Museum of the White Mountains Director Meghan C. Doherty explained the curation of the "Of Baskets and Borers" exhibit to the group.
Over the past eight months, I have had the honor of representing the Forest Society in a “Learning Journey” offered through the NH Land Trust Coalition. More than a dozen representatives of land trusts and conservation organizations in New Hampshire worked together through a self-guided curriculum created by First Light from November 2023 through June 2024.
First Light was founded in 2017 as collaborative of Wabanaki peoples, including the four federally recognized tribes in Maine (Maliseet, Mi’kmaq, Passamaquoddy and Penobscot people, collectively known as the Wabanaki Confederacy) and the land conservation community in Maine. The goal was to help non-native organizations relearn histories of Wabanaki homelands before embarking on the work to recenter Wabanaki voices in land work and return land and restore access to Wabanaki communities.
The NH Learning Journey project was launched by Sarah Thorne and Cathy Menard (former board members of Five Rivers Conservation Trust); Emma Tutein (UNH Extension); and Krista Hemboldt (The Nature Conservancy), after First Light co-founder Peter Forbes introduced New Hampshire land conservationists to First Light at the 2023 Saving Special Places conference.
Participants of the NH Learning Journey aimed to foster foundational understanding of the deep history of our landscapes and strengthen our ability to respectfully engage with indigenous people in our conservation work. We also discussed ways to integrate indigenous names, history, and culture into the stories we tell about the land we steward.
We read articles, watched videos, and researched content created by indigenous and non-indigenous sources before meeting virtually each month to discuss questions raised by First Light for each topic.
The group also collected and shared resources and lessons from the program with the wider conservation community in the state by posting everything online at the NH Land Trust Coalition’s website. Additional land trusts represented by staff or board members (who were primarily non-indigenous) in the Learning Journey were the Bear-Paw Regional Greenways, Hanover Conservancy, Monadnock Conservancy, Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, Southeast Land Trust, Upper Valley Land Trust, and Upper Saco Valley Land Trust.
I appreciated the opportunity to learn more about the history and future of the Wabanaki people in Maine. I especially want to thank First Light for putting together the exceptional curriculum and UNH Extensions’ Emma Tutein for deftly facilitating our deep, and sometimes intense, conversations.
We learned about indigenous sovereignty and identity across what is now the United States, as well as the need for ‘rematriation’ so indigenous people can restore relationships with ancestral land. We also used the curriculum as a jumping off point for learning (or re-learning what we’d been taught previously) about Abenaki tribes in New Hampshire and Vermont and the ongoing challenge by the First Nations of Odanak and Wôlinak to the status and identity of Vermont’s state-recognized tribes.
As Menard noted, “Tribal territories do not line up neatly with state and international boundaries. This struggle about recognition creates a real question, with whom do we talk as we seek to build relationship with Abenaki people? Indigenous people, from whom so much has been stolen, have a million reasons to be cautious. Returning land to native people in Maine only happened after long years of building relationships.”
The culmination of the NH Learning Journey was a visit to the Museum of the White Mountains at Plymouth State University on June 20, where we viewed the exhibit “Of Baskets and Borers: The Past, Present, and Future of Indigenous Basketry in the White Mountains,” and met with Museum Director Meghan C. Doherty.
The exhibition, open until September 14, explores indigenous basketry in the White Mountains region, with a particular focus on Abenaki basketry, and the intersection between Indigenous basketry, brown ash trees, and the challenges presented by the Emerald Ash Borer: "Since the glaciers receded 12,000 years ago and the temperate forest grew up behind them, Indigenous peoples have called this region Ndakina, home. Over many generations, they developed reciprocal relationships with the land, water, plants, and animals. This exhibition explores one of those relationships – one that they developed with the brown ash tree. This species is featured in one of the Wabanaki creation stories. Baskets woven from these splints were central to daily life. The unique structure of the growth rings makes it possible to pound the rings apart into flexible splints. This millennia–old relationship is now threatened by the emerald ash borer, an invasive insect that has devastated ash trees across the Upper Midwest and much of the Northeast. While the threat to this cultural knowledge is real, all is not lost. Current research has begun to offer approaches to preserve and protect ash trees. The approaches to ash preservation we highlight in this exhibition are critical to the survival of the species."
Organizations including the Abenaki Band Council of Odanak, the Musée des Abénakis in Odanak, and the Conway Historical Society helped with research and historical items for display. New baskets made by members of the Nolett family in the Odanak First Nation, Canada, were a highlight.
A map showing Ndakina (above) was provided by the W8banaki, formerly the Grand Conseil de la Nation Waban-Aki Inc., which was founded in 1979 and is a Tribal Council composed of the Abenaki bands of Odanak and Wôlinak in Canada. (Learn more here)
After our last session together, members of the inaugural cohort of the NH First Light Learning Journey all expressed hope that another cohort will begin this fall and both cohorts will continue to expand the local conservation community’s connections to indigenous knowledge and people.
During the course of the learning journey, the Forest Society developed a relationship with Maliseet basket maker Amanda Ennis, whose traditional ash and sweetgrass baskets are for sale and on display at Forest Society North at The Rocks (see below).
Meanwhile, in Maine, the original initiative is now called Dawnland Return and has evolved into two entities: First Light serving as a collective of non-native land-oriented organizations and agencies “working to expand Wabanaki access and stewardship of land” and the Wabanaki Commission on Land and Stewardship, an intertribal body called Psiw ut skitkamiq kignumin (all the earth is our home) that guides the work of return.
We’re still at the very beginning of the long and complex process of relearning and recentering indigenous knowledge and ways of being in conservation work here in New Hampshire. I was excited to take the first steps with the NH Learning Journey and I’m looking forward to what’s next.
Learn more:
- Museum of the White Mountains exhibit
- Dawnland Return: First Light and Wabanaki Commission on Land and Stewardship
- Indigenous Resources for NH Land Conservation are available through the NH Land Trust Coalition: https://nhltc.org/resources/indigenous-resources
- More information will be available soon about future learning journeys in the state.