Beatrice Rafferty Elementary School on the Sipayik reservation in Pleasant Point, Maine has an art room, craft corners in the classrooms and the Passamaquoddy Language and Culture classroom, home to beads, dream-catcher rings and crayons that smear rainbows on small hands.
Sipayik is the larger of the two Passamaquoddy tribal reservations in Downeast Maine; Beatrice Rafferty is the only school on the reservation. After kids finish their worksheets in Passamaquoddy class, they grab coloring pages and the crayon dust flies. A droopy-eared pajamaed rabbit is captioned, “Mahtoqehs—rabbit.”
I spent a week on Alternative Spring Break (ASB) in the language classroom of the school, which overlooks the Passamaquoddy Bay. I came home with a stack of drawings and colored pages inches thick—I have “mahtoqehs,” “pesqahsuwehsok—flower,” and images of the traditional Passamaquoddy double curve.
On Friday, we met with Madonna Soctomah, a former tribal representative to the Maine state legislature. She told us about her experiences growing up on the reservation and then about her time in the legislature, where she worked with politicians who knew nothing about her community. On the reservation, she faced poverty. Off it, she faced racism and a government that wanted to erase her language and alter her way of life.
One of my ASB members asked what she thought our group, which traveled to Sipayik ostensibly to help with the issues facing the community, could actually do with our week.
Soctomah told us to absorb everything we possibly could, to listen and to learn, and then to tell other people what we had seen and heard. She also asked us to treat her people as humans.
Working in the classroom—my organized community service project—I met nearly every child who attends Beatrice Rafferty. Five-year olds sat on my lap and thirteen-year olds told me about their crushes. All the while, we colored and drew, heads together, attracted by the quiet spell of craft time.
The two teachers in the classroom told me about their childhoods, opened their library of Passamaquoddy history books, showed me the craft of beading a dream-catcher, and patiently corrected my Passamaquoddy pronunciation. (The Passamaquoddy “s” sounds like an English “z,” “d” like a “b” and “t” like “d”). As children filed in and out, the teachers would quietly tell me whose parents were separated or gone and who had suffered unspeakably in her five, or seven, or twelve years of life.
On my last day in the classroom I cut out dozens of paper flowers—pesqahsuweskil. The teacher gave me green tempera paint, and on the glass doors that framed the bay glittering with chunks of snow and ice, I created an image of spring.
Before I left, the teacher asked me to close my eyes, and she clasped a bracelet around my wrist. She had beaded it in blue and cream and violet. When I expressed how beautiful it was, she laughed, saying that beading was easy, her hobby. She pointed at the paper and paint on the doors and said that my work was something she could not make. We hugged good-bye.
We gave gifts to each other—colored-in mahtoqehs, bracelets, even window decorations—because we connected on a fundamental level, through conversation and crayons. To receive a craft made by someone else—someone you have known for a short time but will never forget—is a tremendous gift.
To share everything that I learned about Passamaquoddy culture, language and life would take endless pages and hours.
Stories of suffering and oppression, stereotypes that evoke a mythologized way of life, can never define people. I cannot define their entire community in words, but I can tape rabbits to my walls—rabbits colored in during craft time by five-year-old kids—and tell college students about my new friends who made them.