Claire Millikin – Portrait of Maine 2024: Indigo Arts Alliance’s Deconstructing the Boundaries: The Land Fights Back and the Abbe Museum’s Dawnland Festival of Arts and Ideas

Feminist art historian Shearer West points to the capacious definition of a “portrait” noting that a “portrait” emerges “on a continuum between the specificity of likeness and the generality of type . . . showing specific and distinctive aspects . . . as well as the (general) social milieu.” In summer 2024, two significant new art events were launched in Maine: the Indigo Arts Alliance symposium and public engagement event Deconstructing the Boundaries: The Land Fights Back and the Abbe Museum’s Dawnland Festival of Arts and Ideas. Both events took place in July and signal the beginning of rich new directions. Together, these events create a truthful and hopeful portrait of the land now called Maine. It is not my words in this article that draw a portrait of these events. Instead I suggest that the events themselves function as original portraits, portraying Maine’s true identity: Maine has a long and deep history not as a place for white people (that socially fabricated category indicating people of predominantly European descent) but as a place of Indigenous people, the Wabanaki (the Penobscot Nation, the Passamaquoddy Nation, the Mi’kmaq Nation, and the Houlton Band of Maliseet), a place where people of the African diaspora live and thrive, and a signal place on the Underground Railroad, as people of the African diaspora escaped enslavement. Maine today is statistically (according to the most recent census data) disproportionately white. But the deeper history and future of Maine tell a different story than this shallow temporary statistic. The Indigo Arts Alliance Deconstructing the Boundaries: The Land Fights Back and the Abbe Museum’s Dawnland Festival of Arts and Ideas function as portraits, showing the “specificity of likeness” that limns Maine’s truer identity. We may be a state that, for now, exhibits statistical patterns of land occupation reflecting centuries of colonization but we are also, in a deeper way shown by the Indigo Arts Alliance and the Abbe Museum, a state where the land is Wabanaki land, unceded to the invading colonialist forces, where the long-standing presence of Mainers of African descent stands at the core of our state’s identity, a state where newcomers not of European descent are shaping the meaning of this land that, for most of its time of human inhabitation was Wabanaki land, and is still Wabanaki land, even as it is called the state of Maine.

That arts alliances are leading the way shows how essential and necessary is activist art and art’s general role as community and political force. As Jordia Benjamin, executive director of the Indigo Arts Alliance notes, “IAA is the only Black-led, female-led, established arts incubator in northern New England . . . we fill a critically important gap in representation.” The Indigo Arts Alliance’s Deconstructing the Boundaries event draws a portrait of Maine emphasizing the “Black and Brown relationship to the land.” Flowing from a multiyear partnership between the Indigo Arts Alliance and Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, the inaugural 2024 symposium, Deconstructing the Boundaries: The Land Fights Back, builds on the inaugural 2023 event, A Future of Land and Food Resilience and aspires to the mission of reclaiming and nurturing place reflective of pre-colonialist practice, citing the words of the Haudenosaunee (formerly called the Iroquois) Constitution: “Women shall be considered the progenitors of the Nation. They shall own the soil and the land. Men and women shall follow the status of the mother.” As a portrait of Maine, Deconstructing the Boundaries asks what comes after. Our initial confrontations with land acknowledgments have opened a new frame of reference: what do we see looking forward? What would landback initiatives, reparations, and responsible land stewardship look like, with all their challenges and questions, in Maine and also beyond?

The genesis of Indigo Arts Alliance’s collaborative project with Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens wisely gathers the responsibilities of creative stewardship with the arts. The partnering of an arts incubator and a garden is in no way coincidental. More than a means to achieve public engagement, the missions of both institutions seek to nurture meaningful place-based connections over time, planting seeds. Gardens are never in concept and practice non-human places. They are, like all art, human-constructed ways of meaning, and as such they can offer alternative place-based experience and living, unlike the hierarchically-centered structures of racial capitalism that typifies settler cities and towns, whose boundaries continue to uphold colonialist legacies of the nation state.

The program of the July 2024 event, Deconstructing the Boundaries: The Land Fights Back, highlights this flourishing partnership’s aims toward fostering a creative human community that attempts to come to terms with how alienated and alienating our dominant culture has been to our originally sustaining relationships with the land and with nature and their meanings. Through a symposium bringing together artists, scholars, and activists, this project recenters key questions of cultural practices within a timely rubric of nourishment and repair. Looking back in moving forward, Deconstructing the Boundaries asks us to consider how personal, community, and institutional relationships with land ownership might evolve, with special consideration of how botanical gardens, land trusts, and conservancies might have to confront a radical reimagining of their relationships and holds to the land for a truly regenerative renewal that erases colonialist bounds. In looking back to earlier covenants and relationships, Deconstructing the Boundaries adroitly avoids the fetishizing and mystification that too easily could make such institutional gestures a pastoral version of greenwashing. Refocusing key questions through art and art’s capacity to expose the pain at the core of nostalgia, the Indigo Arts Alliance/Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens collaboration pushes past that initial step of voicing land acknowledgment and substantively confronts issues of legacy and ongoing trauma intimately tied to the land we hold. These are tough questions, and the resulting portrait of Maine and this land generated by the Deconstructing the Boundaries project shows us a picture that highlights the voices of African and First Nations descendant people who can speak to existences outside of settler colonial paradigms.

For the 2024 program, Indigo Arts Alliance and Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens commissioned the work of Anna Tsouhlarakis and Shane Perley-Dutcher to envision and create a permanent public art piece that amplifies Indigenous wisdom, artistry, and presence. Both artists were Indigo Arts Alliance’s July Visiting Artists in Residence. Shane Perley-Dutcher is a Wolastoq mixed media artist from the Neqotkuk Wolasqiyik (Tobique First Nation) in New Brunswick. He draws his design inspiration from Wolastoqiyik traditional knowledge and contemporary aesthetics and uses natural materials such as birch, cedar, spruce, ash, copper, silver, gold, and platinum to create unique lines of jewelry and one-of-a-kind sculptures. Shane’s commissioned copper fiddlehead fern installation, Eci-Mahsosiyil/Fiddleheads, draws on the deep cultural significance of the fiddlehead, the first food gathered every spring and symbolizes the importance of weaving and basketry skills that have sustained his people for generations. Anna Tsouhlarakis works in sculpture, installation, video, and performance. She is an enrolled citizen of the Navajo Nation and of Muscogee Creek and Greek descent and drew inspiration from the oyster middens along the Damariscotta River for her commissioned work, The Native Guide Project CMBG. Her site-based piece is deeply rooted in the history and enduring connections of the native peoples who have inhabited the area for thousands of years, highlighting the ongoing need for reparative justice.

Colonization is not an event in the past but an ongoing system of social and economic practices that tend to aggressively apportion land and resources to those whose ancestors came from Europe. Many white Americans may tend to think of colonization, if at all, as a given, a status quo, the way things must be because it’s the way things are. But because colonization is an ongoing system rather than a past event, it is still possible and, for reasons both ethical and practical, necessary to contest this system. That contestation—revisioning to whom the land belongs and therefore how the land should be stewarded—is at the heart of Indigo Arts Alliance and Coastal Maine Botanical Garden’s Deconstructing the Boundaries 3 year symposia program’s emphasis on centering environmental justice through the experiences of Indigenous people, people of the African diaspora, and Latinx people. It is also at the center of the Dawnland Festival’s combining of arts and intellectual discussions to ground a new vision of sovereignty, land, and its attendant environmental justice. These signal events of July 2024 reflect in very different ways on the increasing environmental and social crisis brought about by centuries of colonization’s resource extraction and create a portrait in real time in the place now called Maine.

The argument for shifting the apportioning of land and resources more equitably and sustainably is made through the arts, through an awareness that art is, at its best, a philosophical creation, a way of expressing, exposing, and generating theories of being. Deconstructing the Boundaries: The Land Fights Back and the Dawnland Festival emphasize art as a place of philosophy, of political theory, because art is that singular space in capitalist discourse where the soul speaks, where the truth can still be told. It can be told through the distinctive art of the Burnurwurbskek Singers (Penobscot) and the spoken word art of Jennifer Pictou (Mi’kmaq) both of whom performed at the Dawnland Festival. This truth was told through the words of Dr. Suzanne Greenlaw (Maliseet) and Sherri Mitchell (Penobscot), who discussed the ethics and ultimate aesthetics of caring for the land of Maine, and beyond, in the panel “Weaving a Sustainable Environment” at the Dawnland Festival. Filmmaker Jared Lank (Mi’kmaq) and artist Frances Soctomah (Passamaquoddy) as artists represented on the panel “Arts Transforming Our Futures” at the Dawnland Festival, created a rich and vibrant discussion. Moderating this panel, curator/scholar Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation) eloquently states the complex space of Indigenous art as a form of resistance: “How do we enact Indigenous futures? One of the things we [speak] about [is] that what needs to shift is a rather fixed or closed definition of what art is . . . Frances (Soctomah) you’ve been researching and you’ve shared with us the lack of words for so-called art in your community. And that’s not because there’s no art but because art is so embedded in community it’s not differentiated from a lot of other practices.” Art that is embedded in the community, that is part of living, part of being human, is a radical space in the capitalist-settler regime. It is transformative art, as Hopkins notes: “We have not just a wealth of experience and knowledge here but we bring our ancestors with us and . . . that’s what differentiates us.” Deconstructing the Boundaries and the Dawnland Festival trace a portrait of Maine that is deep and resonant, foreshadowing new directions by drawing into luminous view the real history of Maine, the long history and Indigenous and African diasporic presences and the potent futures of how the land, this land for now-called Maine, can be healed.

 

Image at top: Performance from the Burnurwurbskek Singers (Penobscot Nation) at the Abbe Museum’s Dawnland Festival of Arts & Ideas (photo: Nolan Altvater, Passamaquoddy Nation).