Europeans, particularly by their livestock, including cows. Some of the invasive plants include Dandelions, Knot Weed, and Mullen, all plants found in Maine in contemporary times.

Maine botanists and plant lovers, including Kate Furbish, honored this early explorer’s work by establishing the Josselyn Botanical Society of Maine in 1895 at the Portland Society of Natural History.

The PSNH published the Portland Catalogue of Maine Plants to help both aspiring and established botanists, whom they called, “old and young,” to create a checklist of observed species. It is split between Indigenous plants, and Plants Introduced to the State.

The authors acknowledged the catalog was incomplete as species are regularly "discovered," and asked people to send in their species lists and notes to the PSNH. The catalog also requested amateur botanists—the citizen scientists of their time—send in plant specimens since the Society’s entire Herbarium burned in the fire of 1866. Prior to the fire, the PSNH collections contained almost every species reported in the Catalogue of Maine Plants.

Animal agriculture, diseases, and vegetarian diets

In 1835, Dr. Horace A. Barrows of Phillips described “Fewer colds and febrile attacks” among Maine patients practicing “entire abstinence from flesh-meat” and “strict adherence to the simplest vegetable diet,” as vegetarianism was then known.

Colds, influenza, tuberculosis, measles, smallpox, plague and COVID-19, group under zoonotic diseases, which pass between humans and animals. One major zoonotic breeding ground: Animal farms. Birds harbor influenza, and some scientists theorize influenza viruses jumped to humans 4,000 years ago when ducks were first domesticated.

Wabanaki peoples did not engage in animal agriculture and lived free of epidemics until European fishermen and explorers arrived. Passamaquoddy historian Donald Soctomah documented an epidemic “between 1564 and 1570” and “typhus in 1586.” In 1617, an epidemic killed an estimated 75% of Wabanaki people, with epidemics through the 1600s and 1700s.

By 1832, Maine and the nation nervously watched the advance of another zoonotic pandemic, this time cholera, which transfers from aquatic animals. The first suspected Maine case came that March in Topsham. Dr. Reuben Mussey, a vegetarian, of the Medical School of Maine consulted on the case. Mussey prescribed pure water, rather than the fashionable remedy of liquor and meat, as a cholera treatment.

That same month in New York, Sylvester Graham delivered a now-famous lecture on cholera, urging attendees to eat only vegetarian food and drink only pure water. After cholera swept through the city, Graham published his lecture along with dozens of testimonies from people who’d followed his advice and avoided disease. Maine native Dr. Charles E. Page wrote A Natural Cure for Consumption in 1883 prescribing vegetarianism to help treat tuberculosis.

By 2022, data from the COVID-19 pandemic published by the National Institute of Health revealed those eating plant-based diets had lower rates of infection and severe illness, recognizing a relationship between vegetarianism and staving off illness.

Museums and pandemics
Why should museums and other repositories collect and keep animal and plant specimens, especially those that are hundreds of years old? Because the bones, skins, and tissues document historic biodiversity that can be deployed in future research.

Zoonotic diseases jump from animals to humans. Most emerging diseases are zoonotic, including COVID-19, rabies, MERS and Ebola. Preserved wildlife specimens, often collected for completely different purposes such as ecological research, are a baseline for scientists to monitor changes in species habitat and disease distribution over time.

Using technologies like DNA sampling and RNA sequencing, the Field Museum in Chicago surveyed their mammal collections for COVID-19 candidate host species, like Bats, collected from 1896 to 2023. Scientists at the University of Nevada examined Butterfly specimens dating back to 1910, collecting pollen grains from their bodies and comparing it to pollen from historic plant specimens, identifying how their food sources have changed and how climate change will affect Butterfly and plant populations.

Many natural history museums are digitizing collections, further enhancing their potential use and helping us to learn about habitat loss, invasive species, and climate change.

Clean water, warming water

Warming Oceans
by David Reidmiller Ph.D. Director, Climate Center Gulf of Maine Research Institute

The Gulf of Maine is experiencing physical, chemical, and biological changes as a result of climate change. The unprecedented accumulation of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere over the past century traps excess heat in the Earth system, with world oceans absorbing more than 90%.

As a result of its shape, bathymetry (the measurement of depth of water), and changes in large-scale ocean currents like the Gulf Stream, the rate of warming in the Gulf of Maine is faster than that of more than 95% of the world’s oceans. At the surface, this additional heat can impede vertical mixing of ocean water, preventing life-sustaining nutrients from reaching organisms closer to the surface. Throughout the water column, warming waters create a friendlier environment for certain fish species and pathogens that can disrupt ecosystems, causing population declines and shifts.

Oceans provide us with an “ecosystem service” because they absorb carbon dioxide (CO2)—the primary greenhouse gas—from the atmosphere as a natural part of Earth’s carbon cycle. But the unnatural pace that humanity is emitting CO2 into the atmosphere is causing an increase in CO2 absorption by the world’s oceans, resulting in a gradual acidification of seawater—a 30% increase in acidity since pre-industrial times. More acidic water makes it more difficult for shellfish like lobsters, oysters, and clams to form their exoskeleton or shells. These changes present risks to coastal communities who rely on the ocean for their livelihoods and well-being.

But changes offer opportunities to create new markets for emergent species and adapt business practices to the continually changing marine environment as a result of climate change. In the process, Maine’s marine-dependent communities can serve as a global model for adapting and thriving in a warmer world.

The Penobscot River

The Penobscot River is New England’s largest river system, draining an area of 8,570 square miles.

Maine’s northern climate and geography, a landscape shaped by cool temperatures and receding glaciers, created an environment of dense mixed hardwood and conifer trees. Paper companies like Great Northern Paper industrialized the Maine woods. They took over millions of acres of forestlands, and dammed rivers to transport logs and generate power. Companies eventually controlled waterways, dumping industrial effluent freely into the rivers and air.

The use of Petitions to communicate displeasure or critique of colonial authorities by Wabanaki Nations is a long standing tradition, stretching back to the 17th century. Petitions reflected Wabanaki diplomatic traditions, that understands documents like treaties as relational agreements, dependent on consistent communication and understanding to hold meaning. They also served to inform Colonial authorities of conditions on the ground, where individual settlers would often break the agreements made by the Colonial authorities with Wabanaki Tribal Nations, and would sometimes forcefully correct or punish these individual settlers violating the treaties or agreements.

Settler industrialists saw Maine as a resource-rich landscape with unending supplies of trees, granite, animals, and fish. There were approximately 119 dams constructed to support the lumber and paper industries on the Penobscot River that blocked fish migrations and other animals from using the water.

Mills also polluted the water, compromising the animals and humans living along the rivers. Starting in 2004, The Penobscot River Restoration Project opened up 2,000 miles of rivers and streams to sea-run fish through dam removals and fish passageways, while increasing hydropower generation.

Settlement, logging operations, mills, and dams have obstructed the passage of fish like sturgeon, salmon, and shad that migrate up the Penobscot River from the ocean to spawn.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), as of 2023, 100% of the 26 species of surviving sturgeon are now at risk of extinction due to dams and poaching, up from 85% in 2009.

Penobscot oral histories include stories about human obligations to fish, but their migrations have been inhibited for over a century. With the removal of dams through the Penobscot River Restoration Project and building effective fish passages, the sturgeon, salmon, and shad are returning, along with language and cultural activities related to the fish. The word kapahse is the Penobscot name for sturgeon.

In 2012, Maine State Attorney General William Schneider issued a statement claiming exclusive state control over the Penobscot River. The Penobscot Nation responded to this claim with a lawsuit, attempting to preserve Tribal control over hunting and fishing rights recognized in treaties and the Maine Indians Claims Settlement Act of 1980.

In response, Wabanaki people formed a number of groups in 2014 and 2015 to protect the Penobscot River and educate non-Wabanaki people about the state’s cases. As the lawsuit progressed through the federal court system, Wabanaki citizens engaged in traditional and new forms of public demonstration. This included calling attention to the State of Maine asserting control over the Penobscot River and from the Penobscot Nation.

Penobscot people see the river as a kin relative to which they have never relinquished their rights. While the lawsuit was ultimately decided in favor of the State of Maine, Wabanaki activism raised awareness of ongoing disputes around the extent of Tribal territory and sovereignty, helping build allies and momentum to change unfair and unequal treatment of Wabanaki Nations in state and federal law, as enshrined in the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act of 1980.

The Androscoggin River

The Androscoggin River, from its source in the Rangeley Lakes to its outlet in Merrymeeting Bay, drops 1,500 vertical feet. During annual fish migrations, Wabanaki people harvested fish like salmon and sturgeon on the falls for millennia, in ways that supported communities and also respected the fish. Later, settler-colonialists built bridges, dams, and mills, which disrupted traditional subsistence activities and caused conflict between Wabanaki peoples and settlers.

Historic paintings show these scenic falls, but also demonstrate the long standing industrial pollution of the Androscoggin for centuries. John A. Briggs built Lewiston’s first cotton mill, in 1836, which burned in 1850.

Mills powered by the Androscoggin River were a driving economic force for centuries. The Cowan Mill, built in 1850 on the footprint of John A. Biggs’ cotton mill, also burned in 2009.

Photographs showing the severe pollution of the Androscoggin River are rare. Local communities surrounding the river before the Clean Water Act likely remember the foul effluent smell and foaming waters, but little photographic evidence survives.

The Clean Water Act of 1972
Maine Senator Edmund “Ed” S. Muskie (1914-1996) ushered The Clean Water Act of 1972 through Congress to ensure Americans’ access to drinkable, swimmable and fishable water. In 1972, clean air and water was not a given, and Maine’s Androscoggin River was listed as one of the top 10 polluted rivers in the nation.

Acknowledging water’s essential role for life, the United Nations declared access to clean water and sanitation a basic human right in 2010. Muskie saw laws that protected water as good for Americans, and absolutely necessary for the nation’s survival. He built consensus, and although then President Richard Nixon vetoed the bill, on October 18, 1972, the Clean Water Act became law, with both houses of Congress overriding the veto.

Muskie worked to make the public more aware of the health issues caused by pollution. When campaigning for the 1970 Clean Air Act, Muskie demonstrated his devotion to environmental advocacy saying,

We should all understand that we are all in the same boat. That what happens to our environment must make a difference to all of us, whoever we are. And that what happens to each of us, must make a difference to the rest of us. So we must reclaim the total human environment.

In 2023 America’s water quality in rivers, lakes and streams has improved, but threats to water safety remain. The Act requires the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)—along with states, Tribes, and territories—to monitor the quality of lakes, rivers, streams, estuaries, and other water bodies. But as of 2017, the EPA’s most recent report, only about half of US waters have been assessed. The Act’s no-discharge goal has yet to be achieved, and in Maine, some freshwater fish are currently contaminated with PFAS (“forever chemicals”), mercury, PCBs, Dioxins, and DDT, making them potentially dangerous to eat.

Water Pollution
Ed Muskie grew up in Rumford near the Androscoggin River, where industries discharged pollutants into the river, and municipalities dumped sewage.

Located on the Androscoggin River in Rumford Falls, the Rumford Sulphite Mill, built in 1895, produced sulphite pulp for paper products. By 1900, Rumford had seven mills including the Rumford Falls Paper Company, the Fort Hill Chemical Company, the Continental Bag Company, the International Paper Company, the Rumford Falls Envelope Factory, and the Oxford Paper Company. Dams on the Androscoggin created a powerful falls known as the “Niagara of New England” providing power to the mills.

A study of the Androscoggin by Dr. Walter Lawrance, a Bates College chemistry professor showed that it had almost no dissolved oxygen and therefore could not support fish or aquatic life. The river was threatened not only by industrial chemicals, but also by organic debris from log drives and agricultural or sewage runoff.

From 1943 to 1977, Lawrance produced reports on the condition of the river. The first determined the intensity and cause of the river’s noxious odor in the Lewiston-Auburn area. In the summer of 1948, low river flow and high water temperatures increased the odor. Lawrance noted when paper companies upriver reduced sulphite production, it, “made an appreciable reduction in the pollution load carried by the river.” Lawrence received press coverage, especially for using sodium nitrate to resupply oxygen to the river water.

Suzanne Clune, age 11, wrote to Senator Muskie in 1970 telling him about the Little Androscoggin River, which she said had become quite polluted. She wrote that the river had a “most sickening smell” and that “frogs have been seen gasping for air” and “fish have been seen floating down the river dead.” She stated, “I am sick of the river like this. Please do something about it.”

The EPA requires permits for industries that discharge pollution into water via pipes, but permit holders self-report the levels, sometimes leading to non-compliance.

While point source “pipe” pollution is an important issue, according to the Government Accountability Office, the leading cause of water pollution today is from runoff that carries sediment, oil, bacteria, toxins, and other pollutants from farms, yards, and paved streets and parking lots into nearby waters.

For centuries, people have used rivers and oceans as dumping grounds, incorrectly believing that water has unending renewable properties.

Starting in 1924, Portland used the scow boat, Vixen, to dispose of city waste in the ocean. They loaded the scow with refuse that could not be carried to the public dump on the shores of Back Bay. A 1925 City manager said moving and disposing garbage into the sea was, “one step more in the direction of ideal sanitary and health conditions.”

Workers loaded The Vixen with up to 100 barrels daily, transporting the waste to dumping grounds off of the eastern end of Ram Island. In 1925, they added a second scow, The Three Brothers, to take care of additional garbage generated in summer months.

The Marine Protection Research and Sanctuaries Act, passed in 1972, the same year as the Clean Water Act, regulates ocean dumping and stopped practices like those of the City of Portland.

Richard E. Gosse at the US Public Health Service in Portland wrote to Muskie about the, “wanton disregard by the city of Portland and surrounding communities in the field of pollution.”

Gosse sent Muskie photographs taken from Veranda Street that showed pollution where the Presumpscot River flows into Casco Bay, indicating S.D. Warren Paper Company discharge on the left, flowing near Mackworth Island. Gosse detailed the many pollutants to Muskie, saying,

The smell of this river is nauseating and its contents consists of feces, paper fibers, etc. The photos I think illustrate how the current of the Presumpscot River carries this filth out into Casco Bay.

Gosse was one of hundreds of people who wrote to Muskie, expressing their concerns and helping to strengthen his case that the federal government must do something to protect the environment.

The Pejepscot Paper Company Mill on the Androscoggin River in Topsham was flooded on March 20, 1936. Because of climate change, increased and severe weather events are causing even more flooding as of 2023, leading water and wastewater infrastructure to fail, leaving people without water and contaminating surrounding areas.

Creativity and making small scale solutions to bolster the natural world are strategies for combating climate change. Harpswell-based Margaret Leonard paints abstracted landscapes that show the human condition and the traces of human existence in the environment. In 2022, she began a series based upon the Frank J. Wood Bridge that spans Brunswick and Topsham over the Androscoggin River, because it is slated for removal.

Leonard’s Bridge series paintings demonstrate a lively river with jumping sturgeon and people fishing, a common occurrence in 2023. However, despite progress, the Androscoggin continues to be contaminated and polluted. The Maine Division of Environmental and Community Health recommends people fishing on the Androscoggin eat, “No more than 6-12 fish meals a year of any fish species.”

Art can document and be a bridge between the facts of climate change, and the emotions we feel about it. Abstract painter Veronica Benning taught at Portland School of Art, later the Maine College of Art, and became fascinated with Maine landscapes saying she found that, “Maine’s natural beauty became a foundation of learning ‘to see’ in terms of painting.”

The Clean Water Act of 1972’s goals required zero pollution by 1985. When Benning created this painting in 1987, the Androscoggin was still actively polluted, yet she found a way to be inspired by the coldness of January and the beauty of the trees and water.

Anthropology and Natural History Museums

Anthropology and Sociology, the study of people and societies, were new disciplines in the late 1800s. Their rise dovetailed with the development of natural history museums that displayed non-White peoples, including Indigenous peoples of North and South America, Oceania, Asia, and Africa as frozen in a primitive past and exotic. They placed Indigenous items alongside dinosaur fossils, minerals, and taxidermy wildlife, or miniaturized and minimized them into tiny dioramas.

Anthropologists went into the field on “salvage” collecting trips for museums, presuming that colonialist initiatives, including confining Indigenous peoples to reservations and taking Native children out of the communities and into boarding schools, would result in the acculturation and “extinction” of Indigenous peoples. They removed important cultural items—ancestors—and sometimes the bones and actual Indigenous peoples, without permission.

Museums did further damage by interpreting Indigenous cultures through Euro-American perspectives, silencing Indigenous voices and without engaging descendants, resulting in misrepresentation, othering, and contributing to centuries of societal stereotypes, eugenics policies and sterilization tactics, and governmental programs that continue to harm Indigenous peoples.

PSNH curator Edward S. Morse studied at Harvard with professor of Zoology, Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) starting from 1859 to 1861. Agassiz was a renowned Swiss naturalist who rejected Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Instead, he promoted polygenism, a racist and unfounded theory that proposed different races were separate species. People often used Agassiz’s teachings to justify enslaving Black people. Morse, an ardent supporter of evolutionary theory, broke with Agassiz over this issue.

Arthur Norton spent 35 years as curator for the Portland Society of Natural History. He wrote Mammals of Portland, Maine describing each species in alphabetical order.

Norton included a section about Primates, including a historical sketch of the Wabanaki peoples living in the region, as described by Europeans. The entry is followed, unfortunately, by the next species, Rodentia, and the New England Woodchuck. All humans are mammals and primates. Humans are listed under Great Apes, with a subgroup of Hominins. Norton’s inclusion only of Wabanaki peoples and incorrectly as a separate race (Homo sapiens Americanus) in his chapter on Primates, instead of all humans living in the vicinity of Portland, denies their humanity and makes them a subject of study.

Norton mentions Frank Speck, an anthropologist with the University of Pennsylvania who studied Wabanaki peoples, and collected items through salvage anthropology methods, wrongly thinking their culture was disappearing.

Minik Wallace and the American Museum of Natural History
In the summer of 1897, Robert E. Peary sailed to northwestern Greenland to bring an iron meteorite back to the United States. Franz Boas, anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York asked Peary to invite an Inuit hunter to travel to New York and spend the winter at the museum so Boas could learn about life in the region.

Peary was happy to oblige, but when he returned to New York in the fall he had with him not one man, but three, along with one woman and two children. Tragically, many of the Inuit soon fell ill, and by winter all but one man, Uisaakassak, and one child, Minik, had died of tuberculosis. Uisaakassak returned to Greenland in the spring, but a museum staff member adopted eight-year-old Minik and raised him with their children.

As a teenager, Minik learned that his father’s body had not been buried as he had been told, but had instead been processed, and his bones stored at the museum. Minik embarked on an unsuccessful battle to have his father’s remains returned to him for burial, and then pleaded with Peary to give him passage back to Greenland. Peary refused, but in 1909 Josephine Peary arranged for Minik to go north on a vessel being sent to meet her husband.

Minik struggled at first, having forgotten much of the language and having missed the crucial years of training that other young hunters had. Still, he was able to relearn and become a competent hunter. He did not forget his years in New York and in 1917 arranged to sail south once more. He took a job in a lumber camp in northern New Hampshire, and died there in the fall of 1918, a victim of the influenza pandemic.

Cultural Collections at the Portland Society of Natural History
The PSNH cultural collections included over 500 archaeological items like pre-Columbian pottery and hundreds of cultural materials like Wabanaki baskets. The worldwide cultural items were displayed mixed together, alongside biological and mineral collections.

The Portland Society of Natural History had vast global cultural collections, including Wabanaki items like a Penobscot birch bark canoe and Penobscot root club. Starting in the 1970s, Indigenous peoples in the United States demanded accountability from museums and crafted decolonizing strategies and federal laws as pathways for repatriation of ancestors and sacred items, deep collaborations, and accurate representation.

PSNH staff donated most of the cultural collections to the University of Maine’s Hudson Museum upon closing in 1970. When the PSNH burned in 1866, museums across the nation sent donations to help rebuild the collections. The Smithsonian contributed a cultural “Smithsonian Starter Kit” that included eight items from the Arctic and others from the Pacific, amassed by the US Exploring Expedition from 1838 to the 1850s that mapped and explored the Pacific, Antarctica, and the American Northwest Coast. Individuals added to the PSNH collections from 1866 to 1970.

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