Documents an extraordinary journey into the world of the Wabanaki peoples in early nineteenth-century America.

Documents an extraordinary journey into the world of the Wabanaki peoples in early nineteenth-century America.

In this time of ecological crisis, all that is holy calls us into a more intimate partnership with the diverse and beautiful beings of this earth. In Finding Our Way Home, Myke Johnson reflects on her personal journey into such a partnership and offers a guide for others to begin this path. Lyrically expressed, it weaves together lessons from a chamomile flower, a small bird, a copper beech tree, a garden slug, and a forest fern, along with insights from Indigenous philosophy, environmental science, fractal geometry, childhood Catholic mysticism, the prophet Elijah, fairy tales, and permaculture design. This eco-spiritual journey also wrestles with the history of our society's destruction of the natural world, and its roots in the original theft of the land from Indigenous peoples. Exploring the spiritual dimensions of our brokenness, it offers tools to create healing. Finding Our Way Home is a ceremony to remember our essential unity with all of life.

Winner of an Award of Excellence, American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) In 1822, settlers pushed north from Massachusetts and other parts of New England into Monson, Maine. On land taken from the Penobscot people, they established prosperous farms and businesses. Focusing on the microhistory of this village, Andrew Witmer reveals the sometimes surprising ways that this small New England town engaged with the wider world across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Townspeople fought and died in distant wars, transformed the economy and landscape with quarries and mills, and used railroads, highways, print, and new technologies to forge connections with the rest of the nation. Here and Everywhere Else starts with Monson’s incorporation in the early nineteenth century, when central Maine was considered the northern frontier and over 90 percent of Americans still lived in rural areas; it ends with present-day attempts to revive this declining Maine town into an artists’ colony. Engagingly written, with colorful portraits of local characters and landmarks, this study illustrates how the residents of this remote place have remade their town by integrating (and resisting) external influences.

“A thorough and engaging history of Maine’s rocky coast and its tough-minded people.”—Boston Herald “[A] well-researched and well-written cultural and ecological history of stubborn perseverance.”—USA Today For more than four hundred years the people of coastal Maine have clung to their rocky, wind-swept lands, resisting outsiders’ attempts to control them while harvesting the astonishing bounty of the Gulf of Maine. Today’s independent, self-sufficient lobstermen belong to the communities imbued with a European sense of ties between land and people, but threatened by the forces of homogenization spreading up the eastern seaboard. In the tradition of William Warner’s Beautiful Swimmers, veteran journalist Colin Woodard (author of American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good) traces the history of the rugged fishing communities that dot the coast of Maine and the prized crustacean that has long provided their livelihood. Through forgotten wars and rebellions, and with a deep tradition of resistance to interference by people “from away,” Maine’s lobstermen have defended an earlier vision of America while defying the “tragedy of the commons”—the notion that people always overexploit their shared property. Instead, these icons of American individualism represent a rare example of true communal values and collaboration through grit, courage, and hard-won wisdom.

Newell Lyon learned the oral tradition from his elders in Maine's Penobscot Nation and was widely considered to be a "raconteur among the Indians." The thirteen stories in this new volume were among those that Lyon recounted to anthropologist Frank Speck, who published them in 1918 as Penobscot Transformer Tales. Transcribed for the first time into current Penobscot orthography and with a new English translation, this instructive and entertaining story cycle focuses on the childhood and coming-of-age of Gluskabe, the tribe's culture hero. Learning from his grandmother Woodchuck, Gluskabe applies lessons that help shape the Wabanaki landscape and bring into balance all the forces affecting human life. These tales offer a window into the language and culture of the Penobscot people in the early twentieth century. In "Still They Remember Me," stories are presented in the Penobscot language and English side-by-side, coupled with illustrations from members of the tribal community. For the first time, these stories are accessible to a young generation of Penobscot language learners and scholars of Native American literatures at all levels, from grade school to graduate school.