Through Indigenous Eyes

Passamaquoddy - Passamaquoddy designs and images

The Passamaquoddy are one of the few Algonquin-speaking tribes on the east coast whose language survived European contact. Donald Soctomah, a fluent speaker of his language and a tribal historian, looked through the Frank Speck collection at the APS and identified many people in the photographs whose descendants still live in the community today. Passamaquoddy women continue the weaving traditions seen in these photographs. “We have a lot of women in our community who do beadwork,” Soctomah noted on his visit to the APS. “They’re always looking for old designs to utilize in their work. So the [designs] I saw, that would be something coming back.” In this sense, digital knowledge sharing works to revitalize traditional forms and the meanings encoded in woven patterns.

In the exhibit, Donald Soctomah points out a “double curve motif” on the hat of one of the women in the photographs. In “The Double-Curve Motive in Northeastern Algonkian Art,” Frank Speck notes that the double-curve imagery can be found from Penobscot and Passamaquoddy in Maine extending west to the Great Lakes region where it seen among the Ojibwe and Potowatomi and further still to the Blackfoot in Montana. To the right is Speck’s drawing demonstrating how the “double curve motive” could be rendered simply or with great complexity.

Writing in 1914 about the Penobscot, Speck observes that the motif “represented the bonds uniting the different members of the chief’s family, the subdivisions of the tribe, or the officers of the council. This symbolism has, however, been almost totally forgotten except by a few of the older people.” Donald Soctomah, however, recognized the motif right away, noting of the photo to the right: “the sweetgrass double swirls [on the] front of the cap is like a double curve. And the way the curve is represented is symbolic for either a chief ceremony or a chief death or a coming together ceremony.” At the Building Bridges conference, tribal historians and elders from both the Passamaquoddy and the Penobscot Nations came together to study the photographs, which were digitized so that they could take them back to their respective communities. In this sense, it is our hope that a tradition Speck feared was dying out in the early 20th century can be “reawakened.”