MY FUTURE BEGAN IN THE PAST By Sherri Mitchell Weh’na Ha’mu Kwasset (Penobscot, Passamaquoddy)

I was born Panawáhpskewi (the people) and grew up on a small island nation that is flanked on its eastern side by a series of white-water rapids. Panawáhpskek (the place) is one of hundreds of islands located in the Penobscot River. Before I was born to this land, I was seeded in this ground. A dream nestled into the damp soil of this shoreline by generations of ancestors. Having been held here long before the missionaries, militias, and settlers came, I carry the untouched hope of those ancestors in my blood.

Our nation is one of the few Indigenous nations where we, the original inhabitants, have never been removed from our homelands. We have faced war, disease, bounties placed on our heads, and centuries of industrial disruption and pollution, and still we remain.I We have lived along these same shores for more than ten thousand years, and our connections here run deep.

Since the settlers and their armies were unable to remove us, they attempted to move the land around us, by re-creating the map with arbitrary lines. In 1842, the Webster-Ashburton Treaty drew a line right through our territory, forcing our northern relatives into another country.II This was just one of many dividing lines that would be drawn across the lives of our people. What follows is one tale of loss that helped me find my way.

Echoes of the Past

Have you ever listened to a song and been transported to another time? Heard a story from your childhood and suddenly found that the sounds, scents, and images are enlivened in your mind? Some words are held together with a magical thread that weaves a fabric of continuity between the generations. When we sing our songs or tell our traditional stories and weave in aspects of our contemporary experience, we are transporting ancient wisdom into the ears of a whole new generation of listeners. This is how we ensure that our truths will stand the test of time. This is something that our ancestors understood. They knew that sound carries within it the vibrational frequency of life, and that the entire mystery of the universe could be held in one well-told story.

For millennia, Indigenous Peoples have utilized oral traditions to transfer vital information. Our cosmologies, traditional stories, scientific and ecological knowledge, cultural values, and histories have all been passed down one generation to the next through stories and songs. Cultures across the world have stories indicating that life was called forth with a song or a spoken word. This demonstrates the spiritual importance of sound within Creation. All faith traditions carry stories, songs, and chants that are designed to activate an altered state of being that transports one to higher states of awareness. The inner sounds of prayer and meditation and the outer sounds of chants and mantras are almost universally recognized as spiritually transformative. And so it has been for us within our own spiritual traditions.

For more millennia, our stories, songs, and prayers have been spoken here in our language, Latuwewakon. That language is both instructive and relational. It teaches us how to care for one another and how to be good relatives to all the other living beings sharing our ecosystem. Language helps a people understand themselves. Their understanding of the world is comprised of thousands of words that translate into generations of knowledge.

But what happens to the people when their words are taken away?

Growing up, I had the gift of language in my home. My grandmother was a fluent Passamaquoddy speaker. Her language is the language that first formed in my mouth, though she was stingy with her words. When she spoke to her mother or to some of the other old women in the community, she told long stories in the language, and they all laughed and laughed until they cried. When she spoke to us, it was only with the most rudimentary language. We learned a series of questions and responses that were tied to meeting our immediate needs. We understood commands issued by our grandparents, knew how to politely greet our relatives, and we could turn a few colorful phrases. But we were never given enough to be fully conversational. When I was a teenager, I started to pester my grandmother to teach me how to speak more of the language. Whenever I asked, she had an excuse for why she couldn’t teach me: I speak the language in the old way, not like you younger people do today. I don’t know how to teach the language. I’m too busy for that kind of thing anyway. Eventually, I got frustrated and stopped asking. For a long time, I took her refusal personally, and was hurt by it. Then, someone sat me down and told me her story.

My grandmother, Eleanor Mary (Dana) Mitchell, was born and raised on the Passamaquoddy reservation at Sipayik, which is located about two and a half hours east of the reservation where I grew up. She was the only child of Mildred (Dana) Ranco and was largely raised by her maternal great-grandmother, a woman named Nancy Dana. Nancy had never learned to speak English, so my grandmother was raised with the Passamaquoddy language.

When she was eight years old, a priest and nun from the local Catholic church showed up at Nancy’s house. They told Nancy that they were aware that she had a child living in the home and gave her an ultimatum: she could send the child to the day school on the reservation or they would take her and send her away to a residential school and she’d never see her again. Knowing that this was no idle threat, my three-times-great-grandmother sent her great-granddaughter to the Indian mission school. The year was 1931.

Forty years before my grandmother was born, Secretary of the Interior Henry M. Teller sent a letter to the commissioner of Indian affairs, Hiram Price.III In it, he described Indian dancing as “heathenish” and expressed dire concern over the role of medicine men in Native communities. According to Teller, the medicine men were keeping people under their control and preventing parents from sending their kids to school. In response, Price implemented a set of rules that became known as the “Code of Indian Offenses” that were subsequently heard in the newly formed Court of Indian Offenses. He outlawed various ceremonial dances and forbade any traditional spiritual leader from influencing families against the schooling of their children. The punishment for these offenses began with the withholding of food from the community for ten days; a second offense kept food out of the community for thirty days and carried a jail sentence. These rules made it illegal for Indians to be Indian.

In 1887, the new commissioner of Indian affairs, a man named J. D. C. Atkins, expanded on the work of Hiram Price by prohibiting teaching or speaking in Native languages in all mission schools.IV Mission schools on reservations were required to be English only. Any missionary who failed to comply with Atkins’s mandate would no longer be allowed on the reservation. That order was later extended to all government-run schools on Indian reservations in the United States.

My grandmother entered the Indian day school a fluent speaker of her language. She did not speak or understand English. The punishment for speaking Passamaquoddy at the school was caning. Therefore, my grandmother spent the first three years of her “education” being beaten every time she opened her mouth and tried to communicate. Like so many other Native children, she was forced to learn English at the end of a caning rod. It was clear to her that she had not been brought to the school to learn how to read or write. She had been brought there to learn that it was dangerous to be skejinawok (Indigenous) in her own homeland. As a result, she remained silent for the next six years and left school in the eighth grade.

The laws banning Native languages and ceremonies remained on the books until the passage of the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act (42 U.S.C. § 1996). By that time, my grandmother had grown and had daughters and granddaughters of her own. I will never know whether the passage of that law meant anything to my grandmother. What I do know is that even before this law was passed my grandmother was calling me mishun (her heart) and asking me, Kil ona kotuhp, tus? (Are you hungry, my girl?) and telling me, Koselomol (I love you). Though my grandmother continued using her language until the day she died, she never felt comfortable sharing it with us in a full breath, afraid that we would suffer like she had if we showed up at school with the language in our mouths.

Carrying the weight of my grandmother’s story shifted my balance and altered my path. Before I was handed this story, I had been strongly influenced to focus on educational excellence by my grandfather. He was an administrator at the University of Maine and the founder of the Wabanaki Center, and he helped develop some of the first Native American Studies programs in the country. Though his impact on me continued to be strong, I also began looking around my community for more people like my grandmother, those who carried traditional Indigenous knowledge in tangible ways.

One of those people was a woman named Ssipsis. She was Penobscot and Mohawk, an artist, storyteller, and philosopher. In the decade preceding my birth, she organized protests about the injustices being imposed on our people, and she published a newsletter titled the Maine Indian Newsletter, a publication that she tapped out on a small typewriter in her home. She was fierce, and intelligent in ways that challenged colonial conventions. Some people were afraid of her, but I was friends with her three younger children and I knew that she was kind, creative, and interesting. She had real conversations with us about important things; she told us about the trees and the other plants and how the animals had helped us when we first arrived as a species. And she asked us kids questions that no one else bothered to ask, like when we thought the first snow might come and why. She had endless stories to share, and when there was a full moon, she would build a fire in her front yard and stay up all night singing and dancing. The old women from the church called her a witch. I was mesmerized by her. She was the only person in our community maintaining an open ceremonial life in my childhood; everyone else was still keeping their ceremonies hidden. Her son, Bill, later became our vice-Chief, and he was kind like his mother, always doing what he could to help the people.

Another traditional elder was an old man named Senabeh. He was a chain-smoking wood-carver who lived in a small trailer on the edge of the Rez. The men and young boys frequently gathered there to learn carving and listen to his stories. I wasn’t allowed to go there. My grandmother told me that it was no place for a small girl, because some of the men there were drinking. Senabeh had passed away by the time I heard my grandmother’s story. So, I didn’t get a chance to spend any time with him. However, I had heard that he was funny and generous with his knowledge. I remember that he used to pay my cousin for his newspaper with a story, and my aunt would get mad and go over there and get his money. I think more than anything, I felt the absence of knowing him. He spent twenty-six years of his life living alone in the woods on one of the other islands. My uncle Wayne said that Senabeh had the true mind of an Indian. He could think much better in Indian ways than he could in white man’s ways, and because of that, he could tell you things that only he knew, like the purpose of each living thing and how they could help you. Senabeh used to say that a person was just another element of nature, subject to the same natural laws, and that we had to remember our place. These are the things that we all wanted to know at that time. We wanted to know how our people lived when they were doing more than surviving, how it looked when we were operating closer to life. In his later years, Senabeh was arrested while holding a ceremony on an old Penobscot burial site, a location that had been taken over by a paper company. He won the case and became a bit of a local hero. He also had a lot of knowledge about the medicines, and people would go to him for help. Some called him a medicine man. Those things didn’t go to his head; instead, they weighted him with responsibility. In his life he advocated for unity not only between his people but for all people. In an interview shortly before his death he said, “You can find unity in kindness, having confidence with other peoples, trusting people. That’s the way.”V

I didn’t realize it at the time, but my grandmother’s story was a rudder in my life, guiding me toward traditional cultural knowledge and those who kept it. It has taken me on a thirty-year journey with Indigenous spiritual elders and medicine people from across the Americas. It has guided me to my distant whānau in the South Pacific seas and led me into ceremony with relatives from the African continent, the Siberian tundra, and the Mongolian plains. What each of these connections has taught me is that we are all remarkably the same, despite our rich diversity and geographic distance, and that our core values and connective principles are alive and waiting for us.

Long ago, my ancestors planted the seed of me into Panawáhpskek soil. Our spiritual way of life, skejinawe bamousawakon, is held in our languages, ceremonies, and the many ways that we care for our relatives. I learned to walk this sacred path by following the shuffled footsteps of my elders over generations. When I place my feet in their well-worn prints, I can feel my connection to them and to this land where they now rest, telling me that I too am Panawáhpskewi.

There have been times when I have longed for reunion with those ancestors, to be once again nestled into this sacred soil, cradled in the Earth mother’s embrace, knowing that I would be rooted there with alder, birch, and ash, surrounded by the old families of our nation, Mitchell, Neptune, Francis, and Paul. Buried deep beneath the oak trees, down where I could hear generations of old women laughing and the steady thump of strong men pounding ash trees. Down where there was nothing more to do than to be still and listen—to the lyrical tenor of our spoken words and the steady hum of my grandmother’s hands as she braids the sweetgrass for her baskets.

Psilde N’Dilnabamuk

I offer this for all my relations

Wolasuweltomuwakon, Uhkomi

I am so thankful for you, Grandmother

Kci Woliwon, kinsuhsok ciw Latuwewakon,

Thank you, ancestors, for the language you saved for us.

Komac Koselmol—I love you.

I offer this for my grandmother and all those who have had their words taken.

  1. I. Spencer Phips, Esq, “A Proclamation,” Massachusetts Historical Society, accessed January 16, 2024, https://www.masshist.org/database/6441.
  2. II. “Webster-Ashburton Treaty,” Office of the Historian, United States Department of State, accessed January 18, 2024, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1830-1860/webster-treaty.
  3. III. Rules Governing the Court of Indian Offenses, 47th Congress, 2d Session, March 30, 1883.
  4. IV. “Timeline: 1887: Indian Affairs Commissioner Bans Native Languages in Schools,” National Library of Medicine, accessed January 16, 2024, https://www.nlm.nih.gov/nativevoices/timeline/index.html.
  5. V. Pamela Wood, “Go Back Home, Senabeh,” Salt Magazine 5, no 1. (August 1, 1979): 62-71.