A Call for Repairing the Harms of Colonization: Maine’s Bicentennial as an Opportunity for Truth, Acknowledgment, Resistance, and Healing

The authors examine the colonized history and present of Maine to recognize that the state’s bicentennial may not mean the same thing to all who live here. They explore the impact of settler colonialism on Wabanaki people and settler descendants and recognize the ways colonization lives in our laws, structures, policies, and worldview. And yet, in Maine today, there are already examples of the holistic, indigenous-led engagement, healing, and advocacy that this history and present call for, such as the work of Maine-Wabanaki REACH. However, this moment asks for many more of us who trace our lineages to settlers to commit to these processes. Using interviews, case studies, and literature reviews, this article proposes a set of questions that researchers, policymakers, advocates, and others can ask ourselves about our roles in processes of decolonization. the domination of non-Christian people. Like colonization in general, this may seem to some like ancient history; however, the 1823 US Supreme Court ruling Johnson v. M’Intosh codified the Doctrine of Discovery, laid the foundation for federal Indian Law, and forms the basis of court rulings to the present day (Newcomb 2008: xii). The tribal nations of the Northeast felt the most destructive blows of the Doctrine of Discovery in the seventeenth century. This phase of colonization was preceded by more piecemeal contact, mostly with traders and mariners, and turned out to be unimaginably devastating. These earlier encounters were responsible for the introduction of European diseases, which wiped out entire peoples such as the Penacooks of the region around what is now York, Maine (Rolde 2004: 83). The epidemics reached their apex between 1616 and 1619. So while the Native nations of the Northeast resisted the forces of war and colonization mightily, they were doing so on the heels of what would come to be known as the Great Dying, a pandemic across tribal nations that killed as much as 90 percent of the population of coastal New England (Mann 2006: 90). A horrific, world-altering, and disorienting loss to the Wabanaki and Wampanoag peoples was understood and even celebrated by English settlers as further proof that their mission was ordained by God. Settlers capitalized on the opportunity provided to them by this devastation and in many instances carried out what can only be called a campaign of genocide against Indigenous peoples. The next two centuries were woven with betrayals, broken treaties, violence, and the usurping of tribal lands. As France and England competed for control of the territories of the Northeast, Wabanaki peoples navigated the ongoing wars and struggled to maintain their homelands as colonization increasingly threatened their ways of life. In 1644, the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed legislation that outlawed Native spiritual practices. As the settler population grew and resource extraction intensified, leaders like Chief Polin of the Presumpscot River recognized the grave threat that colonial relationships to the land and water had for his people and nonhuman relations. For instance, the damming of the rivers throughout what would become the state of Maine had devastating effects on Indian fishing practices, which were based on the belief that the people belonged to the river, rather than the other way around (Brooks and Brooks 2010). In 1755, the colonial government issued a proclamation that offered money in exchange for the scalps of Penobscot men, women, and children (Rolde 2004). The proclamation can be read as an order to kill and brutalize Penobscot people to clear the way for English control of land and resources in the region. Throughout this period, numerous treaties were signed between the settler government and the Wabanaki. They were almost uniformly ignored or left unenforced. By 1803, there were only 347 Penobscots left, from 10,000 prior to European arrival (Penawahpskewi Indian Nation).3 Three decades later, just after statehood, Maine sold 100,000 acres of Penobscot land, reducing their land base to less than 5,000 acres. The Doctrine of Discovery was taking on its American form, Manifest Destiny. Alongside the theft of land, the theft of children is a tool of colonization that has had shattering effects on Indian communities. This practice took a particularly insidious form in the Indian residential schools, which first opened in the late 1800s and carried out their mission to “kill the Indian, save the man” through the mid-twentieth century. Wabanaki children were sent to such schools in both the United States and Canada. Passamaquoddy teacher, storyteller, and language scholar Roger Paul recalls that as a child he was moved from family member to family member following the death of his mother, to avoid being sent to Shubenacadie, one such school in Nova Scotia, where his older siblings had suffered (Paul 2020). Thousands of children were taken out of their tribal communities, forced to give up their identities, cultural practices, and languages, and abused emotionally, physically, and sexually. Many children died in the boarding schools. Those who survived experienced trauma that reverberates today in the generations that have come after them. ...while the Native nations of the Northeast resisted the forces of war and colonization...they were doing so on the heels of what would come to be known as the Great Dying.... MAINE POLICY REVIEW • Vol. 29, No. 2 • 2020 18 HARMS OF COLONIZATION