Seven sites.
Seven months.
Seven chances to move in solidarity
toward truth & transformation.
Over the course of 2024, partners committed to surfacing the truths of colonization and oppression in the place known for millennia by the Wabanaki people as the Dawnland will engage with local communities on a journey across land and water, and across time.
Together, we will shine a light on the ways that Indigenous, Black, & settler-descendent
populations are represented—or not—
in Maine’s commemorative landscape.
PARTNERS
Convened by the public history nonprofit Atlantic Black Box, WHERE is carried out in partnership with Wabanaki REACH, Indigo Arts Alliance, Community Change Inc., In Kinship Collective, The Third Place, Pejepscot Portage Mapping Project, York History Partners, Maine Black Community Development, and Momentum Conservation.
Purpose
Walking in solidarity to forward ongoing processes of truthseeking and transformation, our aim is to catalyze and support creative and embodied approaches to antiracist and decolonial historical recovery efforts across the state and the region.
Participate
Please join us in this movement to reckon with all that has happened here and to engage in dialogue around ways that our past continues to shape our present-day relationships and our possible futures. Walk with us. Volunteer. Support our work. Help spread the word. WHERE STARTS HERE.
WHERE2024 will challenge widely accepted narratives and silences and contribute to ongoing processes of truth-seeking and transformation, catalyzing and galvanizing antiracist and decolonial historical recovery movements across the state.
Taking a holistic approach, the effort will involve participatory archival research, public history literacy-building, grassroots organizing, site-specific learning, storytelling, collective dialogue and care practices, artistic interventions, relationship building,
and—of course—walking.
The Walk for Historical and Ecological Recovery series takes inspiration from the Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage, a remarkable collective memory and healing project that took place 25 years ago when 60 participants retraced the route of the transatlantic slave trade, largely on foot.
While Maine was not part of that original itinerary, we now know that merchants and mariners from this area played an outsized role in slave trading, particularly after the practice was banned in 1808. Research and education efforts have also begun to reveal the specific entanglements of colonization, Indigenous genocide and land theft, and enslavement as they manifested here. But these difficult truths, which fly in the face of the region’s cherished myth of heroic moral rectitude, remain largely absent from public discourse, as well as from school curricula and the memoryscape that surrounds us.