Stillness
Interactive performance among 20 artists and natural reversing fall in Sheepscot Maine exploring ways to re-connect to living networks in our local bioregion.
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LongGreenHouse
Indigenous Culture, Permaculture, Digital Culture LongGreenHouse, UMaine’s first Wabanaki/Permaculture Center operated a “communiversity” linking Wabanaki LongHouse Elders gkisedtanamoogk and Miigam’agan, UMaine’s Still Water Lab and Permaculture courses, the Wassokeag K-12 school, and community workshops. Formed in 2004 as a cross-cultural partnership for regeneration of cultural and ecological networks, LongGreenHouse wove together indigenous culture, permaculture, and digital culture exploring synergies and cross cultural collaboration in the spirit of gratitude and reparation to local Indigenous people upon whose lands we live and thrive. Together we developed a Living/Learning model for thriving cultures in the Gulf of Maine bioregion based on the intersection of evolutionary wisdom, natural patterns, and social networking. LongGreenHouse housed and supported the Wassookeag School, based on an experiential and ecological curriculum; operated a Permaculture research lab for UMaine graduate and undergrads; developed and implemented protocols for Longhouse living in partnership with Wabanaki elders; and developed global social networks with state-of-the-art network technologies. In partnership with MOFGA, we also created the Still Water Permaculture Guild to support a Permaculture Journeyperson program inviting UMaine grads and undergrads to live on site and participate in the permaculture “communiversity”. Founders of the project include StillWater co-directors Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito, gkisedtanamoogk and Miigam’agan, and Debbie […]
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Ice Tectonics
Ice Tectonics (slideshow above) is a photo and ecological study of the changing nature of fresh and salt water freezing and movement patterns as seen from a footbridge in Frankfort, Maine. The selection of 44 images below is taken from nearly 2000 images captured over a two year period from a single location. The whole collection is still in the process of editing, curation, and arrangement, but the gallery below gives a glimpse some of the kinds of images captured and of the changing morphology of fresh, salt, freezing and thawing water at this coastal ecotone.
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Wild Blueberry Museum
The Maine Wild Blueberry Museum is one of the main projects that grew out of three years (2017-2020) of community engaged teaching and research in collaboration with Maine Wild Blueberry growers. To address small farmer’s concerns, the Wild Difference Project linked community partners with students from 5 university classes with the following outcomes: Launch of this online Maine Wild Blueberry Museum, Designs for the inaugural issue of Spire: The Maine Journal of Conservation and Sustainability, illustrations by student Colby Fogg Grant writing for NEH, NBRG, NextGen, with funding provided by NextGen A parallel social media/Facebook campaign, including creation of wild blueberry “emoji” in iTunes Funding for and development of a physical museum in Jonesboro, Maine Planning for a National Heritage Area in Downeast Maine Collaboration with local Washington County High schools in a mentor program to teach digital story skills and collect community blueberry raking stories for the museum I presented this material at two national community engagement conferences and planned to present “The Wild Difference: Hearing voices of small farmers and endangered plants in Downeast Maine” at the Compact20 Conference in Seattle, Washington April 2020, until it was cancelled due to COVID19. Democracy, Opportunity, and Voice (conference themes) in the […]
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InBalance
Marnie Sinclair’s work tackles the flows of life and the need to make sure they are in balance, This video captures some of her ecologically motivated work.
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Ebb & Flow
When the gods die, this maid shall ride her mother’s paths
-the Lay of Vafthrudnir 47
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Belfast Ecovillage
From 2007 until 2014, our family was part of the design, development, building and living in the Belfast Ecovillage. As co-founders, we helped design our net-zero “passiv-haus” homes, learned skills for local governance, shared permaculture and farming techniques, made music, fun and food together. We still maintain friendships with current members.
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Request For Ceremony
Gratitude Our whole way of Life is one continuous Song, one continuous Ceremony. The way we move is a dance. Ceremony is Life itself. It is the way we do things. Ceremony, to us, is the daily Life; everything we do, everything we think about is all part of that same expression…and we are thankful for it. –gkisedtanamoogk, Wampanoag Colonization All humans are, or have been, indigenous to a given place at one time. Colonization is the process of civilizing indigenous people. To civilize means to break kinship bonds between people, and to sever their ties to the land and all of its beings; To civilize is to break natural networks of interdependence and replace them with violent hierarchies of control in order to centralize power and wealth. Ceremony Request for Ceremony elicits, distributes, and records some examples of Ceremony generated by people attempting to practice or re-activate their kinship with the Beings of Creation, and to remember or reconnect to their Home. Each entry in Request for Ceremony includes a greeting which locates the contributor (character) and their relation to those already part of the local mesh (contact), as well as a description of the ceremony, location with map, […]
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Cross Cultural Partnership
What do electronic and indigenous networks have in common? What does sovereignty mean outside of nation-states? How can we build networks of trust in the 21st century? The Cross-Cultural Partnership working group has brought together artists, scholars, and activists from over a dozen indigenous and developed nations for the purpose of answering questions like these. Its ongoing mission is to envision a legal and cultural framework for sharing connected knowledge in a way that is responsible and sustainable.
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