Pejepscot Portage Mapping Project
Uncovering a Waponahki Landscape
Maps help us see our world, but they also conceal much. What if we thought about this area not just as towns and streets but as a place grounded in Wabanaki frameworks? For example, before it was the bustling center of Brunswick, Maine Street was a portage that allowed paddlers to carry their canoes from the falls at Pejepscot to Maquoit Bay. “Pejepscot” probably means “long, rocky rapids place.” “Maquoit” probably means “wet place” and refers to the muddy marsh at the other end of the portage. Knowing these names, we can see canoes and clams where there are now streets and supermarkets.
“I’m always home. It doesn’t matter if it’s Indian Island or at Moosehead Lake. We’re home when we are down at the coast picking sweet grass. We’re always home because we belong to this land, it doesn’t belong to us. We are part of it, like the salmon and the eagles and the deer and the moose, which makes it all home, which makes us responsible to all those things.”
Recognizing this portage also helps us to imagine new connections among people, places, and histories. As Penobscot artist and scholar Jennifer Neptune writes, "Portages allow us to get around obstacles, to bypass water too dangerous to paddle, or to connect to a neighboring watershed." They serve as key moments to decide what to carry forward and what to leave behind. As Neptune describes it, "Like a river journey, our history over the last five hundred years can be marked by a series of portage points in time." She makes clear, too, that many of those portages over the last 500 years involved difficult decisions about which “beautiful parts of our culture to carry forward.”
In many respects, Brunswick denies Wabanaki history and presence. Maine Street has no room for canoes, only for cars and trucks. Maquoit’s clams are available only to those who can prove their residence in the town. Brunswick has erased Pejepscot, which now lies buried by a dam.
But look (and listen) more closely. Names like Pejepscot and Maquoit come from Wabanaki languages. Maine Street follows an ancient portage. Wabanaki continue to harvest from nearby blueberry barrens. They attend local schools. Look for information about Wabanaki organizations, and you will see how they are reinforcing and reinventing old connections to their homelands.
The many interpretive signs about Wabanaki history help us see a little more clearly Wabanaki ways of being home. What histories shape your home? What responsibilities come with that place and its past?
This research was compiled as part of the Pejepscot Portage Walk, which took place in Brunswick on October 6, 2024. For more information about this walk, click here.
For more research related to this area, click on the tags below. To download a hi-res version of the posters below for educational use, please contact where@atlanticblackbox.com.
This walk was a collaboration between the Pejepscot Portage Mapping Project and Atlantic Black Box.
