Saturday, September 21, 2024
4:00 - 8:00 pm
Vaughan Woods & Historic Homestead, Hallowell, Maine
The Kennebec Watershed Walk
Created in collaboration with In Kinship Collective and Vaughan Woods and Historic Homestead, this walk seeks to support Wabanaki represencing in the Kennebec watershed as a process that is interwoven with local entanglements in the transatlantic slave trade. In Kinship Collective is developing place-based performance works that attend to Wabanaki displacement, and continuance, in the Kennebec watershed as one move toward the return of stewardship access for Wabanaki communities. VWHH is working to build a collection of primary resources that will become the foundation of their efforts to interpret and share the Vaughan family’s history as owners of enslaved labor plantations in the colonial West Indies; and as merchants involved in trading Hallowell area timber and goods in ports across the Caribbean for commodities grown and produced by enslaved people. All of this work seeks healing and reparations through complex, relationship-driven, multivocal storytelling in and with place.
Hosted at the Vaughan Homestead, this event will include:
A self-guided house tour of the Vaughan homestead, including exhibits curated from the family archives that support learning about relationships between the Kennebec River and the transatlantic slave trade
Discussion surrounding the tradition of Wabanaki guiding and the role of this practice in cultivating cross-cultural learning and respect for Indigenous sovereignty
A walk along portions of the trail network at Vaughan Woods that emphasizes group reflection and the questions “Why here? Why now?”
Listening to excerpts of In Kinship’s performance work-in-progress: Land Back Kennebec: An Audio Place Play that illuminate connections between Wabanaki place names, settler-colonial and Wabanaki worldviews, and land relations
A printed map of the Kennebec River and additional learning materials
This event will take place rain or shine. Please bring clothing appropriate for all weather, good walking shoes, and water. We welcome you to arrive early and to bring food for yourself or others to share — please label anything you plan to share with allergen information.
In Kinship Collective is Lilah Akins, Cory Tamler, Jennie Hahn, Emilia Dahlin, Devon Kelley-Yurdin, Darren Ranco, and Tyler Rai. An interdisciplinary and cross-cultural group, our learning and creation process follows the tradition of Wabanaki Guiding and works to center Indigenous knowledge and experience. Land Back Kennebec: An Audio Place Play is an ongoing and iterative work-in-progress started by In Kinship Collective in October 2023. It is made up of encounters in the watershed of the Kennebec River that you can have in any order, all together or separately, with others or alone.
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, Vaughan Woods & Historic Homestead of Hallowell, Maine is a non-profit nature preserve and non-traditional house museum that seeks to connect people to place through nature, history and the arts.
