Jennifer Neptune on Decorative Traditions Video Transcript

Visual: A panning view of a museum exhibit with a title card reading “Jennifer Neptune, Penobscot” and “Decorative Traditions, Wabanaki Gallery”.

Visual: A woman standing the by the museum exhibit and speaking to camera. She has shoulder-length black hair and wears a chocolate-colored sweater.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: *Speaking Penobscot*

I’m Jennifer Neptune from the Penobscot Nation, and I am here at the Hudson Museum to give you a tour of some of the clothing items that they have in their collection.

Visual: The woman refers to a portrait hanging in the museum exhibit. The portrait is a painting of an attractive young woman wearing a tophat with an elaborate silver band, a frilled shirt, and multiple large accessories such as wide beaded necklaces and an array of elaborate silver disks.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: So first we’re going to look at Sarah here. This is a painting done of her around 1835, and she’s wearing a lot of the similar objects that we see here in the collection. So, she’s got some trade silver on her hat and on her clothing. She’s got some wampum beads around her neck and collar, and it looks like some trade beads as well.

Visual: The camera focuses on items in the case below the portrait, a large, ornate silver disk and a pair of silver armbands, then moves back out to include the speaker.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: The silver trade items are really beautiful and detailed and incredibly done. There’s a large silver brooch. These were made in the 1700s. A lot of them were made in Canada and Montreal  and then traded or given by the French to Native people. There are some that were made in Bangor. There was a silversmith named Zebulon Smith who worked in Bangor. And he made these armbands here

Visual: A detail image of silver armbands showing etched designs and a row of small punched flower designs.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: that have some really beautiful etchings in them in the silver. And those would have been worn around your wrist.

Visual: We return to the speaker in the museum.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: And those are in different sizes as well. Those are fairly large, probably for a man. But there are also smaller ones that would fit on a woman’s wrist as well. The silver is really neat because of, like, the detailed cutouts in it and also, the etching.

Visual: The speaker kneels to show the camera items on the lowest level of the case, including two hats with silver bands. The camera focuses on these briefly.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: So, if we move down to the hat bands that are here, you can see how beautifully etched the designs are in them.

Visual: A detail image of a black tophat with a large, ornate silver band around the vertical portion. It is intricately engraved and includes numerous decorative cutouts. A series of small silver crucifixes are attached near the top of the band and hang at regular intervals around the circumference of the hat.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: This one is really neat where it has silver crosses that are actually dangling and moving. So that would have been really neat when you were wearing the hat and walking they would be moving and jingling around.

Visual: We return to the speaker in the museum.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: This one was made around 1820, and that one also was attributed to Zebulon Smith from Bangor. A really beautiful and elaborate example.

Visual: A detail image of a silver hatband, smaller than the previous one, with more cutouts and less decorative etching.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: The one over here is from Montreal in that Canadian style, and that was made around 1800 as well.

Visual: We return to the speaker in the museum.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: These were passed within families and were an important source of wealth and status. There’s pictures of Sarah’s mother, Molly Molasses, you know, with these big brooches down,

Visual: The speaker gestures, using her hands to indicate large, circular ornaments hanging down her front.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: and she was a really respected and powerful woman in our tribe. And, you know, the silver that she wore indicated that and showed that to whoever she was approaching.

Visual: The speaker gestures to a bracelet on a stand in the front of the case. The view then shifts to a close-up image of the bracelet in the case. It is a large, cuff bracelet with the cuff formed by woven pale wood framed in silver with ornamental shapes. On the face of the cuff is attached a large ornament of blue and striped green stones framed with a starburst of silver.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: This piece in the front is by contemporary Penobscot silversmith Jason Brown. He went out west and learned silversmithing and trained with some Native silversmiths from out there and learned to do stonework and really beautiful stuff.

Visual: We return to a low shot of the speaker kneeling by the case.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: And what’s really special about him is how he incorporates traditional and contemporary into his work. So, some really beautiful contemporary, like, stonework, but also, if you look closer, you can see the woven ash that’s behind there.

Visual: A brief detail image of the bracelet seen from the side showing the woven ash component of the cuff, then back to the speaker kneeling by the case.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: And brown ash is what we use to make our basketry with. And he’s actually woven ash and incorporated it into the silver work and put some gold, you know, on top of that, to make it shiny and special.

Visual: The speaker kneels by the corner of the case and refers to some strings of beads. The view zooms in to look at a small strand of purple beads, then back to the speaker.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: So here we have some different examples of beads. The purple, down on the bottom, those are wampum shells. So those are little beads that are made from the shell of wampum. And it takes a long time to make those, so they were incredibly valuable. They come in white and in purple. Before contact, before we traded for glass beads a lot of our beads would have been made out of this. They were really valuable and also were woven into, sometimes, collars like you can see on Sarah.

Visual: The camera moves into a close-up shot of the portrait in the case, showing the wide beaded necklaces on the woman pictured.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: It looks like she has some collars on made out of wampum, you can see the purple and the white, but also into these long belts that were used to record important historical events, treaties, sometimes they were made for those, agreements between tribes.

Visual: The speaker is briefly obscured by an image of five beaded belts with various patterns of white and purple beads. This image is the replaced by an image on the right edge of the screen showing an elder wearing a feathered and beaded headband, a beaded collar, and a long, vertical ornament with patterns made with dark and light colored beads.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: And they were actually special people who were the wampum keepers and could read those symbols that were on them. And they would have, you know, they would keep the records and they would be woven into the wampum.

Visual: The camera moves from the speaker to focus on a small strand of blue and white beads in the upper right of the display below a label that reads “Glass Trade Beads”, then zooms back out to focus on the speaker kneeling by the case.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: There’s also some really special beads here. The blue and the white, those are beads that were found in Castine, at the habitation site of Jean-Vincent d’Abbadie, the Baron of Castine, he’s called, and he was, actually, he married a Penobscot woman and had children with them and a lot of people today, Indian Island, Penobscot people can trace their genealogy back to the Baron and his wife. Those beads are from around 1680. And those would have been beads that were traded. It was, really, kind of liberating for people when trade beads, became available because it saved an incredible amount of time of having to make beads out of shells or stone.

These beads here were also glass trade beads,

Visual: The speaker points to a much longer double strand of white beads in the case, which the camera then focuses on before returning to the speaker, who speaks while looking at the beads.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: and these were found in Veazie, Maine. There was a trading post that was there close to where the falls are that overlook that. These are from about 1776. Yeah. Really special and amazing to get to see those.

Visual: Scene changes and now the speaker is standing by a different portion of the case that contains beaded objects. As she speaks she gestures with her hands, illustrating the things she describes.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: So, trade beads really changed the way that we did our designs. So, pre-contact our clothing would have been animal hides and probably using, like, different natural ochers and minerals to make paint that designs would have been painted on. So, the double curves, like you see here, and some of the linear designs, would have been painted on to a hide. But when beads came and they were plentiful, different colors a lot of times, and it just made making those designs and patterns easier.

Another decorative skill that people would have used  before the trade beads came was porcupine quills and stitching porcupine quills; you, kind of, like, twist them back and forth and stitch them down, and it’s very time-consuming to do lines and patterns with those. So, the beads cut a lot of time off making clothing and making the designs on there.

About the same time that, you know, the trade beads were becoming available wool cloth was also becoming available. And on the older pieces you see red used a lot, you see black used a lot, and you see dark blue. On some of the treaty agreements that were made, you know, back in the 1700s, you will even see the list that the British or the French agreed… you know, we all agreed to these provisions and that they would have to provide so many yards of red broadcloth, wool broadcloth, so many yards of black broadcloth, and so many, you know, kilos of glass beads.

The early beads are mostly in white and then, like you can see on the moccasins, there’s silk ribbon as well.

Visual: A detail image of a pair of moccasins with red wool at the top and around the ankle. These areas of wool display designs made with white beads surrounding shapes in colored ribbon. Colored ribbon and beading also line the edges of the red wool.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: And that was something that was traded for and something that sometimes came in those treaty annuities as well.

Visual: The speaker standing by the case, looking at the objects in contains, which includes the moccasins sitting next to two long, narrow beaded objects.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: Really incredible how they do our traditional, older design patterns, but incorporate all that work of, you know, the silk ribbon to make the colors and the beads to do the double curves. The moccasins are from about 1850, the Penobscot moccasins. And, you know, that older design, that’s more abstract with the curves and the lines and then behind them you can see, it looks like those may have been cuffs that went around the wrist because they’re a set and they match.

Visual: A detail image of a pair of beaded strips of fabric, much older and more worn in appearance than the moccasins. The fabric is dark, possibly a dark green or faded black, and sport similar designs of white beads surrounding colored shapes of ribbon.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: And those are also on wool with some silk ribbon. And those are from 1775 to about 1800. So, really old and beautiful examples of that earlier style.

Visual: The speaker standing at the case again, now in front of three slanted boards displaying large, inverted-U-shaped beaded objects each with a pair of smaller matching beaded objects.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: So, as time went on we start to see the patterns, the beadwork patterns, kind of shift. And I think it’s because the access to different colored beads just inspires people to do floral patterns and just get really creative with the designs.

Visual: The camera zooms in to focus on the beaded objects briefly and then back out to the speaker. The beadwork on these objects creates floral and botanical motifs, different from the curved and geometric styles seen on the previous objects.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: We’re standing in front of three different chief’s collars and the cuffs that go with them. Penobscot men, Maliseet men, Passamaquoddy men, and even Mi’kmaq, have a tradition of wearing these collars. They signify status a lot of times. They’re used in the ceremony to inaugurate chiefs and they symbolize the weight of responsibility on their shoulders to the community, and to the land, and to all our relatives and the river. So that weight goes on their shoulder to represent that. And then, the cuffs symbolically also bind them to the community and to their responsibility.

These come from three different time periods and it’s kind of neat how you can see the transition of the designs. This one is probably the earliest one which was made sometime in the 1860s, 1870s,

Visual: Detail images of the leftmost object in the case. A beaded collar in green or faded black fabric with large, intricate beaded floral designs in clear, blue, and red beads and a matching set of cuffs.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: and some really beautiful, floral patterns on there. This was worn a lot. And we see it actually in old photographs, from Indian Island and our community at the time.

Visual: A grayscale photograph of a group of people. A man and three women stand in the back row, the man in a dark suit and wearing a priests’ white collar, the women each in coats and hats. The middle row is composed of five individuals sitting in chairs, two women and three men, all in various combinations of Native and non-Native attire. Two of the men wear beaded collars and cuffs, including the set in the museum case and featured in the previous detail image. Five children sit on the ground in the front.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: It was worn by Peter Nicola. It was worn by Walter Ranco.

Visual: A grayscale image of a man and woman, both in Native attire and wearing Plains-style feathered headdresses, standing in front of a building. A sign on the building reads “Visitors Welcome Indian Workshop”. The man wears the same collar and cuffs as are being discussed. This image is shown briefly and then we return to the speaker, who is now kneeling by the case in front of this collar and cuffs set.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: [These] are a couple of the people that we actually have photographs wearing this. This used to come to our community when we would inaugurate a chief. The Hudson Museum would bring it to Indian Island, and it would be there, for the ceremony. It has beads that were falling off and stuff, so it couldn’t be used in the ceremony, but it was there, kind of in spirit. I actually did a reproduction of this that, our tribal Chief has and is used and is worn, by the Chief and will stay with whoever the Chief is so that we’ll always have it for that ceremony again.

Visual: The speaker moves to kneel next to the middle set of collar and cuffs. As she speaks a detail image of this set is briefly shown. It is a smaller set, simpler in shape, but with much more intricate, elaborate, and colorful beadwork – also in a floral motif – worked on a vivid red material.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: The next one is a little later, probably 1890 to about 1900 is when this one was made. This is in incredible condition; it’s very rare that you see one that doesn’t have, you know, wear and doesn’t have the beads falling off. This was purchased, by one of the Indian agents at the time. So, our communities had a person that was hired by the state who was called the Indian agent, and he was kind of in charge of money and different tribal decisions. Like, if you needed to go to a doctor, or if you needed something, you would go to the Indian agent and he could give you the money to do that, or not. But he had a trading post in Old Town, and he bought a lot of art.

But this ended up staying with his family for almost 100 years. And then it came up and started being auctioned off. It was auctioned at Sotheby’s, and then it disappeared. And then it came up again in Toronto at an auction house. And, actually, a beadworker friend of mine from New York, alerted me to it and said, “Hey, Jenn, do you know about this?” And I was like, floored, and like, “That has to come back. It has to come back somehow.” So, I called my colleagues at other museums, because I was going to, you know,  try to bid on it, but we don’t have a big, we don’t really have a budget for acquisitions, so I figured I would be outbid pretty quickly. So, I was calling them to alert them because I just wanted it to come back to our territory so it could be accessible. So, I called the Maine State Museum and Maine Historical Society, and they actually talked to their Presidents and their acquisitions committees and agreed that we would, together, we would pool our money so that we would have a greater chance of getting it and that it would come back to Penobscot Nation and live with us. So that was, like, incredibly amazing and generous and kind of a miracle. We were all together on the phone the night of the auction, with our fingers crossed. And I think we all cried when we actually got it. So, really amazing.

And it’s here, at the Hudson Museum, while the Penobscot Nation Museum is moving into a new location. And, so, it’s here so people can actually see it because it’s so beautiful. 

Visual: A very close-up, detail image of a small area of the beadwork showing flowers made with clusters of nine tiny blue beads surrounding a central white bead next to a leaf made with rich brown and clear green beads. This is followed by a second close-up image of a different section of beadwork showing leaves of yellow and blue and white vines and stems.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: And you can see, like, the teeny tiny beads and, you know, how more colors are becoming available and how, you know, just, amazing and beautiful, the designs.

Visual: The speaker stands and moves to the final, right-most set of collar and cuffs, which she kneels by. Over this two images are briefly shown before we return to the speaker. In the image on the right we see the collar and cuffs, large and with a zig-zag edging. The fabric is a bright, almost orangish red and the floral motifs are made with dense clusters of clear beads offset by beads of dark gray. On the left is a grayscale photograh of an older man standing outside in front of a small teepee. He wears Native regalia, including dark, fringed shirt and leggings, a beaded fabric band tied around his waist, a feathered headdress, and the collar and cuffs in the accompanying image.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: The next one belonged to Francis Stanislas, who was a Penobscot. His family lived on the islands that are near where Lincoln, Maine is now. So, upriver from where Indian Island is.  Our people lived, you know, all the way upriver on the islands. And that was one of the last small communities, other than Indian Island, before everybody moved down river to there. So, this was, this belonged to him, and it was part of his regalia. This is probably more, like, late-1800s, like, 1890ish. And you can see the style kind of changing, and being like, raised beadwork, just two colors of beads, the clear and the dark gray color. And this is really similar to some of the Haudenosaunee beadwork that you see,  you know, with the raised style. It’s probably inspired by, you know, some of that design, but you can still see, you know, the reflection of the Northeastern, you know, Wabanaki, flowers and floral work in it as well.

Visual: The speaker now stands by a different portion of the case. The camera cuts briefly to show two small, flat bags and a small cap on a stand in the case. All are heavily decorated with beadwork.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: So here we have some examples of beadwork from the late-1800s, from about 1870 on to about 1900. And there’s some very sweet purses. And, also, a hat. Up on the top there are some really nice examples of some Maliseet purses with the floral beadwork.

Visual: A brief overlay detail image of one of the small, flat bags appears before the view returns to the speaker. It is clearly very old and the dark material is flaking in areas at the top. The beadwork is intricate and forms elaborate florals in green, pink, red, gold, light and dark blue, and white.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: These were made for trade and sale and also made to keep and use within our communities as well. The cap at the top is pretty neat.

Visual: A detail image of the small cap. It is longer than it is wide and is made of a dark brown or slightly faded black velvet edged with faded red ribbon and worked all over with flowers and other details in beads of white, tan, gold, red, green, and light blue and lines of tubular beads of variable gray.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: Maliseet. People have some really amazing examples of, like, hats and different types of beadwork that they did on different things.

Visual: The speaker standing by the case, looking at the objects and gesturing as she speaks.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: So, like when they were making things for trade, there were, like, smoking hats and tea cozies and all kinds of really cool things. Watch pockets.

Visual: The speaker bends down and points to the lower level of the case and the camera zooms in on a group of three small, heavily beaded bags on display before zooming back out to the speaker, bent over to look at the bags as she speaks.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: And then, you know, down here we have some other examples of Northeastern beadwork. Just really beautiful with the tiny beads again, and the floral designs and patterns. A lot of times you’ll see the floral work and, sometimes you can recognize, like, the plant that it may have possibly been.  And sometimes it’s really hard; it may be more symbolic, or it may be a plant that’s special to the beadworker, that they would know what it is, but that, you know, we might not be able to tell.

Visual: A brief overlay image showing one of the bags. It’s age is clear in the tattered silk ribbon lining. The material is dark, probably black, and the beadwork is densely applied. The central motif shows a plant with three blooms, white petals around a large, circular green center. The central bloom is at the top, flanked by one yellow and one blue leaf, and two blooms sit below these to each side.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: This pattern here is called the Tree of Life design and you see that in Maliseet work a lot.

Visual: The speaker now stands by a different portion of the case. The camera briefly focuses in on a group of five decorated horns on the lower portion of the exhibit before zooming back out to include the speaker who glances and gestures at the display as she speaks.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: So here we have some powder horns,  which would have been part of Penobscot and Wabanaki men’s, outfits and things that they would use. These are made out of cow horns, and so these would be an after-contact thing. And they were used to hold gunpowder for muskets at the time. And they’re waterproof and an important part. They’re oftentimes, like, etched with designs and patterns.

Visual: A detail image of a powder horn showing intricate, well-executed etched decorations in a typical Wabanki double-curve motif. The double-curve is a low, wide shape with a central peak and a tall, inwardly-curved portion at each end, reminiscent of a cross-section of a canoe from front to back. These can be variously elaborated, and multiple examples are seen on this object.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: So we have some that have double curve designs, and then we have some that are more realistic with animals.

Visual: A series of images appears and then we return to the speaker standing by the case. The first is a detail image of a different powder horn showing finely-etched depictions of leaping or running deer or horses, some with fur indicated and some with cross-hatching. The date “1852” is etched above them. The second image shows a different face of the same object, now showing etched animals such as pig, moose, fish, and a long, serpent-like creature with legs. A person in a canoe on water hunting with a rifle can be seen, as well as another person being attacked by a wolf or dog.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: I can see on this one a moose and a deer. So this looks like, you know, animals that someone would have hunted or that would have been important to them. Sometimes they have ships; sometimes they have flowers; sometimes it’s, you know, the things that are important to the person who owned it. And so they may have recorded things that they saw, or they may have recorded things that, you know, sometimes with the animals that, you know, they want good luck in hunting. Sometimes they’re really realistic and sometimes abstract. So they’re really fun to look at and to be able to, you know, turn it and look all around and see all the things on them.

Visual: The speaker bends to look at the powder horns, then stands again, pointing and gesturing as she speaks.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: Sometimes, you see these later after, you know, the gunpowder isn’t used so much for the guns. Sometimes they’re repurposed as dance rattles and they would have stone or birdshot sometimes inside of them to make the sound.

Visual: The speaker now stands in the corner of the case and refers to a large woven bag or satchel on exhibit. The camera zooms in to focus on the bag before a detailed image of the bag appears. The bag is woven of braided strips of material, with the weave diagonal to the square shape of the bag. It has a flap at the top with ties and a wide strap woven of the same material. This image is then replaced by the speaker, kneeling next to the bag on exhibit while she speaks.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: So here we have a really rare example of a Penobscot basswood bag. These were used for hunting bags and they’re really flexible and have some give; they’re almost elastic so if you were stuffing small game rabbits, birds, and stuff in there you could, you know, it would flex for you. It’s made from the inner bark of a basswood tree that is stripped down and then, sometimes it’s boiled with hardwood ashes to make that inner bark flexible. It can feel almost like fabric when you work with it. And then that’s braided before being woven into this bag.

This is a style that was probably made for thousands upon thousands of years, up until about the 1920s is about the time that people stopped making these. Very labor intensive and time intensive to do. And, so, it wasn’t something that was practical for, like, tourist trade or selling to people, because they really didn’t value, you know, the time that goes into it.

This one came from the Stanislaus family up around Lincoln, Maine, and there’s actually photographs that an anthropologist, Frank Speck, took where you can see people, you know, wearing this and using it, which is really neat. There’s only two in existence that we know of, and this is one of them. And this was rescued from an auction by Penobscot Nation, Bangor Historical Society, and Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance. We pooled our resources to make sure that this could stay as an example for people, you know, our community into the future to be able to see. The other one is at the Smithsonian in their storage. And so people don’t really get to see that one often, and that one is a lot smaller, too. So this is the one that you would actually, you know, use hunting. It has an amazing woven strap on it and it can be worn across your shoulders. Really amazing, and rare.

Visual: An overlay image of a long strap with a wide, woven middle section and thick, twined ends.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: Beside it we have a tump line and it’s woven really similar to the bag. Same materials, basswood. And these were really important for a lot of different reasons.

Visual: The speaker kneeling before the case. She gestures as she speaks, indicating locations on her body and gesturing to illustrate her points.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: So, the wide part of it can either go across your head or across your chest and it’s used for pulling things. Basswood, the inner bark of basswood, is incredibly strong and really, really flexible. And, so, you’re able to pull a lot of weight with it. Like, hundreds of pounds you could pull with it. So those are used either on baskets, like, you know, pack baskets, to carry them, they’re also used to pull toboggans.

Visual: A small inset image appears briefly to the right, not obscuring the speaker who continues to gesture to illustrate as she speaks. The image is a grayscale photograph of a man and child outside in the snow. They both wear snowshoes and the boy carries a woven pack basket and the man a bag on their backs, carried with a wide strap across the upper part of their chests.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: So, in the winter, when you’re using the snowshoes and you’re pulling all your gear behind you on a toboggan sled, those are attached to the sled and then usually put around your chest to pull. It just helps you distribute the weight better. Sometimes there’s even smaller ones that they put on canoes. So, when you’re portaging a canoe, it kind of goes across your head, and then you have the weight of the canoe across your shoulders, and it takes some of that weight and kind of redistributes it in a way that makes it easier to carry. So those are really important too, and aren’t made all that often because, again, it’s a lot of time and a lot of work to go and collect the basswood and work with it.

Visual: A close-up camera shot of the bag on exhibit with the tump line next to it. An inset image appears showing a grayscale photograph of a elder woman sitting in a chair outdoors, her head wrapped in a scarf and wearing a dress and cardigan. She is in the process of weaving a bag held on her lap.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: So, one of the unique things about this bag as well, is, because we had an anthropologist, Frank Speck, who was coming and doing research on the Penobscots, we actually know who the weaver of this bag was, which is incredibly unusual that a name is recorded with something like this. Her name was Alice Solomon Swassian, and she was living up near Lincoln on the islands across from there. And she was photographed by Frank Speck weaving the bag.

Visual: A panning shot of birchbark objects on blocks in the exhibit. One is made by folding bark, is simple in form, and has an opening narrower than its base, the next is small and round, etched to leave figures of a moose, tree, person, and teepee decorating the side, and the third is a small, covered picnic basket with a tree flanked by two stars etched into the side. The shot zooms out slightly to show a group of three further birchbark objects including a covered oval container, a container with a braided strap, and a miniature canoe.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: So here we have some examples of birchbark containers. Birchbark is an incredibly important and versatile material that we use and continue to use to make things such as containers, birchbark canoes. Some of these containers can even be made watertight and used to cook in. They were important for storage containers; the ones that have the lids on them were used for storage.

One of the unique properties of birchbark is that it can be etched.

Visual: A series of detail images of the small, round container showing different faces. The first picture shows, from left to right, the back of a moose, a female figure, a teepee, and a male figure wearing a feathered headdress and holding a bow and arrow. The second image shows a different face of the same object with, from left to right, the male figure, a tree, and a moose. The final image shows, left to right, two trees, a moose (the one seen partially in the first image) beneath a crescent moon, and the tree seen in the first image. The decorative elements are darker than the background, meaning the decorations were reverse-etched, with the background removed and the figures remaining.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: So, it’s easy to take a sharp tool and etch in a design. And there’s some really interesting examples here of that.

Visual: We again see the objects in the museum exhibit.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: And, again, you can see how the designs of the earlier pieces are more the double curve designs and the linear designs, and then as time goes on and you start getting into the 1800s and early-1900s, then you start to see some more realistic design patterns like actual trees or animals.

Visual: Two inset detail images of the picnic basket appear briefly. On the left is a photograph showing the tree and stars etched into one side. On the right is a photograph of the top of the basket showing a turtle on one side of the handle and two hunting figures on the other.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: The picnic basket has stars and trees and a turtle. And then some of the containers have, like, people and moose and some of the people that were doing the designs on them and etching the designs are actually, like, telling stories on the containers and on the things that they’re etching. Which is really interesting, to look at some of the old pieces and recognize a story, or to recognize, you know, something that’s being recorded for memory. Really interesting and unique art form that’s still being practiced today.

This tradition continues today. There are still people who make birchbark containers and do the etchings on them. There are still canoe makers, birchbark canoe makers in our communities, and those continue to be made. So, a really important tradition to us.

Visual: The speaker stands before a corner of the exhibit case, gesturing to objects on display. The camera zooms in, focusing on a circular silver ornament with cutouts and etching, a small, pale bag with decorative elements, and a pointed cap.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: In this corner we have some contemporary pieces. There’s a silver brooch that was made in the early 2000’s, a reproduction.

Visual: An overlayed detail image of the small bag. It is made of leather, fringed at the edges, with a braided strap. The front is decorated with a four-way symmetrical design including double-curve elements.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: In the center we have an example of quillwork on hide. So that’s an example of that older style before trade beads start coming in and we transition to the beadwork. So, a really cool example of that. And you can see, like, the double curves and some of the designs in that as well.

Visual: The overlay is removed, revealing a close-up of the pointed cap, which is dark blue and decorated with ribbon and beadwork elements in white, yellow, and green. The camera then zooms out to the speaker, who gestures as she speaks.

Voice of Jennifer Neptune: And then there’s a peaked cap. This would have been a woman’s hat. And this was made by me in 2001 for an exhibit. These hats are, kind of, indicative of Northeastern style clothing. The hats really tell you, like, where the person is from. So, if you saw a woman from a distance in the 1700s, 1800s, or earlier, you could tell from her hat where she was probably from. So Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet hats came down and had, like, a very gentle curve that went around the face and then back. And then, as you go north, the style changes. So, Mi’kmaq hats come down and then have a sharp, kind of, more of a blunt look to them. And then as you go further north, they get even longer. So, if you got up to, you know, Cree and Naskapi country, then they come down below the shoulder. Usually really heavily beaded, and the earlier ones from the 1700s, early-1800s have a lot of  silk ribbonwork in it, very detailed and fine with points and curves on it. They’re really beautiful, especially the older pieces, are just amazing examples of the designs and the creativity. And they would have been, you know, worked on, probably, over time, probably years, even; people adding to it and adding beadwork on it. Sometimes on the older pieces that you see in collections sometimes you can see the transition even where it looks like someone worked on it and then someone else took over, or they did the ribbon work but hadn’t quite got to the beadwork yet. They’re really fascinating to look at. And then to know that, you know, that personal connection to an individual who wore that and that was part of their identity, even.

Visual: A credits card that reads:

Artist: Jennifer Neptune, Penobscot
Images Collection: A. Sky Heller, Hudson Museum Registrar
Project Manager: Gretchen Faulkner, Hudson Museum Director
Video Production & Editing: Samantha Grimwood
Technical Support: Arturo Camacho
This project was funded by a University of Maine Arts Initiative Seed Grant.