Boston Globe highlights Newsom’s work to save historic Wabanaki sites in Downeast Maine

Indigenous history lies buried in far downeast Maine. The race is on to preserve it.

By Sabrina Shankman Globe Staff,Updated August 7, 2024, 9:54 a.m.

NEAR MACHIAS, Maine — Along this picturesque stretch of beach in far downeast Maine, there are all the expected bits of majesty — an expansive ocean, a seemingly untouched shore, and not a person in sight. But then there’s the tree. And there is nothing normal about this tree.

The tree juts out from the eroded edge of a bluff, protruding sideways toward the sand below at an unnatural angle, seemingly one stiff breeze away from collapsing. Its root system is holding back the earth and shrubs, and something hidden, too — mounds of shells, the remnants of a long-gone Native American development, potentially protecting artifacts buried within.

Here on the rocky coast, the past lies buried along beaches and waterfront. For thousands of years, the Wabanaki people sought out these coastal spots to set up camp or make a home, where they could be nourished by the clams and the fish in the Gulf of Maine and easily travel via canoe. Now, as climate change leads to higher seas and stronger storms, archeologists are racing to understand and preserve what they can of that history before it all washes away.

Bonnie Newsom, an archeologist with the University of Maine and a citizen of the Penobscot Nation, a tribe of the Wabanaki, looked up at the tree and sighed. “Once this goes, it’s going to take a chunk of that site, and we’re going to lose all of it.”

Since 1979, a federal monitoring station has been marking the steady rising of seas in nearby Cutler. Around the year 2000, the pace picked up, with more than 2.5 inches of sea level rise each decade. By 2050, assuming a moderate path of sea level rise, seas in Cutler are projected to be some 18 inches higher than they were in 2000.

With thousands of historic Indigenous sites along Maine’s coast, what this means is that with each year of sea level rise — and each year of increasingly strong coastal storms, like the ones in January that washed away parts of the shoreline — the risk increases.

“What’s happening is we’re losing it,” said Newsom, who is leading several projects to protect and preserve at-risk Wabanaki sites around the state. Four tribes — the Maliseet, Micmac, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot — collectively make up the Wabanaki, or “People of the Dawnland.” There are some 8,000 tribal members today.

Archeologists have found evidence that Wabanaki people lived in Maine as far back as 12,000 years ago, said Julia Gray, an archeologist and executive director of the Wilson Museum, in Castine. “Wabanaki oral tradition is that they have been here since time immemorial,” she said.

Over those thousands of years, tundra gave way to forest, prey went extinct, and then came the biggest change of all, the arrival of European settlers, which resulted in a 96 percent population loss due to disease, dispossession, and forced removal. Now, the fingerprints of that history are often locked inside shell mounds, known as middens.

Those heaps of shells, which can be several feet high, were long thought to be essentially trash heaps of an Indigenous community, the place where they would discard seafood shells following a meal. Except Newsom is finding evidence that the mounds may have been used to build up parts of the landscape or for other, not yet understood purposes.

What’s more, the piles are great at hiding artifacts. The ones left behind in shell mounds — rather than the acidic soil that’s found in Maine — are better preserved and more capable of withstanding the cycles of New England’s freezing and thawing.

The first people in what is now Maine lived among large bears and giant beavers, more than 6 feet long, in addition to bison, elk, and muskox, according to the state. The Wabanaki were hunters, experts at manufacturing weapons that could deeply penetrate their prey. The remnants of those weapons and the detritus from the weapon-making process are among the artifacts that Newsom and her team are now discovering.

Near Machias, at another site not far from that precarious tree, Newsom’s group gets to work, digging in cordoned-off squares with meticulous care. The team — which includes former and present graduate students as well as undergraduates, and some community members helping out — digs down layer by layer, and seemingly every few minutes, someone pops up with something interesting. A stone tool here, an animal jawbone (maybe moose?) there.

The shell mound they’re working on is eroding quickly, and Newsom and her team are trying to understand the significance of the location so they can help the tribe and the local land trust decide how best to move forward.

One of the helpers on this day is Natalie Lolar, a student of Newsom’s who is a member of the Passamaquoddy tribe. Lolar first got the chance to help out at a dig when she was about 13. She came upon a piece of pottery, which she remembers holding in her hands and turning around.

“There was a piece of a thumbnail print on the back side, and it was the exact same size as mine,” Lolar said, recalling placing her finger gently on the artifact and aligning it just so. “I just remember feeling that connection to my ancestors.”

That connection prompted Lolar to join more digs, followed by undergraduate study at the University of Maine and work as the Passamaquoddy tribal archeologist at the Passamaquoddy Museum in Indian Township, where she grew up. Now, she’s been accepted to a PhD program at the University of Maine to continue her studies in archeology, part of a new crop of Indigenous students who are helping reclaim their history.

The number of Indigenous students Newsom is working with is small — enough to count on one hand — but that’s a vast improvement over when she started in the mid-1990s. “Now we’re just beginning to get into the era of Indigenous people taking control of their heritage and having a voice in what happens,” Newsom said.

As the seas continue to rise, the stakes are rising, too. Many of the newly discovered sites are fragile, and it’s not known what kinds of artifacts are concealed, and whether they may be sacred and something a tribe would want to keep intact in the ground.

Disturbing the land to find out what artifacts lie hidden could inadvertently cause a collapse. So for each newly discovered site, archeologists have to decide: Do they leave a site to keep it intact, even knowing that the ocean may swallow it? Or do they wake up the past to protect it?

Sabrina Shankman can be reached at sabrina.shankman@globe.com. Follow her @shankman.