Courtesy of Willi Lempert

Willi Lempert, an assistant professor of anthropology at Bowdoin, is using Google Earth to reimagine the history of Brunswick’s land and people.

Over the past four years, Lempert, alongside a host of community members, Maine Indigenous organizations and Bowdoin students, has been crafting the Pejepscot Portage Mapping Project, an ambitious, thoughtful and highly collaborative effort that aims to trace how Native peoples moved through and interacted with the land that is now Brunswick.

The map, which can be easily accessed online, opens with historical context on Native peoples in America, focusing on the Wabanaki homeland in particular, before moving onto explanations of Native engagement across different parts of Brunswick via land and waterways. Notable spots include Merrymeeting Bay, which was a transit hub for canoes at a time when rivers acted as highways, and Fort Andross, where Native peoples once caught fish. Now, Fort Andross is the site of a former industrial mill and adjacent dam which has transformed the landscape.

“You’re trying to encourage folks to imagine Brunswick in a very different way that’s also not just historical, but is enduring, with Wabanaki presence and rematriation projects,” Lempert said. “One of the hardest parts of this map was not including a lot more. You could have 100 slides, but we wanted it to be the kind of thing people could go through in one sitting.”

According to Lempert, the idea for the map came from a long discussion between community members about the Veterans Plaza memorial amidst its construction in the summer of 2020. Following this, Lempert and others began to discuss how Native passage in and around Brunswick shaped the region as groups moved to fish and hunt, ultimately finding their physical and moral anchor in the portage—a path where one carries their canoe from one body of water to another—linking Maquoit Bay to the Androscoggin River by way of the current Maine Street.

“The more we learned, the more portage became a really important idea, because portage is something that a lot of Native artists and authors have been using to think about what we collectively carry with us,” Lempert said. “In a portage, people take their canoes with them over land as a connection. But you can only take so much, and you leave certain things behind. So, it also became a sort of metaphor for this project. What do we carry with us, and what do we leave behind when we’re trying to cross these difficult translational arenas?”

According to Lempert, Native organizations, including Midcoast Indigenous Awareness Group (MIAG), offered feedback that helped improve the map.

“One of the things that came up in our feedback sessions with Wabanaki individuals from around the state is that earlier iterations were very informational and didn’t have a lot of narrative and story, so they really encouraged us to include [that],” Lempert said.

Lempert said that while the map is intended to provoke questions, it is also meant to add to the dialogue by synthesizing perspectives rather than being confrontational about the past.

A walking tour that follows the portage route displayed on the map will run on Sunday, October 6. Margaret Williams, a community member and volunteer for MIAG, said she is excited for the walking tour and optimistic that participants can come away with new perspectives.

“I would hope that [the tour] will create space for people to reconsider the narrative that we take for granted about Brunswick and its development and create the space for people to consider our responsibility to the history of how this place was settled and our responsibility to the … Indigenous communities who are still here,” Williams said. “I would hope that people would be able to expand their ideas of what the land means to different types of people, the power of access, questions about equity and just the impact of colonization.”

Overall, Lempert said that the bonds formed during this project and the reflection it induced within those who worked on the map and walking tour were the most important elements of all.

“It was a sort of small idea to let us stir together a map that’s turned into something that’s had a whole social life of its own and has led to things that we couldn’t have possibly imagined,” Lempert said. “To me, it speaks to the power of people coming together to share with others …  just out of curiosity and concern and interest.”