Wabanaki

“It’s said that our cultural hero, Glooskap, fired an arrow into the black ash tree and our people came dancing out — it’s tied to us,” said Jeremy Frey, a 45-year-old, seventh-generation basket maker from the Passamaquoddy tribe, one of several in the Wabanaki Confederacy.

Long before painters such as Winslow Homer and Andrew Wyeth arrived in Maine to capture its spectacular natural beauty on canvas, the native Wabanaki people used materials from the landscape to weave black ash and sweet grass baskets, the oldest continuously practiced art form in the state.

She was a co-organizer of “Jeremy Frey: Woven,” the first solo exhibition of a Wabanaki artist at a fine art museum in the United States.

John Dieffenbacher-Krall, executive director of the Wabanaki Alliance, said restoring the language would increase “the likelihood current and future residents of this state do understand the obligations of the state of Maine to the Wabanaki Nations.”

But the Passamaquoddy were never really given a seat at the table, says Ranco, a member of the Penobscot Nation, which along with the Passamaquoddy are part of the Wabanaki Confederacy of tribes in Maine and eastern Canada.