Mihku Paul Anderson, a Creative Writing student in USM’s Stonecoast MFA Program, is a proud member of the Maliseet, one of the five groups that comprise the Wabanaki Confederacy. Raised near Penobscot Indian Island Reservation, her indigenous identity flows into everything she does. It provides the subject matter of her strikingly powerful poems (like the one at left). It defines the style and design of her traditional bead work and watercolor paintings. It even affects the way she makes decisions and thinks about time.
An exhibit of Anderson’s poetry titled “Look Twice” opened Oct. 9 in the community gallery of the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine’s leading Native American museum. In it, she juxtaposes her poetry against archive photographs of Native Americans in Maine, creating a tension that she hopes reminds people that Native American cultures and communities are not simply things of the past. “I created a voice for the people in the photos,” she says. “The native people are looking back out at whoever is viewing those images. It’s a cool effect.”
Anderson needed a project to serve as the crowning achievement of her MFA, but she hadn’t even thought of doing this kind of exhibit until last winter when she saw Marilyn Nelson, the poet laureate of Connecticut, talk about a similar project she had done. Nelson is “a wonderful, very accompished black poet who does a lot of very innovative progressive work with her writing” says Anderson. Although Anderson had never put together an exhibit before, she felt inspired to try and proposed it to the Abbe.
“I wasn’t sure that they would say ‘yes’ to the proposal,” says Anderson. “I thought quite frankly that they were out of my league.” But, to the contrary, the museum staff loved the idea and guided her through the eight-month process of putting the exhibit together.
For Anderson, the exhibit is about much more than finding a venue to present her personal work. It is about garnering public attention to a frequently neglected part of our society: Native Americans. Anderson grew up hunting, fishing and trapping with her grandfather, a grizzled river guide and Maliseet elder. “My mother was able to skin any animal,” she says proudly.
Although she lives in Portland today, Anderson says that the traditional Wabenaki legends and values that she grew up with still guide her life today. “There is a difference in world view” between Native American and Eurocentric culture, she says, that extends to how she perceives time (a natural flow as opposed to an imposed external framework) and makes decisions (democratically and slowly, always careful to take account of every point of view). Her husband is from outside the culture, but she says he respects her work deeply, and the cultural differences between them rarely cause problems.
Since the passing of LD291, the law requiring Maine public schools to include lessons about Native Americans in their curriculum, Anderson has become increasingly involved in sharing the culture she grew up with. She frequently goes into schools and has helped to design educational modules for use in the classroom.
Now, with the success of her new exhibit, Anderson has taken the next step toward becoming a publicly recognized voice in the movement. In the three weeks that the exhibit’s been open, she has received multiple offers to publish her work, several invitations to talk at conferences and an offer to serve on a panel about art in Maine school systems. “My goal is to help bring notions of native culture into the twenty-first century,” she says. For the time being, she seems well on her way.
“Look Twice” will be on display through Apr. 10 at the Abbe Museum, 26 Mt Desert St., Bar Harbor, ME FMI: (207) 288-3519.