The Wabanaki and the Abbe Museum
Near Bar Harbor, Maine
Long before any European set eyes on this coast, and long before any millionaire built a cottage, this island belonged to the Wabanaki, the People of the Dawnland. Their confederacy includes the Penobscot, the Passamaquoddy, the Maliseet, and the Mi'kmaq, and they have used Mount Desert Island for thousands of years. They called it Pemetic, the sloping land.
All along these shores lie shell middens, ancient mounds of clam and mussel and sea urchin shells, layered with tools of bone and stone, the leavings of countless seasons of fishing and gathering. When the summer tourists arrived in the eighteen hundreds, Wabanaki people guided them through the woods and sold them beautiful baskets woven from ash splints and sweetgrass. Here in downtown Bar Harbor, on Mount Desert Street, stands the Abbe Museum.
It was founded by a surgeon named Doctor Robert Abbe, founded in nineteen twenty six and opened in nineteen twenty eight. It is devoted to telling the story of the Wabanaki, not as a people of the past, but as living nations whose home this has always been.
