Have you ever had a moment in your life where your perception of truth dissolved? My moment came when a professor studying indigenous people in Maine visited the public library where I was working. The library had a significant native artifact on display, the professor and I chatted casually as we looked at the handiwork and conversed about local histories that might provide more insight into early indigenous culture in the area.
With all sincerity I told her what I learned. That the town had largely been populated by soldiers returning from the Revolutionary War who had been given land grants. As they moved north and west in Maine the native peoples fled north to Canada. She kindly told me that it was likely the indigenous population was exterminated and settlers were paid for scalps. Many local histories in Maine used “moved north” as a way to cover up systematic genocide. Wham!
In 1755, the price for a man’s scalp was roughly $12,000 by today’s standards, about half for a woman’s scalp and even less for a child’s. This conversation over a beautiful bark basket changed my life forever. It was then I realized that all these histories I had read had been written by the victors in a watered-down version of the truth. I can only imagine what it was like for our upcoming guest speaker to realize that her ancestors had participated in an often overlooked part of Maine’s history, slavery.
Several years ago, Vana Carmona, a descendant of several notable early Maine families inadvertently discovered that her ancestors had enslaved people of color. This led her to begin a fascinating journey to tell the largely undocumented story of enslavement in our state. Vana Carmona will be at McArthur Library on Tuesday, Feb. 21 at 6:30 p.m. to share details of her research which became The Prince Project.
Vana Carmona, M.A. is the Maine Community research director of Atlantic Black Box and the founder of The Prince Project, a database of over 1,800 people of color who lived in Maine prior to 1800. She is a docent and guide for several historic sites in the Portland area, including Maine Historical Society and Spirits Alive (Eastern Cemetery). She is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and completed her Master of Liberal Arts at California State University–Sacramento. She is descended from a number of early European settlers, with the first of these arriving in New England in 1620 and moving into Maine in 1633.
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