BRUNSWICK — When he leaned in, Darrell Newell could smell the sweetgrass in the photo.

Later that evening, in an auditorium at Bowdoin College before an audience at least 100 strong, Newell, the former vice chief of the Passamaquoddy Tribe at Motahkomikuk (Indian Township), spoke of his childhood on the reservation in northern Maine.

“We were poor, but we were rich in culture, in language and in our identity,” Newell said.

Newell was one of 38 storytellers who shared oral histories as part of a Wabanaki REACH initiative called “Beyond the Claims — Stories from the Land & the Heart.”

An audio archive of those stories and a photography exhibit hosted by the Bowdoin library opened last week, followed by a panel event featuring Newell, story-gatherer and Wabanaki REACH board co-chair Juanita Grant and project coordinator Kate Russell. The panel was moderated by Penobscot historian Maria Girouard.

REACH, which stands for reconciliation, engagement, advocacy, change and healing, is a Wabanaki-led nonprofit founded in 2008. The organization came about during the process of interrogating the state’s history of removing children from Indigenous communities through child welfare proceedings. The archive of stories shared during that truth and reconciliation process also lives in Bowdoin’s special collections.

“Beyond the Claims” moves discussion of the 1980 settlement between Wabanaki Nations and the state of Maine “from the head to the heart,” Girouard said.

In 1980, Wabanaki Nations and the state and federal governments ended nearly a decade of negotiations over tribal claims to 12.5 million acres in Maine. The resulting settlement, enshrined in federal and state law, today subjects the tribes to a unique legal framework that gives the state heightened authority over tribal activities.

At the time, it provided a much-needed infusion of cash and access to land and included conditions whose effects, negotiators have said, were not evident back then.

The deal, which had to be ratified by the president, was also made with the looming threat that then-presidential hopeful Ronald Reagan would not sign it if he won the upcoming 1980 election.

President Jimmy Carter signed the deal on Oct. 11, 1980, 24 days before he lost re-election to Reagan.

The discourse around the settlement at the time was far from uniform, said Girouard, an expert in the land claims settlement. The oral history project enshrines the multiple and complex experiences of those who lived through the negotiations or the world created by them.

Maya Attean, a Penobscot and Passamaquoddy photographer whose work is displayed in Bowdoin’s Ramp Gallery alongside the photography of Nolan Altvater, also collected oral histories from her community and family.

“It brought context to my entire life,” she said. “Growing up on a reservation, I was directly affected by this (settlement), even though I didn’t know it at the time.”

The REACH archive is rich with detailed stories from members of all four Wabanaki Nations, including several who have died in the last year. Also in the archive are stories collected from non-native people, including John Paterson, who as a deputy attorney general for Maine represented the state during the land claims negotiations.

For Grant, these stories are a navigational tool for life.

“It tells you part of who you are,” she said.

Bowdoin’s special collections is facilitating access to the archive, said the library’s interim Director Kat Stefko. The college does not own the materials, and Stefko acknowledged in her introduction that the work comes as Bowdoin grapples with its own ties to colonialism, which included profiteering off the theft of Wabanaki land.

Bowdoin professors are already working the materials into curricula, said special collections librarian Marieke Van Der Steenhoven.

The photography and multimedia exhibit, titled “Wikhikonol,” will be on view at least through June 1.

Reuben M. Schafir is a Report for America corps member who writes about Indigenous communities for the Portland Press Herald.