Jennifer Sapiel Neptune Video Transcript

Visual: Title card featuring an image of a smiling woman wearing dark-colored peaked cap with embroidery around the edge.  On the right is a close-up of ribbon work on red fabric.  Text reads: Jennifer Sapiel Neptune, Penobscot Beadworker.

Voice of Jennifer Sapiel Neptune: My name is Jennifer Sapiel Neptune. Sapiel is my maiden name.

Visual: The same woman with dark brown hair wearing a muted green sweater sits in a room speaking to someone off-camera.  To the left of the frame is a case holding two aprons with black fabric and floral beadwork.  On the table in front of her is a piece of red fabric with ribbonwork and beadwork and an open sweetgrass sewing flat.

Voice of Jennifer Sapiel Neptune: I grew up in Old Town and Orono. I lived in Old Town the first five or six years of my life and then my mother bought a house in Orono and we moved to Orono. You know I always grew up knowing that and spending time with my grandparents. He would tell me stories about my great-grandmother who was a basketmaker. And so I really wanted to be a basketmaker. But I was also interested in the bead work too.

Growing up I was really a quiet, shy person and kind of bookish and so I spent a lot of time in the library; and I would go to the library over here at the University – because my mother works at the University of Maine.  So I would go to that library there as a teenager and pour through all the books and I started to see, you know, photographs of peaked caps and collars and was just really kind of awestruck by them and how beautiful they were, and how powerful, and, just, you know, that whole tradition. And I hadn’t seen them in person ever.

Visual: Brief shot of a small bag made with black velvet fabric, icy blue ribbon trim, and intricate floral beadwork.

Voice of Jennifer Sapiel Neptune: This style of bead work I started… I was probably, like, 18 or 19 and just had this like overwhelming urge one day: you have to make bag, you have to make a bag, And I was like “I don’t know how to make a bag. I’ve never done that kind of beadwork before!” because, you know, jewelry and

Visual: A brief close-up of Jennifer’s hands holding the a piece of red fabric with ribbon work and beadwork.  She uses a needle and thread to secure a piece of ribbon applique to the fabric.

Voice of Jennifer Sapiel Neptune: it’s similar and a lot of the techniques are similar,  but that applique is really different. A lot of the lot of these old pieces ended up in museums in the late 1800s and early 1900s. There was a big push by Anthropologists to go out and collect because at that time they thought that, you know, Indians were a dying race and everything was going to die out.

Visual: Closeup of the piece Jennifer was working on – red fabric is decorated with ribbon applique in navy blue, green, and gold and with beadwork in white.  A partially-completed line of white beads lies in place, ready to be worked into the design.

Voice of Jennifer Sapiel Neptune: So it was like, you know, “salvage anthropology” and they went out and, you know, tried to get everything they could and so a lot of these pieces went into museums and left our communities then, and so not many people have seen them.

When I was asked to do this collar – the original is in the Smithsonian and I was able to go to Washington DC and see it in person and photograph it. When they pull them out and you actually get to see something that you’ve only seen in black and white, it’s pretty spectacular because they look totally different. They’re totally different. And they just, like, you know, vibrate with energy.

This will be the hardest thing I’ve ever made. By far. It’s a big, big project. But I was really happy and excited to do it because I think it’s so exciting when you can… um… it’s almost like bringing something back. Right now, you know, it’s down in Washington and it’s almost impossible to get in and to see these things, and really hard for people. And if I can make something kind of reappear in our community then I think that’s a really good thing. The more people that can see these old pieces and old styles I think it just makes us stronger as people, and, you know, to remind ourselves about these beautiful things that our ancestors made.

Visual: Video cuts to Jennifer

Voice of Jennifer Sapiel Neptune: Ok, so what I’m doing now is just following the edge of the ribbon work. And I lay down, like… I’m doing four at a time. And then I’m just stitching it down and then coming up between two and then going through again. And there’s a couple of different waysto do the bead work. This is the way that I like to do it when you’re doing shapes. Like, right now I’m kinda going up and down and up and down… And so this just gives you a little bit more control when you’re beading shapes like that. And this is what I’ll do when I do double curves and flowers. When I do floral designs I use this technique.

Peaked cap is a traditional style woman’s hat for the Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Mi’kmaqs, and Maliseets.  Different tribes had different shapes; like this, with the curve, is the Penobscot style. And I think the Mi’kmaqs’ are square? Yeah. The Mi’kmaq style comes down straight and then goes straight across.  So you can tell the tribe who made it by the cut of the hat and also the designs on it. And this is, actually, an example of once you see the older pieces it changes your style. Like, when I made this I’d ust seen photographs of the peaked caps, but not seen a real peaked cap in person, just pictures.  Now that I’ve seen a lot of peaked caps in the museums and the ribbon work on them, and all the bead work and the designs, this would be totally different if I made it today.

If you’re quiet enough and respectful enough I think the spirits, the ancestors, they’re still there.  It’s still there, you know, if you can just settle down and have some patience it will come through and you will figure it out. And I did.

Credits

Featuring: Jennifer Sapiel Naptune

A Collaboration of: The Hudson Museum and the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance.

Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance is supported in part by: Artography, a grant program of Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC), funded by the Ford Foundation.

Video Documentation Provided By: ASAP Media Service (Mike Scott, Alexander Gross, Justin Taylor).

Millie Rahn, Folklorist.

Hudson Museum: Gretchen Faulkner, Director; Stephen Bicknell, Still Photographer.

Funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Also made possible by The University of Maine.