Crafting a space and building a home: a year in Reed House

Sew what?: Crafts provide opportunity for cross-cultural bonding

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.

Sew what?: God in the Modge Podge? Finding creative origins

When I was a kid I used to make little people out of Sculpey Clay— Sculpey babies, Sculpey moms, Sculpey girls with curls like the ones I wanted but couldn’t have. They had names and personalities, and when I left them in the oven for too long and their edges blackened, I would be seriously upset. Playing God was a little too stressful for me, so now I use Sculpey to make beads and earrings.
This week, however, I’ve been thinking a lot about God. Even though I’m curious about what others have to think, I don’t talk about God often. I asked my friends if they believed in God while we were in the Craft Center, listening to Fleetwood Mac and having fun with Modge Podge—a glue, sealer and finish.
God is maybe in the ocean, or in the sky, or in the ground. All around us, a man, a woman, a genderless being, our Savior, our protector. God inspires fear or love—or both. What most people seem to agree on is that God—if they believe in God—is our creator. There are as many creation stories as there are cultures.
Humans are enthralled by creation stories. Evolution, our factual creation story, doesn’t assign an actor, and so I see the idea of God as the original crafter. Every time we make something we are recreating a tiny bit of that original making, in that we are crafting something the way we want it to be—putting it into the world, giving it a purpose.
So maybe my fascination with people making things, crafting things, stems back to the human desire for a creation story. Maybe my thought that crafting is a way of showing love for others, defining one’s selfhood and place and just figuring out a way to not freak out about life because you’re doing something else with your hands has something to do with the comfort that people get from the various creation stories.
People don’t always craft with intention; they’re not always making something in a particular way or for a particular purpose. But I think humans have always liked to believe that we were made in a particular way, for a particular purpose, even if we have no idea why or what for.
I don’t have any answers. I’m not sure I want to have any answers. What I actually believe in, or what my friends hold to be true, is almost less interesting to me than all the possibilities, all the creation stories, all the myths, all the truths.
When I make something—really make something, think about it, invest myself in it, put it into the world—there’s a moment of letting go. All the crazy, intense effort is in the process and the product becomes something that floats, borne by the reactions (or lack thereof) of other people.
Crafting isn’t always so intense or imbued with meaning. For most people, most of the time, it’s a hobby or a way to make someone smile, a distraction from something else.
I didn’t find God in the Modge Podge. But it’s good to ask questions. It’s good to think about the world in a way that I usually ignore. Whether my Sculpey becomes little people or little beads, clay is clay, and I can make of it what I will.

Sew what?

Crafting a space and building a home: a year in Reed House

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

April 9, 2015

It was Friday evening in Reed House and a mess of rainbow-colored Walmart odds-and-ends became the backdrop for our last campus-wide of the year. Tablecloths taped to the floor became giant board game squares; paper plates on the walls were the Gumdrop Forest. The basement, of course, was the Molasses Swamp. Over the living-room door, sparkly letters spelled “Candyland.” House members, myself included, ate candy and looked at our work, genuinely delighted with our ramshackle creations.

Reed has maintained a commitment to excellent campus-wide décor throughout the year. From the star-spangled basement created for our “Spacement” party, to the deflated Cinderella balloon from “Fantasyland” that is still in the living room, red tinsel hearts from “Reed my Lips,” and letters that now read “Landycand,” represent our year in campus-wides.

One thing to know about Reed is that it’s a little bit broken. The right-side shower on the second floor has a shockingly high water pressure. The kitchen sink runs warm water. The heater screeches like a banshee and groans like a ghoul. It took me several weeks to learn how to operate the stove—and even when I did learn how to turn it on I could never remember to turn it off.

But one of the most wonderful parts of living in Reed this year has been occupying that very space and making it my home.

The little quirks of the house flood my memories, because I’m letting myself be nostalgic about something that isn’t even over yet. Stress-cleaning the goopy fridge during finals period with a few intrepid friends. Baking cookies and cakes throughout the year (and then almost burning the house down). Drinking warm tap water while standing in the kitchen in pajamas, uniquely and perfectly content in the presence of some of the most delightful people I know.

At the beginning of the year, my roommate and I took on a project of absurdity: we printed out middle-school photos of our housemates, Crayola-d them with names and dates, and turned the kitchen wall into an amorphous birthday calendar. The kitchen also boasts charming posters urging house members to clean up after themselves: “Drop the Beet? Pick it up!,” and the only permanent decorations in the house: an American flag painting, and a string of paper plates that spell Reed House.

We’re out of here in a little over a month. The particular community that I’ve been a part of this year will probably never spend more than a few hours together all in a room together again. I knew when I moved in that my time in Reed, like the posters I hung in the kitchen and the paper plates I taped up during Candyland, would be transitory. We all knew that.

But different house members spent hours throughout the year decorating this house, for parties and just for ourselves. A Reed House crest was designed. Banners were drawn, painted and flown proudly. I laid tablecloths on the floor, knowing well that they would be torn up imminently by dancing feet, because the decoration crew was committed to showing Reed’s true colors.

Living in Reed—noisy, broken, messy Reed—has been the high point of a challenging year.

Knowing that I can finish class or finish my work and go to a place where I feel at home, where there are people I care about and a communal mattress to collapse onto, is an incomparable happiness.

So what of all the goofy crafts my housemates and I have made throughout the year? I think we made them because we claimed this space entirely, and we were proud of it—proud enough to spend hours designing and making things that had no life span at all.

Our house might paint a mural in the basement to join the American flag painting, a present to New Reed but also a reminder that we were here. Even if the house doesn’t get around to it, even if nothing remains to say that I lived here, the relationships built laughing giddily at 2 a.m. in the kitchen, aren’t going anywhere.

We may be done decorating, but the year isn’t over yet. Spring has just begun, the backyard is melting, and Reed House has big plans.

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