a Culture of Survival: Allen sockabasin
IN 1999, the Maine Humanities Council’s Born to Read program convened a committee of librarians and educators to select books for its new initiative, Many Eyes, Many Voices: Talking About Difference Through Children’s Literature. The committee’s mandate was to cull twelve picture books from the multitudes in print, striking a perfect balance of topics and styles without compromising quality. Unfortunately, there was one notable gap in the otherwise bountiful field of contenders: no suitable children’s book about Maine’s Native American population could be found. The few titles available were either too stereotypical or too distant—tales populated by warriors in headresses, set amidst Plains buffalo or Southwest deserts. With extreme regret, Born to Read decided to launch its initiative without Native American representation.
That all changed last year, when Tilbury House Press in Gardiner, Maine, published Thanks to the Animals by Passamaquoddy storyteller Allen Sockabasin. This tale—about a baby who is sheltered from a harsh winter storm by gentle animals—has resonated with many readers. It was the top seller in the book department at L.L.Bean’s flagship store during the holiday season. Thanks to the Animals is not a traditional Passamaquoddy story, but rather, a family story that Sockabasin heard from his mother. It does not attempt to explain or encapsulate an entire culture, but its setting and characters present an opportunity to talk with children about Maine’s Native American population.
Since adding the book to its Many Eyes, Many Voices collection, Born to Read has heard about preschool classrooms captivated by the story, curious about the animals, concerned for the lost baby, and eager to tell their own stories of moving between winter and summer homes. Building on this interest, educators have introduced children to animal names in the Passamaquoddy language, either using the index in the book or the Tilbury House website. Sockabasin is thrilled by these accounts, for every child who hears his language becomes another potential advocate for its restoration.
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The characters in Allen Sockabasin’s picture book, Thanks to the Animals—Joo Tum and his wife, Zoo Sap and his brothers and sisters—are based on his own large family, which his father struggled to support after his mother’s death. Sockabasin recalls sharing a single sleeve of saltine crackers with ten brothers and sisters. At the age of eleven, he started his first business: hauling garbage for 25 cents a load in a 55-gallon drum he’d lashed to a wagon. “Something magical happened when I earned those first quarters,” he recalls. “I got control over my hunger.” Sockabasin attributes his work ethic to the “culture of survival” in his village, in which self-sufficiency and ingenuity were highly valued. By way of illustration, he launches into an archetypal story of American boyhood: a neighborhood baseball game interrupted by a ball shattering a window, children dispersed in an effort to avoid blame. From his hiding place, Sockabasin watched a local craftsman gather the shards of glass, which he would later use to plane white ash for axe handles.
Sockabasin traces the loss of this culture of survival to the disappearance of the Passamaquoddy language. He does not agree with all the methods used in the attempt to rescue his language (he speaks with scorn of the scholars who devised an orthography before realizing that most native speakers could not read or write), but he is a steadfast supporter of restoration efforts that involve a genuine understanding of oral culture. He teaches immersion courses to Passamaquoddy students at the University of Maine and incorporates the language into all of his performances. While he instructs them in grammar and pronunciation, Sockabasin’s first priority is to leave them with a sense of pride. “No one will remember words or sounds of a language they are ashamed to speak,” he reasons.
His dedication to Native language is inextricably linked to his love of music. He remembers listening to his mother sing traditional songs; then, after she was gone, playing his only cassette recording of a girl singing in Maliseet over and over. Music and stories remind us who we are and where we come from, and Sockabasin believes that the true purpose of education is to illuminate these mysteries. He’s not concerned about the multitude of other cultural influences competing with traditional music for the attention of the youth in his community. After all, his mother’s melodies competed with his father’s singing in Latin, and in the evenings, all singing was supplanted by the strains of country music broadcast from West Virginia on WWVA radio.
Every summer, Sockabasin puts his educational theories into practice when he invites 35 Native American children from the most disenfranchised communities in the country—afflicted by alcoholism, drug addiction, poverty, and HIV/AIDS—to his rural camp in Maine. The children sleep in tents, paddle a fleet of fifteen canoes, and meet speakers of Passamaquoddy—who cannot necessarily communicate with every child but can certainly communicate the power of Native language.
One summer, a boy at camp caught a turtle and didn’t know what to do with it. “You have to let it go,” his peers insisted. “It’s against the law to keep it!”
Thirty-five expectant faces turned to Sockabasin, who looked directly at the boy who’d made the catch. “It’s up to you,” said the former tribal chief.
The boy’s eyes widened. “No one has ever said that to me before,” he said quietly, and released the creature.
Shard by shard, Allen Sockabasin is helping to reconstruct a culture of survival.
