12-02-2025
A new day in the Dawnland
Stewart HuntingtonICT
MILLINOCKET, Maine – Mount Katahdin is one of Maine's crown jewels. The centerpiece of Baxter State Park, its summit is the highest point in the state and the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail.
But for thousands of years it has also been much more: a sacred place to the Wabanaki people where earth and sky converge and the secular and the divine connect. It is the birthplace of the Great Spirit.
Today, the territory is also Ground Zero for a groundbreaking collaboration between Native leaders and Western conservation groups centering Aboriginal values, knowledge and priorities in statewide land protection practices — and amassing resources behind the effort.
The project's centerpiece is the purchase — and planned return to Penobscot Nation stewardship — of 31,000 acres near Katahdin.
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'When Indigenous people are at the forefront, are in the leadership, when our governance is mobilized, that's actually producing the most profound conservation outcomes,' said Darren Ranco, a Penobscot citizen and scholar who sits on the Wabanaki Commission on Land and Stewardship, the driving force behind the land return partnership.
The commission includes representatives from the federally recognized Wabanaki tribes in Maine and brings a unified voice to discussions with the traditional Western conservation community to prioritize parcels of land for purchase and return.
'There's amazing things that we're doing here,' said Ralph Dana, a Passamaquoddy member of the commission.
On the other end of the conference table sits First Light, a consortium of conservation organizations that share an understanding that promoting Aboriginal stewardship of land and resources is fundamentally sound conservation practice. Reaching that conclusion has meant shelving the tools of traditional conservation such as easements and legal proscriptions against development. First Light's goal? Putting land back under Native stewardship. Period.
'First Light represents a huge shift for the conservation community,' said Ranco, a Harvard-trained anthropologist who is a professor of Native studies at the University of Maine. 'They're able to join our collective work and not … want to take credit for it, but really support what is a set of common values across Indigenous [communities].'
The shift — and the growing partnership between the two worlds — did not spring up overnight. In First Light's early days, beginning in 2017, it encountered a hurdle that took years to overcome: a lack of trust.
'Unfortunately, we come from a place where we can't trust because things were taken away from us,' said Shannon Hill, a Mi'kmac Nation citizen who sits on the land and stewardship commission. Hill recounted her early days on the panel when she couldn't accept at face value that her Western counterparts wanted to buy land and … give it to Indians.
'I was like, 'Well, where are the strings?' You know, it's like, there's got to be something else. What's the bottom line here? You just don't give away stuff like that. Especially to us,' she said. 'Nobody ever gives us stuff anymore and it is usually the opposite way.'
But over time, the two sides have grown together into a sturdy alliance.
'First Light has been incredible,' Hill said. 'They have really bridged the conservationists and the private funders with the Wabanaki people in a way so that we can both slowly trust each other.'
The roots of Hill's turnaround are not entirely ephemeral. There are also the tangible outcomes of the collaberation. In December, First Light closed on — and returned to the Mi'kmaqs — a 103-acre property abutting the tribe's reservation in Littleton, Maine. The property includes wetlands and woods full of traditional medicines and a small lake, providing the tribe its first unfettered water access.
'This is a big deal,' said Mills. 'We're really hoping to utilize this as a place to put a summer camp for the youth to go down and to canoe and kayak and fish. … This is going to be a game-changer in our history.'
And maybe beyond. The Mi'kmaq land and a 1,300-acre parcel First Light community bought and returned to the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians in December — and eight other Landback projects in the pipeline — attest to the maturation of the cooperative model driven by the Wabanaki commission.
But it's the work on the huge parcel of land near Mount Katahdin that speaks to the collaboration's transformational power.
'This can be a really good example and set a great precedent for future land return projects to come, whether it's in Maine or across the nation,' said Anne Read, the Maine land protection manager for the Trust for Public Land.
In 2022 the trust bought the sprawling parcel from a timber investment outfit for $32 million. It is now raising the money — along with the tribe — to retire the debt taken on to buy the land. The end goal is to return the land to the Penobscot Nation – with no strings attached.
So far the partners have raised more than $11 million and when the project is done and the land is back in Penobscot hands, the result will be the largest land return between a U.S.-based nonprofit and a tribal nation in American history.
'We're going to look back and the history books are going to talk about us, because this is such a major movement where we're reclaiming land and bringing land back to our people,' said Hill. And, in the case of the Katahdin land, not just any land. Sacred land.
'I think the return represents the core of our culture,' said Ranco. 'The quantity is big. It's also big in terms of its meaning.'
The parcel is known to the Penobscot as Wáhsehtək and includes long stretches of the East Branch of the Penobscot River. It's a place that, according to Penobscot language teacher Gabrial Paul, is central to the Wabanaki people, or People of the Dawn or Dawnland.
'The place where we are now holds all our stories,' he told ICT, standing in a clearing in the woods that offered a view over Lake Millinocket to Mount Katahdin, 'And the land beneath us we relate to as our mother.'
To Ranco it is home. 'It's where our clans have been hunting for thousands of years,' he said.
And maybe, said Chuck Loring, the Penobscot Nation's director of natural resources, for thousands of years more.
'The land is very important for us to be able to practice traditional lifeways and make sure that we're able to harvest subsistence species such as moose, deer, brook trout, other fish,' he said, while driving up a dirt road that crosses the Wáhsehtək parcel and ends at the Wabanaki Welcome Center at the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument.
Loring turned off on a side road that led to a small pond. Walking around, he explained the area highlighted everything the property had to offer: mixed forest of brown ash, spruce, pine, maple and birch; cool clear streams; and still water for bird and beaver habitat.
The land is not yet in Penobscot hands, 'but I'm getting calls from tribal members asking if they can go hunting,' Loring said.
A personal bonus? 'My four-year-old daughter loves it out here,' he said with a grin.
No one in the First Light group or the Wabanaki Commission on Land and Stewardship is counting chickens – or looking past the successes in front of them. But neither are they bashful about eyeing the potential spread of their experiment.
'I'm a scholar, so for me it's like the scholarship is actually supporting this,' Ranco said. 'It's saying, when Indigenous people are at the forefront, are in the leadership, our governance is mobilized, that's actually producing the most profound conservation outcomes around the world. We're really just … scratching the surface of something that is even more transformational.'
The potential for change lies within — and beyond — Native communities.
'We have done Native collaboration work for the past many years since we started in the '90s,' said Read from the Trust for Public Land. 'So this is a priority for us. But I think on this scale, 31,000 acres is definitely historic. Land Return is starting to become a larger priority within our organization and becoming more and more a part of how we implement our mission.'
Brett Ciccotelli from First Light went a step further.
'A big part of what we see with First Light work is that it can expand, not as a recipe for how this can be done elsewhere, but for an example that shows there are ways where the conservation community and the Indigenous communities can share common interests and common goals and work together,' Ciccotelli said.
The Wabanaki Commission on Land and Stewardship's Dana said the impact could go far beyond Maine.
'We can be an example and can be a template for this kind of work throughout the country, throughout North America and maybe even worldwide,' Dana said.
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