Join us in celebrating Native American Heritage Day as Acadia National Park stands committed to engage with tribal partners in strengthening our stewardship of these lands and waters, together.
Since time immemorial, Native American peoples have inhabited the land now called Maine. Acadia National Park continues to be a place of enduring and immeasurable importance to the Wabanaki, People of the Dawnland.
Starting in the 1500s European colonizers used guns, disease, and genocidal government policies to displace and erase Wabanaki people from this landscape.
Resistant and resilient, Wabanaki people are still here.
We gratefully acknowledge the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians, Aroostook Band of Micmac, Passamaquoddy Tribe at Motahkokmikuk, Passamaquoddy Tribe at Sipayik and the Penobscot Indian Nation on whose ancestral homelands we now gather.
Here, tribal partners work with Acadia National Park and U.S. Forest Service staff on traditional gathering of sweetgrass within the park. The interdisciplinary work focuses on Wabanaki stewardship approaches through centuries of learned Indigenous knowledge, as well as cultural protocols to assert Indigenous sovereignty within natural and cultural resource management on ancestral lands.
(Back row, from left) Geo Soctomah Neptune, Passamaquoddy; Kyle Lolar, pαnawαhpskewi; Natalie Dana Lolar, Passamaquoddy-Penobscot, Motahkomikuk Indian Township; Colleen Truskey, NPS; Michelle Baumflek, USFS research scientist, Co-PI; Jodi DeBruyne former curator at the Abbe Museum; Suzanne Greenlaw, Co-PI, University of Maine in the School of Forest Resources PhD Candidate, citizen of the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians; Starr Kelly, Algonquin First Nation of Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg, Quebec; Gabriel Frey, Passamaquoddy
(Front row, from left) Nicole Sockbeson, Penobscot; Sarah Sockbeson, Penobscot; Kim Bryant, Penobscot; Zigwan Morey, Mi’kmaq; Tania Morey, Mi’kmaq.
Original source can be found here
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