Joe Hall, an associate professor of history at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ whose course offerings include Native American history broadly and also specifically — that of the Indigenous people of Maine — got a call for help in early August. His expertise was needed to correct, or deepen, the record about how two Maine landmarks came to be.

Both stories covered the history of places as they related to European settlers. And that caused concern for members of a group Hall belongs to, the Pejepscot Portage Mapping Project, which has been working to record the history of the Brunswick area as home to Indigenous people.

Concerned that the stories recounted history within a vacuum, leaving out the stories of the Wabanaki people, they asked Hall to write to the papers’ editors to provide more context. 

Two stories about the development of Brunswick had just appeared in the Portland Press Herald and Times Record, intriguing pieces explaining how a Brunswick swamp had been developed in the early 19th century, and why one of the town’s other claims to local fame, its (according to the author, to create a buffer “in case of an ambush�).

Hall, the volunteer historian of the group, quickly wrote two responses and within days of the first story (the one about the Brunswick Mall, as the town green is known), his guest column, “,” appeared on the papers’ sites. (His second response, about the origins of Maine Street, has not yet run.) 

For starters, the colonists found that swampy area unsightly and inconvenient — the cattle they had sold at the market on the shores of the Androscoggin River and were taking to Maquoit Bay to be loaded on ships for trade kept getting bogged down in the mud. Plus, mosquitos abounded. But for the people who came before them, who had walked the route of Maine Street before it became a street, that swamp had true benefits, Hall wrote:

In the centuries before Brunswick, Wabanaki lived in the area, fishing at Pejepscot Falls, farming along the banks of the Androscoggin, gathering blueberries on the pine barrens, and digging clams at Maquoit.

The swamp also provided for these residents and travelers. It fed a reliable stream of water that saved thirsty Wabanaki the trouble of a steep descent to the Androscoggin. It grew cattails, which have edible roots, leaves that can be woven into mats or bags and downy seed pods that can wrap infants for warmth. It grew fiddleheads, which are the spring shoots of ostrich ferns, providing food at the end of long winters. To be sure, it also bred swarms of mosquitoes that plagued Wabanaki as well as later colonists, but a swamp is more than its nuisances.

The Pejepscot Portage Mapping Project is working to create a digital map of the Brunswick area as the Wabanaki people used it.  For the last three years, Hall has been contributing his historical perspective to the group effort and finding it deeply rewarding. The group includes non-Indigenous and Wabanaki people from the Brunswick area who are interested in highlighting the Wabanaki history of the area.

“It’s a really interesting mix of people,� Hall says. “Which is a fun way to do scholarship. To be involved is really gratifying. I feel like I’m doing something that is not going to end up on a shelf. You won’t find it in a library. It’s not some big scholarly thing, but I hope people are going to read it and think, ‘Oh I didn’t realize that was part of the story.’�

These places, including Maine Street itself, are “fundamentally defined by Native history,� Hall says. It’s true that Maine Street was built “twelve rods� wide to avoid ambushes by Native people. But they were being blocked from using their traditional fishing grounds by settlers, who built a fort there to claim it.

Moreover, Maine Street also travels the same path the indigenous people used as a portage, walking from the falls to the waters of Casco Bay carrying their canoes. “There’s a Wabanaki foundation to all of this.� (On Oct. 6, Hall will participate in a historical walking tour centered around that portage with , which is in the process of completing seven guided walks of old Native areas in Maine this year.)

Because the Pejepscot Portage Mapping Project seeks to highlight Wabanaki history of the region, the group has also consulted with a variety of Wabanaki educators over the years. Hall and his partners have found the conversations vital for framing their work. They have learned important information, and they have also gained a sense of which lessons Wabanaki find most meaningful.

The project is educational, but who knows where raising awareness might lead. “It’s a little humbling to feel like my partners and I are part of something with an unknown destination or end-point. Wabanaki history is interesting, sure, but what does it mean? Reparations in the form of giving land back? This work raises hard questions, fundamental questions. There’s a reason why it’s a lot easier if colonial peoples like me don’t know that Maine Street was a portage, and that an old swamp was actually a place of sustenance, as opposed to just an eyesore where cows got stuck in the mud. Which is what a newspaper article I read from 1853 was saying. Basically, ‘poor cows.’â€� 

Earlier: In 2019, during the celebration of Auburn’s 150th birthday, Hall , addressing Native history within a commemoration of the era of settlers.

In April 1854, a three-masted schooner, the Kate Brigham, set sail from New Orleans loaded with 150 bales of cotton grown by slaves on Southern plantations.

The cotton shipment was one of many destined for Lewiston, Maine, a small but growing mill town where entrepreneur Benjamin ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ of Boston and his fellow investors had built their first textile mill two years earlier. In its first year, the mill had netted $33,000 in profit — putting Benjamin ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ on track to become a wealthy man in the years before the Civil War.

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ readers know what comes next. Benjamin ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and his business associates, eager to create civic institutions in Lewiston, made financial gifts to a new school founded in 1855 by Oren Cheney, a Freewill Baptist leader and fervent abolitionist. A decade later, Cheney named the school, by then a college, after ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, its principal benefactor.

Eager to build civic institutions in the growing town of Lewiston, textile mill owner Benjamin ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and his associates — wealthy thanks to slave-grown cotton — made financial gifts to the school that would become ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College.

And from that foundation grew a college that today is rightly and widely known for its inclusive character.

That founding story is familiar, but it’s not the whole story, say ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ faculty and students who are now doing academic research to better understand what it means that a Northern college like ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ was intertwined at its founding with an American economy fueled by slave labor.

“Everyone says, ‘ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ was founded by abolitionists,’â€� says Perla Figuereo ’21 of the Bronx, N.Y., who was part of a digital humanities course last fall that has begun a long-term, data-driven exploration of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ early financial history. “But no one adds, ‘and funded by slave cotton.’â€�

The founded-by-abolitionists narrative is “not necessarily false, but rather incomplete,â€� senior history major Ursula Rall of Kent, Ohio, told her audience during a Martin Luther King Jr. Day presentation with fellow senior Emma Soler of Bethesda, Md. “It’s important to acknowledge the other part of the founding.â€�

To be sure, up to the time of the Civil War, there’s hardly an American institution that ·É²¹²õ²Ô’t supported by the American slave economy.

In this 1860 photograph, African Americans, likely slaves, pick cotton near Montgomery, Ala. (Lakin, J.H., photographer. 186: https://www.loc.gov/item/2012648057)

“Slavery was integral to our nation’s founding, our economy in the North and South, our universities, and our wealth,â€� says journalist and ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ history major Kristen Doerer ’14, who has reported for the Chronicle of Higher Education on how colleges have reckoned with their historical connections to the U.S. slave economy.

“We can’t kid ourselves and think that because ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ is in the North and was founded by abolitionists that it was immune from slavery,â€� she adds. “If we view wealth from cotton and slavery as dirty money, we should know that the dirt is everywhere — even under abolitionists’ fingernails.â€�

To that point, one day after Rall and Soler’s MLK Day presentation at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, Maine Public Broadcasting devoted a segment of its Maine Calling program to examining the specifically how various Maine ship captains transported slaves from Africa to North America in the 1800s, even after it was made illegal.

That’s a barely known fact, says Kate McMahon, a scholar and Maine native who has done extensive research on Maine’s connection to the slave trade, because Maine has “valorized� its maritime tradition over the years while “making the suffering of other people invisible.�

“Slavery was integral to our nation’s founding, our economy in the North and South, our universities, and our wealth,â€� says journalist and ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ history major Kristen Doerer ’14, seen during a campus visit in 2019 when she offered a public talk and met with history students. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

If we fail to fully appreciate this local history — such as, she says, the existence of “buildings in Portland that were built from funds from selling enslaved people� — then how do “we even begin to understand that we actually live with the legacies of slavery every single day here and now?�

On a larger journalistic scale, there’s also the ongoing New York Times’ 1619 Project, named for the year African slaves first arrived in Virginia. That project seeks to place “the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.�

The digital humanities course that Perla Figuereo took last fall is taught by Anelise Hanson Shrout, an assistant professor of digital and computational studies. Like her students, Shrout feels the imperative to flesh out the college’s founding story.

“For me, as a historian and as a human who lives in Lewiston and works at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, the story is more complicated than ‘ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ has always stood for abolition,’” Shrout says. “We have the same foundational American sin baked into our history that much of the U.S. does.â€�

Perla Figuereo ’21 (center) presents a digital project developed with, to her left, classmate Alya Yousuf ’21 as part of their fall 2019 coursework in “Data Cultures,” taught by Assistant Professor of Digital and Computational Studies Anelise Hanson Shrout. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Last fall, Shrout’s students began painstaking work to review and pull numbers from the college’s early business ledgers, held by the college’s Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library. Those ledgers record the donations, large and small, that Cheney took in, including gifts from Benjamin ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, who gave approximately $175,000 to the college, equivalent to a few million dollars today.

They also began a review of the many bundles of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Mill cotton invoices now held by Lewiston Public Library. It is slow work, says Shrout, who anticipates devoting future editions of her course to the project. “We’ve only scratched the surface.â€�

Still, the individual cotton invoices are fascinating. Besides the amount and cost of the cotton shipments, they include dates, ship names, shipping routes, and wholesalers, painting a picture of how antebellum cotton made its way north.

Besides the aforementioned Kate Brigham, another ship that transported cotton to the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Mill was the Paul Boggs, which ran aground on Cape Cod’s infamous Chatham bar two years later. And still another, the Asa Fish, built in Mystic, Conn., in 1849, also transported African slaves to Cuba.

Shrout says the process of creating meaning from handwritten cotton invoices promises to teach a powerful liberal arts lesson. “One of the questions we’re asking is, ‘What does it mean to produce a dataset that represents labor that was violently stolen from people?’ How do we do that ethically and thoughtfully?�

Dated June 30, 1854, this invoice for 150 bales of cotton (63,795 pounds), for delivery to the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Manufacturing Co. and its treasurer, Benjamin ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, indicates that the cotton was shipped from New Orleans on the schooner Kate Brigham. (Photograph by Anelise Hanson Shrout)

In today’s world, “data is thrown around as if it is objective,� Shrout continues. “We feed tremendous amounts of data into algorithms that decide what a self-driving car sees as human or how people are policed. But data is always an artifact of some kind of human decision, so at a meta level in this class, I want students to take that away.�

The basic facts of the college’s founding, both Benjamin ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ cotton connection and Oren Cheney’s abolitionist views, have been well-documented over the years, even as the latter narrative has, until now, received more attention.

In the 1970s, Jim Leamon ’55, then a young history professor and now an emeritus member of the faculty, enlisted students to help him research Lewiston’s economic history, including Benjamin ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ contributions to the city’s early growth.

Commissioned by the city’s Historic Commission, Leamon’s monograph explained as other New England mills suffered: because Benjamin ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ gambled on a long war and “bought up huge stocks of cotton at 12 cents a pound when the struggle began,â€� writes Leamon. “By 1864 cotton was worth 70 cents, and a year later it was over a dollar a pound.â€�

The Asa Fish was among the many ships that delivered slave-grown cotton to Benjamin ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ mills in Lewiston before the Civil War. Flying under the American flag, the bark also transported slaves from the west coast of Africa to Cuba.

Thanks to the stockpiled cotton and government war contracts, Lewiston mill profits were “remarkable� during the war, Leamon concludes. In sharp contrast, other New England mills sold their stockpiled cotton early in the war for a quick profit, then had to pay exorbitant prices as the supply of Southern cotton dried up. In Lowell, Mass., for example, the era is dubbed “Lowell’s blunder.�

It is important to note, too, that Benjamin ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ was among a group of businessmen who lent their support to the new school, including Francis Skinner, a Boston-based middleman who sold Southern cotton to Benjamin ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ mills and who became a college trustee.

“We hate it — we abhor it, we loathe it — we detest and despise it as a giant sin against God, and an awful crime upon man.�

Oren Cheney’s devotion both to abolitionism and to creating a radically inclusive college have also been well-documented over the years, including by Tim Larson ’05 in his landmark senior honors thesis in history, “Faith By Their Works.�

Noting that Cheney had operated a branch of the Underground Railroad in Maine prior to founding a new college, Larson quotes Cheney’s own words on the topic of slavery: “We hate it — we abhor it, we loathe it — we detest and despise it as a giant sin against God, and an awful crime upon man.�

Larson also notes that, in founding an inclusive college, Cheney was combatting powerful social norms that “advocated for discrimination against women, African Americans, and the poor.� Despite those and other pressures, the college “held its ground� and maintained its inclusive practices.

(In fact, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College ·É²¹²õ²Ô’t Cheney’s only handiwork. Well-connected politically thanks to his service in the Maine Legislature, Cheney used his influence to help found another mission-driven school, Storer College, in Harpers Ferry, W. Va., in 1865, which was dedicated to educating freed slaves.)

Still, Larson noted, there was the vexing question, a “contradictionâ€� as he called it, of why an “ardent abolitionistâ€� like Cheney would take money from industrialists like Benjamin ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, who might be “as much to blame as Southern slave ownersâ€� for “allowing slavery to thrive.â€� Larson answers the question this way: “Perhaps this contradiction speaks more to the omnipresence of the slave system in American economy than to Cheney’s own shortcomings.â€�

Founder of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Oren Cheney, seen in 1873, was a bona fide abolitionist. (Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

Fifteen years later, appreciating the urgency with which ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students and faculty have taken up “the contradictionâ€� requires some historical context.

In 2003, Brown University started to investigate its direct historical connection to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. A few years later, scholars and students at Harvard began a similar exploration. And in 2013, historian Craig Steven Wilder published Ebony and Ivy, which broadly explained how all of U.S. higher education in the 18th and 19th centuries, not just a few schools, capitalized in some way on America’s slave economy.

With Wilder’s book, explains Joseph Hall, an associate professor of history at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, “U.S. colleges no longer had to chooseâ€� whether to admit to benefiting from slavery. “Wilder demonstrated that everyone was involved, whether you liked it or not.â€�

In addition, a new generation of scholars, including Wilder, from groups previously underrepresented in academe, including women and African Americans, are now asking new questions about American history, often through the lenses of colonialism (the subjugation of one people by and for the benefit of other people), white supremacy, and racism.

“People are asking different kinds of questions,� says Hall. “And different people are involved in asking those questions.�

In the early 2000s at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, questions about the college’s historical connection to the American slave economy were cropping up in and around ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ classrooms, prompted by faculty in the history department and the Africana program, including professors Sue Houchins and now-retired Margaret Creighton. (Discussions in her classroom, in part, led to Larson’s ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½-focused thesis.)

In recent years, faculty and students began to move the topic front and center in their academic work, spurred in part by national events, including publication of Ebony and Ivy, racial violence in Ferguson, and the subsequent emergence of Black Lives Matter. At the same time, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ was using its convening power to showcase a string of prominent speakers on race and equity in America, including Wilder himself, who spoke at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ in January 2017.

An audience fills a Dana Chemistry Hall classroom on Martin Luther King Jr. Day to hear Emma Soler ’20 and Ursula Rall ’20 lead a discussion about the college’s dual founding narratives: founded by abolitionists and funded initially by Benjamin ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, a textile manufacturer who derived wealth from slave-grown cotton. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

That September, members of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ faculty raised the issue during a discussion in a packed Pettengill Hall classroom, held to help students understand issues of white supremacy and Confederate monuments in the wake of in Charlottesville, Va.

Noting how Benjamin ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ profited from slave-grown cotton, Assistant Professor of History Andrew Baker pointed out that while it’s meaningful to remove Confederate monuments in the South, we need to look at history closer to home. Racial problems don’t somehow “belong to a different time,â€� Baker said. “It’s always been a part of America itself, and so that touches all of us.â€�

From the classroom to the public lectern, Joe Hall has lent his academic voice to the topic in recent years. He recalls how, more than a decade ago and after Larson did his thesis, he began to mention the college’s connection to slave-grown cotton as a “throwaway line� in one of his classes, such as “African Slavery in the Americas.� He says, “I remember a student telling me, ‘I never thought about that before.’ It’s been kind of an itch� ever since.

From the classroom and the lectern, Associate Professor of History Joe Hall in recent years has invited the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ community to consider the meaning of its founding connection to the American slave economy. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

In spring 2018, Hall introduced the topic in a “master classâ€� that he led during a campus Admitted Students Reception, when ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ rolls out the garnet carpet for new admits. After briefing the students on the basic facts, he asked, “What’s missing from the story about Oren Cheney and Benjamin ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½?â€� One of the students replied, “There’s no African American history here.â€�

Hall says, “That was great, because he was absolutely right.�

And that September, Hall, speaking to the incoming Class of 2022 during Opening Convocation, used his address, “Questions for ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½,â€� to explore at some length the apparent contradictions of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ founding.

For the past two semesters, Hall has devoted one of the department’s signature courses, “Historical Methods,â€� an upper-level seminar that prepares majors for thesis work, to the question of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ founding. During the course, he has guided students into the college’s Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library and downtown to Lewiston Public Library.

In February 2019, students in Associate Professor of History Joe Hall’s historical methods class pore over historical documents related to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ founding in Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library. From left, Eric Opoku, Benni McComish, Zach Jonas, Andrew Faciano, and Ke’ala Brosseau. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

From Hall’s perspective as a teacher and scholar, probing questions about ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ founding are what a liberal arts education is all about: appreciating complexity, knowing that there’s more than meets the eye, and being on the lookout for unintended consequences.

“The good in the world, even the good found in a place like ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College, does not come without a cost,â€� he says. “In the case of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ founding, it was a tremendous cost in human lives.â€� And it’s powerful, he adds, that his students are learning these lessons in a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ framework. “There’s immediacy. They can see the relevance of it because they care about ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.â€�

Ke’ala Brosseau ’20 of South Burlington, Vt., was in Hall’s methods course last year. With several classmates, she made a presentation at the annual Mount David Summit that looked at how ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, as an institution, has foregrounded its abolitionist founding narrative over the years.

When an institution emphasizes one narrative, it’s like putting on blinders. “You don’t recognize the imbalances of power,â€� she says, that have muted other voices over time, including, in the case of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ founding, humans imprisoned by slavery. Furthermore, she adds, “It’s hard to recognize inequality today when we don’t confront things that have happened in our past.â€�

“It’s hard to recognize inequality today when we don’t confront things that have happened in our past,” says history major Ke’ala Brosseau ’20 of South Burlington, Vt. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

To be sure, it will take time and effort to discover, let alone amplify, the voices of people who grew the cotton that created the wealth leading to the college’s founding.

For her senior honors thesis, Emma Soler initially hoped to “put a human faceâ€� on the cotton trade by tracing cotton that Benjamin ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ used in Lewiston back to specific Southern plantations, and perhaps to specific individuals.

In the limited time of a senior thesis project, that goal proved unattainable. Indeed, Hall imagines that the search for cotton clues might someday extend to century-old dissertations on the cotton trade housed in Southern universities. “It will take some bibliographic digging,� he says.

So Soler has pivoted to a broader analysis, looking at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ founding in the context of the U.S. slave economy as well as campus discourse around the issue, contemporary campus culture, and reparations movements.

Emma Soler ’20 is using her honors history thesis to explore how college’s founding narratives affect the college today. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

She’s asking questions such as, “How do we talk about this history on campus? What is the consensus about talking about this history in a different way? Do people think it’s impacting their experience here?â€� And, if so, “positively or negatively?â€�

From her perspective as an interested alumna, Kristen Doerer sees value in ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ faculty and students continuing their exploration of the college’s founding connection to the American slave economy.

“It says that this institution isn’t afraid to take on hard topics and study, examine, and discuss them.�

The ash tree is an important part of Wabanaki history and culture, says Associate Professor of History Joe Hall. That’s why he keeps a hunk of the hardwood — a gift from one teacher to another — in his Pettengill Hall office.

An expert on Native American interactions with Europeans in Colonial times, Hall is well-versed in the history of the five nations of the Wabanaki Confederacy that lived in Maine, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and eastern Quebec.

In the origin story of one tribe, the Penobscot Nation, the cultural hero Gluskabe splits an ash tree with his arrow, from which emerge the first Penobscot man and woman.

Joe Hall works in his Pettengill Hall office. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Native peoples in Maine have long used the wood of brown ash (also known as black ash) trees to make beautiful and functional baskets. Hall had learned about the importance of the ash tree from a number of Wabanaki educators, but even after living in Maine for 10 years, he had never actually seen such a tree.

That changed one day about five years ago during a visit to his sons’ Auburn elementary school, where he ended up talking trees with one of their science teachers, Jim Chandler. “Can you show me what an ash tree looks like?� Hall asked.

Chandler took him into the woods behind the school and said, “This is an ash tree.� Hall also learned how to identify the species and what kind of soil it grows in.

Hall then explained his interest in Wabanakis and that ash trees really matter a great deal to them. “Oh, I have something you might want,� replied Chandler, who went back into his office and returned with a piece of splintered brown ash that showed “both what the wood looks like and how it is that you actually turn this strong, hard wood into splints for weaving baskets,� Hall says.

Hall holds a prized possession. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

As Hall has learned from Wabanaki basketmakers, to create the ash strips called splints, you whack the wood with the back of an axe or other blunt instrument. That separates the growth rings so eventually they peel off. A tool called a splitter may be used to make the first splints even smaller and thinner.

These strips are ideal for weaving a basket. “If you’ve ever held a wooden baseball bat,� Hall says, “you get a sense how solid and dense ash is. These strands also show how flexible it is, so the tree can be used to make baskets that are incredibly light and strong. They’re really marvelous constructions.�

A closeup of Hall’s piece of split brown ash. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

This important Wabanaki tradition is now threatened by an invasive beetle species from eastern Asia, the emerald ash borer, that since 2002 has gradually spread from Michigan and other parts of the Midwest into New York and more recently Maine.

Hall shows the piece of ash to students so they can appreciate how Wabanakis turn wood into a basket, “because it doesn’t immediately make sense that you can make wood weavable,� he says. It’s also a reminder that “there’s nothing in our lives that isn’t made from other things, things that we all depend on in our connections to the world around us, such as the trees that surround us.�

Most of the time, Hall’s prized possession sits on a shelf facing his computer so he can look at it as he works. “It provides me with this connection to the people — Wabanakis and non-Indians — who have educated my children and also educated me.�

Text of the 2018 Convocation address, “Questions for ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½,â€� by Associate Professor of History Joseph Hall, delivered on Sept. 4:

Good morning. Happy New Year.

I want to begin with a few words of thanks, first of all to Walter for such wonderful remarks. You have a gifted classmate.

I want to also thank the Wabanaki peoples and the homelands that we sit and stand on, and the people whose labor has made our conversation today possible, including the sign language interpreters who are turning the words that you hear into words that you can see.

I’d like to thank the Class of 2018 for nominating me for this opportunity to speak with you all. I’m sorry they’re not here for me to extend my thanks in person, but it is truly an honor, and I am grateful to them for it.

I’d like to thank two students in particular, Tim Larson from the Class of 2005, and Emma Soler, who’s from the Class of 2020, both of whom have done important research that makes a lot of what I’m going to be talking about today possible.

To Caitlin Lampman, Michelle Belden, and Pat Webber, who all work in the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Muskie Archives and Special Collections, for providing access to the history that I’m going to be talking about. And last of all, of course, to you all for being here. It’s a pleasure to be here with you. I want to extend a warm welcome to all of you who are new, whether you’re in the Class of 2022 or new faculty or new staff. I hope your time here at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ is much more than you expect.

Although I am certainly grateful for the chance to be here to speak with you all, I have to admit that I’m a little bit frustrated by the conventions that bring us here.

We all decided to come to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ because it’s an institution that prides itself on small scale conversation, whether in our classrooms, dormitories, or departments and programs. Yet you as the Class of 2022 are going to begin and end your academic careers here dutifully listening to people garbed in velvet robes, standing behind large wooden lecterns, and not really having much of a conversation.

It’s not that I’m really opposed to velvet and wood. It’s not even necessarily that I’m opposed to lectures with large audiences. The problem is that what really excites me about being here with you all is the chance to actually to get to know you and to talk with you. The reason those conversations are particularly interesting is because within that intimacy, we have the opportunity to learn from each other but also, as in our mission statement, “to engage the transformative power of our differences.â€�

This kind of lecture, frankly, is not the kind of format where I’m expecting that we’re getting much in terms of intimacy or engagement. Let me just say right at the beginning, I don’t really care what you think about what I’m about to say. I am very interested in hearing what you want to do with what I have to say. What I want to do is think about questions, which are at the heart of any good conversation.

I’d like to think about what a question is — at its heart, it’s about a quest; that’s at the root of the word. The Latin quaerere, or quest, is at the heart of a number of words that we think about with questions, such as “queryâ€� or “inquiry.â€� The Latin quaerare means to seek or to inform oneself, to ask, but I want to think about “questionâ€� in terms of that idea of quest. When the Middle English used that word, they were invoking a certain kind of judicial understanding. You see that in the way we use the word “inquest,â€� or even “Inquisition.â€�

I’ll bet no one was expecting that. In asking questions, it’s incredibly important that we remember that a quest for knowledge should not simply be a quest to prove yourself right, a quest to conduct an inquisition that seeks to stamp out ideas that differ from your own. To be inquisitive, not inquisitorial, is what I’m talking about here.

I also want to make clear that I think every question has the potential to lead to something big, to have something big at stake. I’m a firm believer, as I think are almost all of my colleagues, that there is no such thing as a stupid question. I’m sure many of you have heard that injunction many times. Many of you might, in fact, not believe it, because you think you’ve heard stupid questions and maybe even asked a stupid question. But let me ask you to think about it this way: If a question is an adventure or a journey, if it’s a quest, and if every journey of 1,000 miles begins with one step, then the converse means that every step has the potential to begin a journey of 1,000 miles — which is to say, every question has the potential to hold some much bigger questions at stake.

Let me put this in terms of a question that I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’m going to need you to use your hands here.

How many of you have heard that ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College was founded by Oren Cheney, who was an abolitionist?

All right, so many of you have. If you haven’t, that’s totally fine, but now you have. Oren Cheney was an important founder of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College. He was a Free Will Baptist. He believed deeply in the equality of all people, such that he believed that anyone should be admitted to what was, in 1855, the Maine State Seminary, regardless of their racial or gender backgrounds.

A second question. How many of you know that ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College is named after Benjamin ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, an industrialist who established the textile mills in downtown Lewiston?

All right, you guys are warming up. This is good. It’s in 1864 that Benjamin ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ is going to give the first $10,000 of what would eventually be a $200,000 set of gifts to Oren Cheney, so that the Maine State Seminary could become a liberal arts college named after Benjamin ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

Third question. How many of you know that the cotton textiles that Benjamin ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and others are weaving in Lewiston are going to be made, until 1865, from cotton that is grown by enslaved people in the south of the United States?

Okay, so maybe not as many. That is, in a sense, an indication of some of the ways we talk about our history in this country.

These three questions are at the heart of what I think is perhaps, by now, an obvious question: If Oren Cheney was an abolitionist, deeply opposed to slavery, and Benjamin ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ was making his money weaving cotton grown by enslaved people, why was Oren Cheney taking ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ money?

And what does that mean for us?

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ founder Oren Cheney

We can start with Cheney’s own diary, which, fortunately, you can find in the Muskie Archives. It’s really a wonderful little artifact. It’s about three inches by five inches, a small leather-bound thing that he could stick in his pocket. When you open it, on each page would be the seven days of the week — Monday through Wednesday on one side, then Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday on the other page.

There’s only one year of this diary that still exists, which for me, is a fascinating question. For a man who keeps a diary so often — and we know that he did keep other diaries — why is there only one still remaining? The fact is, because it’s 1864, we have a chance to find out a little bit of what he thought when he first talked with Benjamin ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ about that first $10,000 gift that would make the seminary into a college. I want to read to you from that important day when Cheney and ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ first talked about that gift, March 4, 1864.

“Have had a long and pleasant call on Mr. ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€”says he will give $10,000—would rather have had another name—he cannot act as our agent as well as if on another name—but said it might be as well for us in the end—said should at some future time make us a donation. I asked, ‘Before your death?;’ He replied: ‘Perhaps so, I cannot say.’ Said now is the time to start subscription in Boston. Went to Concord, N. H. Stop with Bro. E. P. Prescott. Carrie and I called at the Millett’s.â€�

Hearing these words might seem rather unremarkable, but it’s extraordinary when you look at the diary, because here’s this incredibly small page, and Oren Cheney’s trying to fit all of these words on one third of it. You can see, as he’s writing, the penmanship gets tighter and tighter and smaller and smaller until he’s finally wrapping the words up around the page because he doesn’t have room to fit all the important things that Benjamin ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ is telling him on March 4th, 1864. Cheney, in what looks like fairly spare prose, is really, really excited. $10,000: He was going around very happy when people would give $100 or $10, and here’s a man giving $10,000 and offering the prospect of much more.

But he doesn’t say anything about slavery.

We know that Cheney had opinions about slavery. He was a member of the Free Will Baptists, which was one of the denominations so radical as to believe that God offered salvation to all people. If that was true, then slavery was, as Cheney put it in an opening editorial to the abolitionist newspaper Morning Star, “a giant sin against God and an awful crime against man.� Cheney was so deeply committed to abolitionism that he left Brown University because, as a student, he did not see it as abolitionist enough. Cheney believe deeply in abolitionism.

It’s worth noting that abolitionism was something of a fringe at the time — it’s easy to say we’re all abolitionists now, but roughly 2 percent of Americans living in the north of the United States were abolitionists in the 1850s. Just so you understand, the Libertarian Party polled 4 percent in the national election in 2016.

When it comes to talking about money made, at least indirectly but still fundamentally from slavery, there is silence.

There was controversy surrounding ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ establishment of this gift to make a college. The controversy lay not with slavery and money, at least as far as Cheney would remember it. The controversy lay in the fact that Cheney was accepting money to make a college in the first place. When Cheney established the Maine State Seminary in 1855, there were a number of Free Will Baptist seminaries in other parts of northern New England. All of them were thinking about becoming a college at some point, in a sense stepping up from being a post high school kind of school to being one that dealt more deeply in the liberal arts. Cheney actually assured a number of people, “Don’t worry, I’m actually looking into just establishing a seminary.â€� Yet here he is nine years later, looking for the money to make a college. A lot of people were incredibly unhappy with this. They were so unhappy that decades later, in 1907, when Emmeline Cheney, Oren’s wife, wrote a biography of her now-dead husband, she took an entire chapter to explain why it was that he had done what he did and to defend those decisions.

Cheney and his colleagues were also aware of the limits on the kind of money they could accept. Cheney’s successor and second president of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, George Chase, recalled in the 1880s that Free Will Baptists, when they were thinking about establishing ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College, would have been reluctant to send their children to a college, “maintained by the fruits of slave labor.â€� What he was referring to specifically was that there had been a southerner, a plantation owner, who had offered money to an institution in New Hampshire. He had not actually followed through on that, but Chase was acknowledging that plantation owners, perhaps strangely, were interested in supporting an abolitionist institution, and that ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College would have probably been very uncomfortable with that fact, had that plantation owner been interested in giving a donation here.

Here we have a college that is aware of some controversial elements of a decision to become a college, and is aware that slavery is actually a controversial piece of a foundation of a college — and yet when it comes to talking about money made at least indirectly but still fundamentally from slavery, there is silence.

I find that silence intriguing because it suggests just how deeply this nation — not just south but north, south, and west — depended on the enslavement of millions. Abolitionists, including mill owners, failed to disassociate themselves from ties to slavery. Emma Soler has done some wonderful research on this fact, to show that even a mill owner in Rhode Island would be anxious about how he was going to continue being an abolitionist, while he continued to weave cotton grown by the people he wanted to be free.

This failure to acknowledge or at least directly address these compromises raises for me another set of intriguing questions, and I want to take another moment to think about it etymology. “Intrigueâ€� is a wonderful word. It comes from the Latin intricare, to entangle or to confuse. It’s worth thinking about intriguing questions, because it is those kinds of questions that are questions in which you find yourself entangled. To put it differently: In what ways are you inextricably tied to the questions that you pose?

It’s with that idea of intrigue that I point out that I did not title this talk “questions for Cheneyâ€� or “Questions for Cheney and ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½,â€� but instead, “Questions for ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.â€� My real interest is not questions for them, although I would love to sit down in a room with both of them, but it’s for us.

When it comes to slavery, abolitionism, and racism, there are many contemporary entanglements for us to consider. As Bryan Stevenson, the director of the Equal Justice Initiative, pointed out in his Commencement address last May, “I don’t think we’re free in America. I think we’re burdened by our history of racial inequality. It’s in the air in Maine, just like it’s in the air in Mississippi. It doesn’t matter where you go, there is this contaminant that we’re all breathing in.â€�

You can see some of that contamination in the life of someone like Julie Lythcott-Haims, the author of the Common Read for this year, who, in many instances, recounts how she was silenced by the racism of others. That silence is not something that she bore alone or something that she suffered alone, even though I think she suffered it more than the other people around her. Everyone who was with her suffered it for not being able to benefit from the wisdom that she could offer, the trust that she could build, with those who instead were inflicting great pain on her.

It’s in the face of these problems that people like Lythcott-Haims and Stevenson point out that I wonder, can talking more fully about Oren Cheney, his vision and his compromises, and also his silences, help us see a little better this contaminated air and perhaps even hear a little better our awkward silences?

There’s a problem with this, and that’s that my question, at least for what I want to do right now is just too big. The amplification is too loud. You’re all sitting here very quietly, nicely regimented in your rows, and I’m stuck behind this big wall of wood. I would so much rather talk with you all in a smaller group, as I was able to do in April, when I talked about this with a group of prospective students.

I would like some of you to ask me, as some of them did, “What role did African Americans play an abolitionism?� “Why are you talking just about white men?� And for that matter, “What role do you play? What role does your background play, as a white man, in asking these questions and seeking these answers?�

Associate Professor of History Joseph Hall urged the Class of 2022 to ask the questions that intrigue them. â€�Your quest, your development, depends on your questions.â€� (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Of course, there’s another big problem here, and that’s that these are only my questions. Your quest, your development, depends on your questions. I hope you get some of those questions and answers from the people around you.

Consider, for instance, asking Frankie Urueta, a custodian in the basement of Pettengill — when he gives you a fist bump, you’ll know who he is — why he wants ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ to host a powwow. Ask Michael Sergeant what he thinks about ranked-choice voting, or go and then ask him. Ask research librarian Christine Murray anything. If you have time, ask her about how birds communicate. Let’s talk about what intrigues us, and remember, there really are no stupid questions.

Perhaps just as important, let’s find the space to do this. it’s so easy to say to stand here and say, “be curious, ask questionsâ€� when that does not help you get your homework finished. The dreams of September frequently wither under the obligations of October. If you are going to ask questions, ideally you’re going to have the space to do so in your classrooms. But there might be other questions that intrigue you that don’t fit in those spaces. I hope you do the work to make those spaces.

For my part, if you have a question for me, I’ll cut corners on my committee work right there. I might even cut some corners on my lecture for class tomorrow. For those of you who are in either of my classes tomorrow, you might see some of the effects of these questions in your syllabi. That’s not quite as much of a joke as I’d like it to be right now.

What it’s really about is you and the questions you want to ask. I hope I’m part of them. I hope others here are part of them. We have this wonderful opportunity in this wonderful environment to ask them.

I’d like to close with one last question: Does anyone have time to talk over lunch next week?

Thank you.

Each year when I ask faculty what they’re excited to teach, there’s a shared vibe — optimism for a new academic year and new students — in their different answers. But this year, I heard something new: urgency.

Associate Professor of History Joe Hall, for example, feels the force of current events as he launches his course on .

Hall says that following “horrible misreadings� of U.S. history by President Trump and following the violence in Charlottesville, his course “offers a wonderful opportunity� to set the record straight.

Current events, he says, offer the chance to talk “not just about understanding why history matters, which is frankly true of any history course, but to talk about the origins of slavery, which are at the center of this country, and later the founding of the Confederacy and race relations that still make our lives so complicated.�

Ian Shin, a lecturer in history and C3 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, is bringing a new course to the college, .

As noted in the Catalog, the course will suggest that the “contemporary discourse of Asian Americans as the ‘model minority’ obscures a long history of struggles for equality and glosses over the community’s rich diversity.�

Ian Shin, a lecturer in history and C3 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, brings a new course to the college, “Making Asian America: Citizenship, Identity, Belonging.” (Jay Burns/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

“To my understanding, this is the first time this topic has been taught at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½,â€� Shin says. “So there are a lot of stories that haven’t been told and a hunger among students of Asian descent to hear these stories.â€�

Moreover, he says, the course “offers a new way to think about U.S. history� by setting aside the usual narratives of American history, ones that often focus on transatlantic immigrants, to take a new perspective, looking at those who came “over the Pacific from Asia and Southeast Asia� to America.

Jane Costlow, the Clark A. Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies, says she’s been “inspired by where we are right now” to shake up her environmental humanities course, ““

So while students will still read canonical writers like Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Edward Abbey, she’s been introducing new and more diverse voices, such as those in “” essays edited by cultural geographer and writer Carolyn Finney and published in Orion magazine in 2016.

Costlow says that her love of writers like Thoreau, Muir, and Abbey includes “fighting with them sometimes”; for example, dealing with Abbey’s misogyny. But then “there are his moments of insight into the world, where his orneriness is directed against things that drive me nuts, too, such as materialism and superficiality.”

“I tell students that I hope they will discover writers who resonate with them who are, at some level very different from they are.”

Assistant Professor of Sociology Michael Rocque is keen to teach his own new course, “.�

Rocque says his course will go beyond the criminal justice system to look at the “philosophy and social reasons of why we need to control and sometimes correct behavior.�

A criminologist, Rocque has correctional-system experience, including a stint as director of research for the Maine Department of Corrections. “I plan to use some of my connections, on both the inmate and staff sides, to show students an inside perspective on that whole world.�

Professor of Sociology Francesco Duina is the author of the forthcoming book, Broke and Patriotic: Why Poor Americans Love Their Country. (H. Jay Burns/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Rocque’s colleague Professor of Sociology Francesco Duina, author of the forthcoming book (Stanford University Press), says it’s a great time to teach his course on . “Very timely,â€� he says. “Given the current political climate, I think students will feel interested in topics such as national identity and populism.â€�

Rebecca Corrie, the Phillips Professor of Art and Visual Culture, is excited to teach her long-running First-Year Seminar “.�

The course looks beyond the familiar public face of museums to the complex world of collecting: “the art market, art law, and their sinister underside, art crime.�

Rebecca Corrie, the Phillips Professor of Art and Visual Culture, teaches the First-Year Seminar “Fakers, Forgers, Looters, Thieves.” (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

It’s a “topic that keeps on giving,� she says, referencing two recent news stories, one about the on the suspicion that it was looted from Italy in the 1970s and the other about an of 13 priceless pieces from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Like all ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ geologists, Professor of Geology Mike Retelle is happiest when he’s out in the field, which is why he’s jazzed to teach his course on .

“It’s an intensive field laboratory course that gets students working like geologists,� he says. The class will visit what Retelle calls his “classic sites in Maine,� on the coast, rivers, and lakes. “They get a chance to get their hands dirty, literally.�

Assistant Professor of Physics Aleks Diamond-Stanic looks forward to his newly created First-Year Seminar on .

“We’re doing readings on stereotype threat, on , and how to be successful in sciences, and we’ll have discussions to help students contextualize various current events.�

Marcus Bruce ’77, the Benjamin E. Mays Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies, took a broader perspective than his colleagues.

He’s teaching courses on from 1550 to 1840 and , plus a for majors in religious studies.

Professor Emeritus of Sociology Sawyer Sylvester talks with Professor of Religious Studies Marcus Bruce ’77 after Convocation on Sept. 5, 2017. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

For Bruce, excitement comes from “teaching a new group of students. It’s always interesting to see what they bring to the classroom.�

As he engages his students in dialogue, “something happens in that moment when you exchange ideas,� Bruce says. “You tell them a little bit about America’s religious history, and they bring their insights and perspectives. And that keeps it fresh.�

President Spencer says a flier posted on campus was “absolutely directed at suppressing the vote” — Washington Post

A dastardly attempt to discourage ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students from voting caught the attention of local and national media.

“Somebody doesn’t want ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College students to vote Tuesday,” reported the on Nov. 6.

Orange fliers posted in Commons and residences on Sunday by an unknown person implied that voting in Maine meant that a student must get a Maine driver’s license and, if they owned a car, register it, which could cost “hundreds of dollars.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Orange fliers with false voting information posted on campus on Nov. 6 were a deliberate attempt to discourage students from voting, said President Spencer. (Photograph by Sarah Frankie Sigman ’18)

In a statement issued Monday morning, President Spencer took to the bully pulpit, reaffirming ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students’ legal right to vote and to same-day registration and denouncing the fliers as “clearly a deliberate attempt at voter suppression.” She added:

We are proud of our students’ interest and participation in the electoral process, and I am deeply disturbed that anyone would seek to deter their exercise of the most basic form of citizenship…. Any unofficial communications that suggest otherwise are contrary to the ideals of American democracy.

President Spencer leads off this story by WCSH-TV in Portland by saying that the orange fliers seemed “absolutely directed at suppressing the vote.”

Sarah Frankie Sigman ’19 of Port Washington, N.Y., told the that “rage” was her reaction when she read the flier, labeled as a “Legal Advisory,” on Sunday in Commons.

“This is obviously meant to scare ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students from voting, which is not right,” said Sigman, who spoke to her upbringing and how “the need to vote has been instilled in me since birth.â€�

On Election Day, the editorialized that “the principle of one person, one vote is something to celebrate” yet it has been “under attack” in Maine and in the nation.

Maine law is clear that a U.S. citizen of voting age can vote in Maine and register as late as Election Day by establishing “voting residence,” which can, in the case of a student, be a college dorm.

‘ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ies really showed up’ on Election Day — Lewiston Sun Journal

In a noontime story on Election Day, the Lewiston Sun Journal noted that “ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College students aren’t backing down at the polls.”

Hannah Wilson ’17 of Brooklyn, N.Y., casts her ballot at the Lewiston Armory on Central Avenue, two blocks from campus. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

The Nov. 8 story looked at how students were reacting to a weekend incident in which “mystery fliers” posted around campus “appeared to be an effort keep students from voting.”

Despite the attempt at voter suppression, “ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ies really showed up,â€� said Hannah Prince ’18 of Ardsley, N.Y.

The Sun Journal reported that campus sidewalks were “chalked with many messages urging everyone to vote and pointing the way to the polls” and that “posters and banners hung on walls” in Commons. “And many students were involved in trying to rouse their classmates to go vote.”

Katherine Cook ’18 of South Burlington, Vt., said that people need to realize “this election isn’t just about you, it’s about everyone else.â€�

America’s founding greatness ‘was also an incomplete idealism’ — Portland Press Herald

In an , Associate Professor of History Joseph Hall and four students wrote that America’s greatness under a new president will require teamwork to make the country’s founding ideals “more real.” They continued:

Working together can be difficult. Recent efforts of voter suppression at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College make clear that some wish to silence others. More troublingly, many millions remain outside of the political process, marginalized by their lack of money, their lack of education and simply who they are.

Hall’s coauthors were Ben Aicher ’18 of Falmouth, Maine, Max Milavetz ’20 of Salt Lake City, Andrew Segal ’17 of Glencoe, Ill., and Francesca Steiner ’19 of Salt Lake City, all members of his course “The Age of the American Revolution, 1763-1789.”

Op-ed writers Ben Aicher ’18 of Falmouth, Maine, Max Milavetz ’20 of Salt Lake City, Francesca Steiner ’19 of Salt Lake City, Associate Professor of History Joe Hall, and Andrew Segal ’17 of Glencoe, Ill., pose on Alumni Walk on Nov. 11. (Josh Kuckens/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Turning human waste into biofuel — BBC World News

The BBC World News show Horizons covered a Rwandan-based company founded by Ashley Murray Muspratt ’02 that for industrial kilns and boilers in the cement and textile industry.

The sanitized and odorless fuel has 20 percent more energy and 10 percent less moisture than other biomass fuels. “Africa needs power,� says Horizons host Adam Shaw, and access to power is seen as a key factor in the continent’s economic development.

Ashley Muspratt ’02 founded Waste Enterprisers and its Rwanda operation, Pivot, in 2010.

“Our mission is to radically reduce the cost of waste treatment for developing cities by producing valuable fuel from human waste,� Muspratt tells reporter Fiona Mbabazi. “In the U.S., we treat waste as a disposal problem rather than a resource. We have a huge market opportunity across the African continent and beyond.�

A biology major at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, and its Rwanda operation, Pivot, in 2010. She has a Ph.D. from Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group and was a postdoctoral fellow at the International Water Management Institute in Ghana.

Exhibition of Saudi artwork highlights a fast-evolving art scene — Portland Press Herald

The landmark Museum of Art exhibition Phantom Punch “sizzles and sparkles in the academically open-minded and intersectional museum space,” writes , “but underlying it is an anxiety about how to create a functional contemporary art culture for Saudis.”

In a country without a “robust community of art venues,” Saudi artists are creating an art culture through social media.

“And because 60 percent of Saudis are now 30 years or younger, these artists are trying to build a new cultural path forward for an ever younger and more technologically savvy society.”

From “Elementary 240,” 12 photographic prints and a video by Njoud Alanbari. (Courtesy of the artist)

Echoes of an exposition, and an assassination — New York Times

For three days in Buffalo, New York Times reporter Eve Kahn followed a group of scholars assembled by Professor of History Margaret Creighton as they went about “excavating artifacts and scouring archives” related to the Pan-American Exposition of 1901 and the assassination of William McKinley.

Margaret Creighton is the author of The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City.

Those events are covered in Creighton’s new book, The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City: Spectacle and Assassination at the 1901 World’s Fair.

The exhibition, Kahn writes, was “meant to celebrate America’s ingenuity and dominance over the Western Hemisphere — you know, when America was ‘great again.’”

Creighton explained the fair’s “amusements and philosophical framework, not the least of which were its undeniably racist overtones. The displays, she told me, were ‘all about supremacy.’”

As we’ve done in recent years, we asked a few ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ professors, as they gathered for the academic procession for Convocation on Sept. 8, to share what they’re excited to teach this fall.

Featured are Kirk Read (French and francophone studies), Jason Castro (neuroscience), Carol Dilley (dance), Ke Ren (history), Jamil Drake (religious studies), Margaret Imber (classical and medieval studies), Jim Parakilas (music), and Joe Hall (history).

Titled Wabanaki Hopes for Their Lands: A Conversation, the panel discussion will explore the relationship between the lands of the Wabanaki (a term that refers to Maine’s four Native American tribes) and their cultures.

Open to the public at no cost, the panel is made possible by the Philip J. Otis Endowment at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. For more information, please 207-786-6237.

The college’s annual Otis Lecture follows the discussion at 7:30 p.m. in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St. The Otis lecturer is N. Scott Momaday, whose novel “House Made of Dawn” earned him the first Pulitzer Prize awarded to a Native American.

The event is open to the public at no cost, but tickets are required and can be reserved by e-mailing olinarts@bates.edu. A reception and book signing follow the lecture. For more information, please call 207-786-6135.

The speakers in the 4:15 panel are Brenda Commander, chief of the Houlton Band of Maliseets; David Soctomah, Passamaquoddy tribal representative and historian; and James Francis, Penobscot Nation tribal historian. The panel, says organizer and ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ history professor Joseph Hall, “is a way for us all to learn how we might collaborate more closely as inhabitants of the same state.”

The annual Otis Lecture at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ is funded by the Philip J. Otis Endowment, established in 1996 by a gift from Margaret V.B. and C. Angus Wurtele in memory of their son, Philip, a member of the class of 1995 who died attempting to rescue injured climbers on Mount Rainier.

In recognition of Otis’ appreciation for nature, the endowment helps support ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ programs with an environmental focus, in particular those exploring the spiritual and moral dimensions of humanity’s relationship with the environment.

Information and knowledge are two different things. Teachers like Joseph Hall Jr. proffer the first, but their real work is leading students to the second.

Hall does that so well that ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students chose him for the prestigious 2009 Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Yet in some areas of his specialty, early American history, associate professor Hall remains a student himself. That’s something that excites him about his Short Term unit “Wabanaki History in Maine” (the state’s Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, MicMac and Maliseet Indians are collectively known as Wabanakis).

This year, joining Hall in teaching the course will be James Francis, Penobscot tribal historian, and Rebecca Sockbeson, a Penobscot now completing her doctorate in education policy at the University of Alberta. But the course also includes visits to Penobscot and Passamaquoddy communities, where the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ contingent will interview residents on a variety of issues.

When Hall last taught the course, in 2007, “they would tell us their stories about everything from Penobscot culture and environmental issues to Maine child welfare practices and their impact on Passamaquoddies.”

“In every instance the students would ask, ‘What do you want us to do with this? What do you want us to take away from what you’re telling us?’ — I was always quite proud that they would ask that question.”

The Native Mainers’ answers were consistent. “Every single person said, in some way or another, ‘I want you to tell the truth to everyone else.’ And that’s a really powerful responsibility.”

As part of a program to raise aspirations and increase awareness of college opportunities, 10 high school students from Maine’s Wabanaki tribes visited ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, Bowdoin and Colby colleges over three days in early July.

The program is just one example of “many coordinated efforts by the three colleges and tribal representatives” to reach out to the Native American communities, said Jared Cash ’04, the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ associate dean of admissions who coordinated the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ visit.

The students represented the four Maine Wabanaki tribes: the Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet and Micmac.

At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, the students attended a simulated class presented by Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hall, who spoke about Edmund Muskie ’36 and the Maine Indian Claims Settlement of 1980, when Muskie was secretary of state.

The Wabanaki students and several community members heard from Director of Multicultural Recruitment Marylyn Scott, who explained how admissions officers evaluate applications. Cassandra Dana, 16, of Princeton, Maine, said she found the session “helpful in understanding what colleges are actually looking for.”

“I would love to come back in the school year,” added Glendon Zernicke, 15, of Presque Isle.

The Wabanaki visits to the three Maine campuses reciprocates a visit by ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, Bowdoin and Colby students last February. As guests of the Wabanakis, the college students learned about native culture and met with students from the fourth through eighth grades.