Re: Micmac Baskets, a Follow Up by Bernard Ten Bears

Today in the News:  Question from "Dirty", one of our followers:  "I am looking for a lite cooking set that will fit into one of the rockets on my snugpak rocketpak...any suggestions?" 

I am not knowlegable in such areas. Please help a brother out.

I decided to post a response that I got from Bernard Ten Bears about a question that came up in the comment section after the Micmac video, "Our Lives in Our Hands", on Folkstreams.  Bernard Ten Bears has done a lot of research about Maine and more specifically, Aroostook County, through reading, talking to old folks, digging in the dirt and just plain old thinking.  I have spent days digging old bottles out from between roots of a birch with Bernard Ten Bears and I can assure you, the man knows his stuff.

Link of the Day:  Information on the Maliseet People.  Bernard Ten Bears mentions this tribe in his letter.  I found the information very interesting.

Re: Micmac Baskets, from Bernard Ten Bears

Hi,
If you haven't answered the comment on your blog...pre steel era Micmac basketry in Maine doesn't exist. They moved in here late in the woodland era (came in from Nova Scotia mostly). Biological artifacts are rare here in Northern Maine as the soil is so acidic that it even eats bones. Thus even very few gravesites are known. Most of what is found for evidence of the ancients is stone only. In Southern Maine the soil is less acidic and as in the case of the giant shell middens on the coast, sometimes something would be a shield around the artifacts (in this case the shells themselves in unbelievable abundance) kept the biological things inside the midden insulated and protected from breaking down. That's why in the Abbe you can see bone harpoons and fish hooks, and spearheads. You'd never find anything like that here. Even very few baskets from the 1800's exist in the Abbe museum and Maine state museum.

Our real native tribe for Northern Maine...that were here before the Micmacs were the Maliseet. There is a band of them Nationally recognized in Houlton. It is from their language we get the words, moose, and all the native names on the map of Aroostook. The Micmacs drove them out as they were peaceful and the Micmacs were warlike.

BERNARD TEN BEARS


Stay tuned for more from Bernard Ten Bears this week!

Pax Domini Sit Semper Vobiscum,

Mike, Oscar, Hotel.....out