Some of it was rural, such as the easy familiarity of small town life. In all of it is a bond with a past that is hard to recapture in contemporary life. The issue is whether the tribes have sovereignty over what they consider internal matters, or whether outsiders can wrest from them what they believe is only theirs. It is a classic confrontation, and given that the system in which the tribes will be judged is not theirs and that the state is taking the side of the paper companies, an improvement in relations appears remote. As Dana explains in this week's Cover Story, the Penobscot River is the tribe's lifeblood, its ancestral home, the key to a distinctive culture.
Tribal members take personally the many affronts to the river.
How much better it would be to join them in restoring the river rather than standing in opposition, branches and leaves instead of a unified trunk, parsing words in a courtroom. Leaving New York City for Nova Scotia, she hoped to live the good life in the manner of Helen and Scott Nearing. I'd be starved. I thought her book was a handbook. She returned to filmmaking, at first working with the National Film Board of Canada, and later finding her way to Portland, where one day in the mid-1990s she happened upon a video interview with Helen Nearing.