Molly Neptune Parker Video Transcript

Visual: An older woman sits in a kitchen talking to someone off camera and working with weaving splints. The video briefly cuts to an image of the woman overlaying an image of a flower-top basket and text that reads “Molly Neptune Parker: Passamaquoddy Master Basketmaker”.

Voice of Molly Neptune Parker: I actually enjoy making baskets and it doesn’t have to be any particular basket as long as it’s a basket. I was born and raised here on Indian Township and I lived for a while at Pleasant Point. Well, I started with scraps. My mother and aunt never allowed us to touch the good material – well I was the only one that was interested in basket making, so she says, “Once you get to learn how to make baskets then you can touch the good stuff.” You know! She says “but in the meantime use the scraps that you can find off, you know, on the floor” so that’s how I started.

Visual: The video switches back and forth between Molly’s face and a close-up of her hands as she uses a splint gauge to cut wide splints into narrow, regular splints for making baskets.

Voice of Molly Neptune Parker: And I was doing like little, you know, little candy baskets and stuff like that. When my mother realized that I really had an interest in it then she started sharing her good material. All the people that I remember that I picked up different things from were all beautiful people and they were all elders, people that I’d associated with ever since I was a child.

Visual: Video switches between video of Molly speaking and images. The first is an image of a basket with a cluster of wooden flowers on the lid.  The flowers are tan and purple and green. The second image is of a bright red basket in the shape of a strawberry with an braided sweetgrass handle on top.

Voice of Molly Neptune Parker: My mother loved to make the flower top baskets, the ones that I make all the time. She gave me all her forms shortly before she passed. There is two baskets with flowers that she always made and as far as I could remember she was the only one that made baskets like that. And also strawberries, we make the old-fashioned strawberries which is shaped different than most of the other people that do make strawberries. And her other favorite type that she used to make is a handkerchief basket which George made here and it’s basically the same thing, but she made hers a different style.

You see I lost my mom two years ago and she and I used to sit down to make baskets all the time and at that time we spoke Indian fluently. And now very seldom you’ll find anybody that speaks Passamaquoddy language. It’s so nice to hear people talk, to converse with, you know, at different times and different places.

I used to work for my mother-in-law Francis Richards. She made pie baskets and she also had men working in her workshop to do scale baskets and between my husband, myself, and at least four or five other people we usually have a hundred baskets from Monday morning to early Saturday morning. And everybody shared whatever they had, whether it’s food, basket making, braiding, whatever. It’s still, you know, we were welcome to do whatever we wanted to do with it with our neighbors and that was the best part of it.

Visual: The video focuses briefly on Molly’s hands as she uses an ash splitter to split a wide ash splint into thinner strips. It then returns to video of Molly talking and working with the splint gauge. She shows the camera different gauges as she talks.

Voice of Molly Neptune Parker: I’ve already split some with my splitter and now I’m gauging it out to different pieces and I will do this until I can get all my materials ready but it takes a long time to do this. And I’m trying to get it all ready so it won’t get all, won’t waste on me. So I’m gauging it out in different sizes. Now this particular piece is one-eighth of an inch that I use for weavers and I’ll get a whole bunch of them. Then I use this one here, which is three-sixteenths. I use them for the curly baskets. And then I use the very tiny weaves which, I don’t know what size this is, but it’s smaller than the one-eighths. So I am doing all different sizes.

Visual: Molly shows the camera a wide, thin strip of brown ash and the gauge she plans to use to cut it into strips of the correct size.

Voice of Molly Parker Neptune: This is a weaver strip and it won’t be one of the real tiny weavers, it’ll be one of the one-eighths because it’s a little bit on the thick side but not thick enough to use for standers. I separate every size so I can have like one, two, three, four, five, different sizes that I’m doing at the same time.

Visual: Molly gestures to bundles of different-sized strips on the counter beside her and there is a brief close-up of her hands as she coils a strip into a bundle to set aside.

Voice of Molly Parker Neptune: So right now I’m getting materials ready for my next workshop. I’ll have some people braiding, some people trying to, you know, split ash, and other people already started to make baskets. So we have different phases on different workshops that we have. I will teach as many people as possible as long as they want to learn. That means, you know, the tribal members.

At one point I thought we were going to lose it because I can actually count how many people made baskets here, and there was only about half a dozen of us. That’s including some of the elders that were alive at that time. And now I think that you’re going to find more and more kids that are interested.

Visual: A young person sits at a table with flower-top baskets, a basket mold, and bundles of ash strips. They are weaving a basket while talking to the camera. Text reads: George Neptune: Basketmaker, Grandson.

Voice of Geo Neptune, Passamaquoddy: I started doing it because it was something like my grandmother did and I kept doing it because it was something I enjoy doing and now I keep doing it because I realize it’s a really important cultural aspect of this tribe.

Visual: Molly sitting in her kitchen splitting ash. The video briefly cuts to a video of Molly teaching two young people how to wind braided sweetgrass in what appears to be a community center.

Voice of Molly Neptune Parker: Everyone that’s there wants to be there. They want to learn how to start a basket. They say they’ve learned how to weave around a basket but never actually [were] taught the first stages of it, which is making the bottom part of the basket. So we did all that this week and I think maybe not every one of them will take it up as they get older but I think if we continue teaching the children the importance of basket-making you’re going to find it’s going to survive.

Credits

Featuring: Molly Neptune Parker, George Neptune.

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, Yeshe Parks, Will Seyffer, 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.