Sweetgrass at Acadia: How Wabanaki Scientists Changed the Study, and the Results

First published in the National Park Service's Park Science magazine, Winter 2021.

Bass Harbor Marsh in Acadia National Park, where Wabanaki families were co-investigators, sharing their knowledge of sweetgrass ecology with academic scientists. NPS / Jonny Schmidt.

A practice kept out of the park

Each summer, families come to favorite places on the Maine coast to pick sweetgrass, whose fragrance — vanilla, salt, evergreen and earth — lingers as it becomes baskets, braids, pottery, medicine, ceremony and prayer. Picking it also spurs the grass to send up new shoots.

The Wabanaki — the Maliseet, Micmac, Passamaquoddy and Penobscot — have lived in the Acadia region since time immemorial. Gathering sweetgrass was once common along the Maine shore, but European settlement has pushed them from the coast, and for most of the last century the federal government barred Wabanaki people from harvesting sweetgrass in Acadia National Park.

In 2015 the Park Service issued regulations letting federally recognized tribes gather certain plants in parks — a path to renew cultural practices. But under the National Environmental Policy Act, a harvesting agreement needs an environmental assessment finding "no significant impact," with experiments showing harvest won't harm the plants or ecosystem. At Acadia, Wabanaki scientists and cultural experts have led the response, and their communities chose sweetgrass as the first priority.

Suzanne Greenlaw, a University of Maine doctoral candidate and member of the Houlton Band of Maliseets, points out that such assessments are a burden on Native communities. Western science privileges objectivity, random sampling, statistics and the written word, which sidelines Wabanaki knowledge built on practice and oral teaching; the Park Service, she argues, too often treats "best available science" as only published research.

Letting the gatherers lead

With Park Service funding, Greenlaw is studying how harvest affects sweetgrass in Bass Harbor Marsh, Acadia's largest salt marsh, with Michelle Baumflek, a research biologist with the USDA Forest Service, and fourteen Wabanaki gatherers and their families. Botanist Glen Mittelhauser of the Maine Natural History Observatory had surveyed the marsh, and he and Baumflek laid out transects with square-meter plots to harvest and control plots to leave alone, to be measured the next year.

On harvest day, the problem was obvious: the plots marked for harvest were not where gatherers would have chosen. Baumflek recalls that this was unintentionally disrespectful and kept the gatherers from sharing their knowledge — the very aim of the study. So she and Greenlaw added a parallel experiment: gatherers picked their own spots and harvested as they always had, and researchers set up plots there and interviewed them in the field. Acadia program manager Rebecca Cole-Will says listening to the gatherers opened up a wealth of knowledge — about sweetgrass, how it's harvested, how marshes are judged healthy, and why gathering matters culturally.

The results

Earlier studies had found sweetgrass grows back denser after harvest, like a mowed lawn. Preliminary results presented at the 2021 Acadia National Park Science Symposium showed that the gatherer-chosen plots had, on average, a 30 percent increase in stem density after harvest — and the botanist-chosen plots had no change. Mittelhauser concluded the original design was flawed: counting stems along transects took a toll on the plants, and it ignored the kinds of sweetgrass gatherers prefer. Not all sweetgrass is the same.

Reclaiming archeology

Sweetgrass grows at the upper edge of salt marshes, a zone that could disappear as seas rise; rising water and storm waves also threaten Acadia's other Indigenous sites. Most of the park's 24 documented archeological sites are coastal shell mounds hundreds or thousands of years old; one group on Isle au Haut dates back 4,000 years. The Park Service recommended them for the National Register as a district but withdrew the recommendation because erosion had damaged them. Materials excavated there decades ago were locked away in 1981, with reports marked confidential.

Bonnie Newsom, a University of Maine archeologist and member of the Penobscot Nation, holds a Second Century Stewardship fellowship to re-examine those collections, with Wabanaki interns Isaac St. John and Natalie Dana-Lolar, and to write a new, accessible report. She argues archeology's claim to manage Wabanaki heritage has distanced communities from their own culture, and this project puts Wabanaki people at the forefront. That means new words: not "middens," which suggests garbage, for shell-bearing sites that meant far more; families rather than "occupants"; pottery and stone tools as art and gifts from ancestors. In Passamaquoddy, the word for clay pot, qahqolunsquey, is animate, like words for people and animals — a clue, Newsom says, to how past people saw these objects. Cole-Will, who worked those same sites early in her career, recalls that archeology then gave no thought to the Indigenous people living there today.

Shared stewardship

In November 2021, the White House committed to bringing Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge into federal science and policy, citing the Acadia sweetgrass study as an example. Greenlaw notes that Wabanaki scientists answer to their own communities for their results, and she and Baumflek hold a yearly gatherers' workshop to share findings and work together on permits. At the 2021 symposium, Penobscot gatherer Kyle Lolar described sweetgrass as one of the four sacred medicines, a link between two worlds now being re-established. For Newsom, strengthening cultural heritage makes communities more resilient and better stewards of their homelands — work that benefits everyone and is just beginning.

Sources

Based on Catherine Schmitt, "Gathering Sweetgrass and Renewing the Past: How Science at Acadia Is Making a Course Correction," Park Science 35(1), Winter 2021, National Park Service; published by the National Park Service. The words of the researchers and gatherers are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.