Native people arrived in Maine at the end of the last Ice Age, around 13,000 years ago. They came in small family groups and survived unimaginably cold winters and animals such as the giant beaver and cave bear. Fortunately, they had their great god, Gluskape, who slowly melted the ice and rid the woods of terrifying serpents. But he was also a liar and a big tease! It was a time when people, animals, and stones were equal; when Gluskape could be as large as a mountain or as small as a mouse, when the Star People traveled to the treetops. Slowly, things started to change. The tribes squabbled and Gluskape hated jealousy. It was m'teouin that people and animals needed-inner strength. The stories instruct people in the ways of hunting, the lore of plants, and the skills they needed every day. There is still much for us to learn about Maine as the next great climate change approaches. Will we hurt the land with our jealousy and greed? Or will we learn to be alone and appreciate the magic of every stone? The Native storytellers who still remembered these tales 12 centuries later included Tomah Joseph, Marie Saksis, Louis Mitchell, and Noel Neptune. By then, few Wabanakis remained and efforts began to preserve the language and write down fragments, mostly from the Fundy area in Nova Scotia.
I had an unusually healthy childhood-sailing across the ocean on a steamship at age 7, visiting England,Scotland, and Norway, and playing endlessly with my dollhouse, which perhaps eventually lead to writing many books for children. Because I live in a refugee resettlement city Portland, ME, I wrote about displaced kids from war areas, Sudan, Kurdistan, and Kosovo. I was also an art teacher. The book, Soldier Mom, now 20 years old, was written during the first Gulf War, when we suddenly used a "reserve" army instead of an enlisted one. I had two active sons, dogs, rabbit, chameleon, hamster and later assisted 40 Kosova high school students. I loved gardening, painting, reading. But suddenly began to hurt everywhere, falling, weak. Nothing helped.I had to leave my job as an art teacher but was still able to write.
Nearly twenty years (plus a bout with severe cancer) into feeling weak, I now know I have Myasthenia Gravis, a neuromuscular disease that affects your eyes, breathing, endurance and speech.
I still write, paint, sing, practice my standup comedy, and take photographs. Really nothing inside me has changed at all. I fight to improve, laugh over the silliness of ordinary life, and am curious about all sorts of things.
