In late September, I travelled to Indian Township, Maine, the largest of three Passamaquoddy reservations, for the tribe’s annual ceremonial-days festival. That far northeast, the state is all water-edged hills and long stretches of humanless, single-lane roads, and it was in full autumnal splendor. Outside the reservation’s tribal office, in a field that was steps away from a shimmering lake, a few hundred Passamaquoddy people gathered to celebrate in pan-Indian powwow style. Donald Soctomah, the tribe’s soft-spoken historic-preservation officer, whom I’d been in touch with by phone, welcomed me to Indian Township. I knew him as the tireless steward of all things Passamaquoddy: he’s a photographer, archivist, museum curator, writer of books, designer of curricula, birch-bark-canoe builder, and former (non-voting) tribal representative to the state legislature. When I met him in person, after hearing his surname mentioned throughout the reservation, I learned that he’s also a father of thirteen. “I’m doing my part to keep the tribe going,” he said, with a rare chuckle.
The one thing that Soctomah doesn’t do is dance, so we stood at a remove from the drum circle, he in a windbreaker and baseball cap, as other festivalgoers moved clockwise around the yard. They danced in the subtle manner of Passamaquoddys: rod-straight backs; short, light steps; offbeat lifts of the abdomen. There was a solemn moment, too, as the names of those who’d died of illness, addiction, and old age in the previous year were called. In the afternoon, the yard was cleared for the traditional Passamaquoddy hunter’s dance. The fifty-three-year-old Dwayne Tomah, who was wearing a fringed nubuck tunic and a tall feather hat and carrying a small tomahawk, walked to the middle of the field. A hand drum, amplified from the sidelines, projected a gentle beat. Tomah squatted, knees low to the ground, as if he were stalking prey. Then, as the music crescendoed, he leaped, suddenly, into the air.
Passamaquoddy music and rituals have been studied by academics for more than a century, but the tribe, whose name means “people who spear pollock,” has had little say over the use of its cultural property. In 1890, just months before the murder of some hundred and fifty Lakota Indians at Wounded Knee, a mustachioed anthropologist named Jesse Walter Fewkes dragged a state-of-the-art Edison phonograph to Passamaquoddy country. This was during the height of “salvage anthropology,” an attempt to document the many tribes that were being massacred into extinction, and Fewkes had received funding to study the Hopi and Zuni people, in the American Southwest. Before journeying there, he decided to practice recording on the “remnants of the Passamaquoddy.” The wife of the local Indian agent, who served as a liaison with the U.S. government, recruited members of the tribe to sing and speak at Fewkes’s request. For several days, they projected their voices into the giant metal cone of what Fewkes called Mister Phonograph. They told folk stories and performed songs and chants. They watched as a crank-powered needle inscribed thirty-six brown wax cylinders with the sounds.
[For more on this story by E. Tammy Kim, go to https://www.newyorker.com/cult...digital-repatriation]
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