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VPR's coverage of arts and culture in the region.

Vera Longtoe Sheehan for WHM: Molly Ockett

Kwai Nedobak! Nd'elewizi Vera Longtoe Sheehan du Elnu Wôbanaki – that translates into English as: Hello my friends! My name is Vera Longtoe Sheehan, and I’m a citizen of the Elnu Abenaki Tribe.

I’m here to honor the countless generations of Wôbanaki women who were fiber artists and to the women that will carry this art form to future generations of our people.

Most of their names have been lost to history, but they’re remembered for the textiles they created – and when we’re lucky, through the surviving textiles themselves.

The late Jim Petersen, a professor and Anthropology Department Chair at UVM, documented an extensive legacy of textile fragments dating back thousands of years that have been found in Abenaki archaeological sites.

And I’ve personally had the honor of studying some of these surviving 18th-century textile pieces.

The Maine Historical Society has an 18th-century plant fiber object in their collection that was made by an Abenaki woman known as Molly Ockett, a healing woman who took care of people in her community, and who was also a talented fiber artist. As an herbalist, Molly would have been a keeper of extensive knowledge about different types of plants and what they were used for.

She would also have known how to harvest plants like the milkweed or dogbane that she used to weave bags such as the fiber object that has come to be known as Molly’s Purse.

My father, John Sheehan, is an eighty-four-year-old Abenaki culture bearer who fondly remembers carts full of milkweed being delivered to his grandmother “Lena” during his childhood.

He recalls watching his grandmother and aunties talking and laughing as they made milkweed string - then the hours they spent weaving it into market bags that they sold for less than twenty-five cents apiece. Later “Lena” taught him how to weave and he passed this family knowledge on to me - his daughter.

I’m honored to carry Lena’s fiber arts knowledge and pass it on to my daughter Lina who will carry it on to the next seven generations.

It is important for us to continue teaching weaving and other old-style art forms to revitalize our culture that connects us to our ancestors, our traditions, and n’dakinna – our homeland - now known as Vermont, New Hampshire, Northern Massachusetts, Southern Maine, and Quebec.

Vera offers educational programs on Native American culture, traditions, and crafts, which are appropriate for audiences of all ages. She has been doing lectures and demonstrations at tribal events, schools, museums and historic sites for more than twenty years. Some of these locations are the American Museum of Natural History, Ft. Ticonderoga, Lake Champlain Maritime Museum and the Echo Lake Aquarium & Science Center. She has also done presentations at conferences for organizations such as the Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges and Vermont Alliance for the Social Studies. In addition to being a citizen of the Elnu Abenaki Tribe and member of the Woodland Confederacy, she is also a member of the Textile Society of America and New England Museum Association.
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