What I Found in the Woods This Summer

97,997 Years of Erased History

I paused writing “Code Red and Me: Rethinking Everything” last May when the lure of a five-foot-high pile of dirt drew me away from my writing chair and out into the long warm days. But be comforted, reader: I didn’t pause the blog for any old pile of dirt.  I paused instead for the succor of a warm black pyramid of composted loam, a full dump truck’s worth of fecund smelling earth that hummed its wormy promises into the warm Spring air: blood red tomatoes, pungent basil, summer squash.

When that dump truck backed up over the lawn, the high pitched beep beep sound of its warning alarm echoed through the trees. Warning: sometime this summer you will experience this place, these woods, yourself, in an entirely new way.

Who knows how one’s mind cracks open, what portal in the stories we construct as “reality” unbolts and a whole new landscape tumbles before you?  Looking back, I can pin it to the day I heard the words settler colonialism, an entirely different phrase from the much-ballyhooed term my mind has been using for 77 years: colonial settlers.  I was walking on the paved road with my friend, C., and as we passed yet another long stretch of mossy stone walls on the edge of open fields, she referred to those walls not in the romanticized poetic way I’d thought about them, but as a tactic for denoting ownership over land that was “given” to the early settlers by covenant with God. 

Def: Colonialism: the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically.

Beware walks with treasured friends deeply engaged with issues around equity and racial justice. This is the same friend who threw into disarray my cozy memories of the 1803 house I’d lived in at Porters Landing for over forty years when she asked me if I knew that Rufus Soule, shipbuilder and trader who built the house at Porters Landing, had made a great deal of his money in the slave trade.  I wrote about that experience here, a version of which was also published in Maine Homes.

The portal didn’t open instantly, but those two words gave my imagination a boost onto a platform for observation and wonder, like a deer stand in a tree. In the days after my conversation with C. walking in the woods felt different. There was a silence I had not heard before.  There was an emptiness I had not experienced.  Something, it seemed, had gone missing. I began searching. I looked deeper into the shadows in the ravines. I walked further. I peered behind trees. Sadness grew inside me.

In these woods that surround my house I can walk for hours and not see a house or a road and rarely do I see anyone. The only sounds I hear are the calls of birds: the teacher teacher teacher call of the ovenbird and the solemn fluted notes of the thrushes.  Mossy gray and black granite boulders protrude from clefts in the earth, muddy streams run every which way, and mosses and ferns stipple the ground breathtaking shades of green. In a 13-minute walk from my home I can be at the edge of Maquoit Bay and delicately pick my way over razor edged slabs of rock and slippery algae coated stones and dive into the ocean. 

After days of searching, it hit me: what I was searching for was what had been un-remembered. Ten thousand years of history of this land and its people: erased, “wiped out.” I know nothing, absolutely nothing, about the way the Native peoples lived on this land before we “discovered” it. Who was here? How did they care for the land, the forest, each other? How did they govern? There are no informational signs tacked to trees, no structures, nothing to denote their presence.

The Freeport Historical Society, like most other Historical Societies in Maine, only has records of white men and women. There is no record of the people who lived here for 99.97% of the time before our arrival. There is one name: Maquoit and though I have lived here for forty-five years, I don’t know the meaning of that name. And most importantly there are no stories.

But what I discovered this summer is that the spirits of the men and women and children who lived here for thousands of years are not really erased.  If you walk very quietly and breathe very deeply and feel the thrum of the earth, you will find them wandering in the woods. These spirits are thin and frail because it has been so long since we have called them by name.  They have been silenced, a second form of death: first by warfare and starvation and disease, then by erasure of their stories.

I want to tell those stories, to join with others who feel their presence and bring their spirits back to life. I want to sit beside them and allow them to teach us what we need to know about how to live on this earth, how to bring the earth back from this state of breakdown.

In this town there is one story that involves Indigenous people.  It is one of the town’s foundational stories and it is referred to as the Thomas Means Massacre of 1756. In the early 1700’s, The Means family, Scotts Irish immigrants from Ulster in search of land and religious freedom settled just up the road from here on fertile land beside Maquoit Bay.  The story of the death of two of the family members at the hands of Native Americans has always been told here from the point of view of this valiant family.  Never has it been told from the viewpoint of the people who were forcibly disposed of their land and their whole way of life.  I want to find a way to tell the story.  The spirits I encounter in the woods are the descendants of those people.  They are asking me, very quietly, very politely, please bring our spirits back to life.  

I asked Tilley Laskey, Curator of the Maine Historical Society, if she could send me some references to the Thomas Means Massacre.  She was kind enough to send me enough references to get started. She said there wasn’t yet much known about why that particular event occurred but “There must have been some grievances that perhaps had to do with the so-called scalp bounties.” Scalp bounties!

See if you can keep your heart in your chest as you read this report:

In 1755 when Maine was part of Massachusetts, an official Proclamation by Lieutenant Governor Phips offered:

• 50 pounds for every Male Penobscot Indian above the Age of Twelve Years taken alive (live captives would likely be sold into slavery in the West Indies or to other distant buyers);

• 40 pounds for every Scalp of a Male Penobscot Indian above the age of 12;

• 25 pounds for every Female Penobscot Indian taken and brought in and for every male Prisoner under the Age of Twelve Years;

• 20 pounds for every Scalp of such Female Indian or Male Indian under Twelve Years of Age.

In 1757 in response to Governor Phips’ offer, the Reverend Thomas Smith, pastor of First Parish Church in Portland, recruited a posse of 16 men from his Church as “scouters and cruisers” who were sent to “kill and captivate the Indian Enemy” to the east of Falmouth in the area between the Kennebec and Penobscot Rivers.

“People seem wonderfully spirited,” the Reverend wrote “to go out after the Indians.”

This is the backstory to the Thomas Means Massacre. This is the story that must be told.

Every day I learn something that startles me.  Just yesterday I learned from the Midcoast Indigenous Awareness Group that there was once a fort in Brunswick on the banks of the Androscoggin River called Fort Gorges. In the collective amnesia called history, I never considered what purpose this fort served. Now I know. It was built to prevent Native peoples from gaining access to the Androscoggin River, their main trade route for thousands of years.

Natives travelled between Maquoit Bay and inland by a method called portage. The tip of the portage passage up to the Androscoggin River is just up the road from me at the end of Maquoit Bay. The road they took up to the Androscoggin is still called Maquoit Rd. It becomes Maine Street in Brunswick and leads right to the river’s falls.  It was here that Native people fished for salmon in the salmon run each spring.  Without access to the river, they were cut off from their coastal homelands, from trade routes and deprived of major sources of their food. I think there’s a word for this kind of erasure of people.

Tell these stories to everyone you know.  Also tell them that Maquoit means “place of the bear,” because that’s where the bear went in the spring to fish for salmon. 

How is all this related to climate change?  I could not say it better than Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a scholar whose books retelling America’s founding stories from the perspective of Indigenous peoples are brilliant and, beware, mind altering.  This is a quote from her first book, “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States:” 

“It should not have happened that the great civilizations of the Western Hemisphere, the very evidence of the Western Hemisphere, were wantonly destroyed, the gradual progress of humanity interrupted and set upon a path of greed and destruction.  Choices were made that forged that path toward destruction of life itself—the moment in which we now live and die as our planet shrivels, over heated.  To learn this history is both a necessity and a responsibility to the ancestors and descendants of all parties.”

Who are we, we proud Americans who call ourselves lovers of freedom and equality?  Who am I living on this stolen land, disconnected from all these fading spirits and their stories?

In my thinking and writing about the climate crisis I very badly wanted to blame Big Oil and the Bad Big Banks, to rave at climate deniers and Donald Trump for breaking our commitment to the Paris Accord.  But very soon I came to see it as a crisis that exists not only in the carbon weighted atmosphere and the dying ecosystems, but inside me as well.  I came to see it as a personal crisis of meaning, identity and morals. 

I see now that the “Rethinking Everything” part of this project includes rethinking what it means to be in possession of this beautiful piece of land beside the sea because three hundred years ago my people “seemed wonderfully spirited to go after the Indians.” There is a very dark side to American history, a dark story behind all the courageous stories we tell ourselves about being a welcoming nation of immigrants who believe in equality and freedom. 

How has this erasure of our violent takeover of this land altered my ability to respond to injustice, blinded me to the paths of coexistence with our planet and each other? I’ve spent most of my working career as a therapist helping others come to terms with the secrets of their past and their own dark side.  An underlying assumption I work from is that unless we come to terms with these things that have been buried in our unconscious, we will continue to repeat the past. 

My one climate action recommendation for you this week: Read Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Her books will blow your mind. 

I hope to return most Sunday mornings to your email box with my efforts to process this urgent moment in history when we can choose to move towards what Joanna Macy calls The Great Turning, or…! I’d love to hear from you reader so please add your comments below. I’ve missed you!!