(bright music) - Coming up next on "RFD Maine," we'll visit Pleasant Point Reservation where young people learn about their heritage.

At Narraguagus High School, students record the lives and experiences of long-time residents in Eastern Maine.

And we'll learn why many of our state's young people are drawn to a rural way of life that just can't be beat, all coming right up on "The Best of RFD Maine."

Please stay with us.

- [Announcer] Production of "RFD Maine" is made possible through a television demonstration grant from rural development, part of the US Department of Agriculture.

(gentle music) - [Child] It's so cute!

- [Teacher] Oh, I have asked them what they liked the best, and it's usually, it's either the food or the worms.

- Children learn about agriculture in a variety of hands-on ways, like using everyday materials to see how soil is made.

Hi, I'm Sandy Phippen, your host for "The Best of RFD, Maine," and it's amazing that I'm standing here in this East Holden classroom, because it reminds me exactly of the classroom I grew up in and went to school in in Mount Desert, Fairai.

I assume most Maine schools were like this at one time.

It's also amazing when I think of it now, how we thought the farms of Maine would always be there.

But in my case, in my hometown, there aren't hardly any left.

I remember growing up and listening to the roosters crowing in the morning and the sounds of my grandfather's saw mill but none of those sounds are around now.

We've tried to preserve our culture.

We're trying to anyway, on a project I worked on called the Maine Literature Project that produced the book "Maine Speaks."

There's a section on the Indians, because of course their culture was oral.

And it's just now that we're trying to put down the actual language of the Passamaquoddys.

For instance, in this section, we've got a Passamaquoddy poem written in that language and then translated into English.

We're going to go now, in this segment, to the Passamaquoddy Reservation at Pleasant Point and meet with Joe Nicholas and other people who are trying to preserve not only the cultural traditions and the language, but a sense of pride.

(flute music) - Discrimination exists from lack of education, lack of knowledge about people.

And once this is what I strive to do here is that to eliminate that.

The Indians have always been portrayed as welfare recipients, people who were lazy, who were relying on someone else to take care of them.

Well, that's not true.

I felt it was so necessary to have a little museum.

We started about nine years ago in order to, I guess its function is to be able to create a good positive image to the youngsters growing up of who we really are, not the way that we've been portrayed for so many years.

We are now righting history, and I spell that R-I-G-H-T. We were very fortunate to be able to get all of the artifacts that we have present here, the basketry and so forth, to portray to the youngsters, indeed, we had some very proud and still have, proud artists that work on basketry.

And then of course the other part of the culture is we're trying to instill in others is the language.

(speaking Passamaquoddy) - [Child] Cake!

- Cake.

(speaking Passamaquoddy) This is the Beatrice Rafferty School in Pleasant Point, Perry, Maine.

I'm teaching them our past Passamaquoddy language.

(speaking Passamaquoddy) - Crow.

- Crow.

(laughs) As a child, I was spoken with our language every day.

And today, when you speak to the children in our language, they don't understand you.

And that's something that I don't want them to miss out on.

So that is one of the reasons why I accepted this job to teach our children, so they can someday be very proud of who they are and what they are.

(flute music) - The culture is a wonderful culture.

I love the Passamaquoddy culture.

I'm not Passamaquoddy but just listening to it, listening to the language, it's the most beautiful language I've ever heard.

And when they get involved in it, you should see their eyes.

They light right up.

- It is fun and it's interesting.

And I like learning it, because I want to speak to my grandfather, because I never understand him.

(speaking Passamaquoddy) - He asked me if I was going to dance.

- What we're doing here is putting together a second edition of the Passamaquoddy dictionary.

With everything coming in with the new technology, with the TV, with all the outside influences that are coming through the TV, I think now it's a must that we have it written down, so that we can at least preserve it in that way.

(flute music) It's who we are.

It's part of who we are.

It's our culture.

It's what we believe in.

It's how we think and how we act, it's us.

That's why it's important, because if we don't preserve it in some form, in some way or another, we're going to become a part of history, I guess.

And I can hear it being said, "When Passamaquoddy used to be in existence," it's like a footnote in history.

And I don't want that for our people.

- I want to share a bit of an essay that I just received from one of my Orono students.

It's about Millinocket and the Indians.

And he says, "I know that I'm not a full-blooded Indian, "but I know that I have some "of the Native blood in my veins."

And then he goes on to talk about how, "I've been called a hick for how I was raised.

"But I believe I have been fortunate "to have special education of the outdoors "where I hail from," and that he has what it takes to live like the Indians did in past times.

All over Maine, there's this renewed interest in teachers and classrooms about our cultural heritage and community involvement.

At Narraguagus High School, for instance, in Verne Campbell's class, he's had his students keep oral histories, going around interviewing people in the town.

Let's take a look.

- This is Holly Strout.

- And Marcia Duggan.

- And we're here to interview Harold Leff at his home in Milbridge.

- The Historical Society has talked about doing an oral history project for several years, and we just didn't have the manpower to get the job done by ourselves.

And we decided we needed some help.

So we went to the high school where they had plenty of students who were eager to get involved with us.

- How far was your school from your house?

- Oh, a mile and a half.

I went to school with a horse drawn wagon.

In the winter time it was on runners.

In the summer time it was on wheels.

When we got to school, we had chores to do.

We were assigned chores, like we had to lug the wood upstairs.

We had to keep the water pails full of water.

And what you know as restrooms today, was called toilets and out houses in those days.

And there were not heated, So you didn't spend much time out there.

- One of the benefits of this project is the fact that this is a link between the students and the community.

And I think that's extremely important.

And I think that we certainly want to produce, and I believe they are producing a quality product to present to the Historical Society.

But I also think that they're getting an appreciation for history on a local level.

- I wanted the students to have a sense of belonging to the community, tradition, and I also want the community to see our students, because sometimes, you know, the kids get a bad rap, and it's not fair in a lot of cases.

And when the kids go out, and they're representatives of the school, it's good PR.

It's good for everyone, and it makes everyone feel proud of the school.

- Well, they're really slow at first to open up and tell us about what their life was like.

But after a while, they seem to like it, telling us what happened to them and their experiences.

- The person I interviewed, he wasn't nervous at all.

So, actually he had his whole family come in and listen to us while we were interviewing him.

But he was, he liked talking.

He liked talking a lot, and I think he enjoyed being interviewed.

He asked us to come back and interview him again.

- I think they've gotten more and more excited about the project.

The number of interviews has increased from a dribble at the beginning to, I'm getting all the time as well.

We're gonna have Narraguagus to the weekend.

We're gonna go here.

We're gonna go there.

The thing that excited me is that this is giving a voice and a face to history besides my own, and I think that's a plus anyway.

- This is getting it in person from the people who lived here and it's just a really nice thing.

- And there are always stories that they have that aren't in the local history.

You know, our books if you've ever read, they're gonna have a different outlook on things, how they happened.

- And then Kristen told me this morning that she did an interview last night with her great grandfather, and that she had a couple problems I thought we'd talk about too.

- On some of the questions, he's like, he's one of these people where you usually talk to him, and he won't be quiet.

He'll just talk your ear off.

But last night I had to pry everything out of him.

He wouldn't tell me anything at all.

- Do you think that because he was your great grandfather, that was a problem as far as the interview goes?

- Yeah, a little bit, because he's like, "You already know all this.

"I don't need to tell you again."

So he was having soup and crackers, and he keeps reaching into the cracker thing.

And I paused it to tell him that it would pick up, and it would be really loud.

And he's like, "Oh no, it won't, no, it won't."

So I was just like, "Go ahead."

(people laughing) - Well, you know, I thought he provided a lot of information there anyway, Kristen.

Is he usually more verbose than that though?

- Yeah, a lot more.

- Really?

People at the Milbridge Historical Society had already put together an interview process, which they presented to the students.

They came in and did three days of training on it even with the students, because this is all new, that most of these students hadn't interviewed before at all, weren't familiar with techniques, either the equipment or what have you on.

And it was a great opportunity to work with them.

- The Maine Humanities Council has offered us a grant of $500 to pursue this project further, and they want to help us at the end of the project to let people know of some of the wonderful stories that we found from these interviews.

And they'll be some kind of, possibly a worldwide webpage and a traveling exhibit that will go around the state and tell about other community histories that have been developed.

- I wanted the students to realize that older people, and maybe especially in their own family, have a lot to share.

And you need to get this information while you can.

Older people have a lot to offer, and they can learn a lot from the experiences that people have already had.

- And I say, I think I'm about the only person in Washington County whose ever had the opportunity to introduce a Vice President of the United States.

- At Orono High School, we now have a program whereby our students have to complete 30 hours of community service before they graduate.

And other schools around Maine are doing similar things for community involvement.

At Sumner High School, my alma mater I'm proud to say, they allowed Danny Rogers, when he was there in school to come to school only three days a week for his academics, and then spend two days at home, doing what he loves, lobstering.

(bird chirping) (water rippling) - This is definitely a seasonal place.

I mean, you can't do one thing all the time unless it's like a normal job, I guess.

I don't know if you consider this normal.

I don't really, 'cause I mean, I dive in the winter time for sea urchins and I lobster in the summer, do a little bit of everything in between.

I guess you just have to be able to go day after day, whether you make, 'cause there's a lot of days you go you don't make any money.

You know, if something goes wrong or anything like that, you just have to be able to deal with it and keep going.

You just tough it out.

(water splashing) (motor whirring) Grandparents and that kind of thing, you know, college, college, college.

But my parents have been real supportive.

They'll support anything that I want to do.

But it wasn't real bad.

The teachers at school are the people who pressure you the most about college.

But the teachers who understand you the best don't want to even offer to pressure you about anything.

They let you do what you want to do.

And this is what I want to do, so they, you know, after a while they give it up.

There's not as many as there used to be, probably.

There's just a handful of us that chose this way, now.

(engine whirring) I don't know, I mean, you can't beat that, to make a living at what you like to do.

Don't have any bosses, anybody to answer to.

I like it, I don't have any regrets.

The biggest advice I give is do what you want to do.

Don't do what someone else wants you to do, because you're not gonna be happy with it.

(boat motor rumbling) - Students learn what they want to do and how to do it by having hands-on experiences.

A good example of that is how agriculture is being taught in a Maine classroom.

(soft music) - You'd be surprised how much of the public doesn't really know where their food comes from.

I think you could do a survey.

You'd be very surprised.

A lot of kids would say, "Oh it comes from the supermarket shelf."

You know, and that's why it's important for us to do what we're trying to do.

- They all would have horns.

You have to de-horn them.

- We try to take teachers around to a real wide variety of agricultural enterprises in the state, so that they can help kids understand the importance of agriculture in Maine.

- So, we've seen all kinds of teachers come through the program, and they've all been excited for various different reasons.

Some teachers, I have a kindergarten class, and they just wanna know how to grow small plants.

And you've got some teachers that want to do much larger projects, like the one from Freeport that's doing large scale work on building agriculture into the classroom curriculum.

There's only 30,000 acres of cranberries in the whole world.

This little New England here that we have of Massachusetts and Maine and Vermont, they contain over half of the world's cranberry acreage.

(children interacting) It might be bad, and they take one out, and they throw it away 'cause it's bad, and then they package these other two up, and then they take them to the store.

(upbeat music) - I felt it was important to show kids the origins of food.

And it seemed to me, as somebody who's been gardening, dabbling in gardening, and as a composter that to start from the ground up made the most sense.

From the worm bin, we take the castings, which are the compost that the worms make and put it into the plants, put it into the garden from which we'll grow plants, which you can eat next fall in a harvest festival like you did this year.

- Children have learned in this project that worms can compost their food waste.

So food waste isn't garbage, it's a natural resource, basically.

That food waste is used to grow food, which these kids have grown, and they've actually eaten food that they've grown.

We made some wonderful pizza using the wheat that they grew and the tomatoes that they grew.

I think it was the best pizza I've ever had.

My goal was to make as much of this project as I could fit into what the teachers are already doing.

They didn't need an extra.

They needed something that would work with what was already being done in the curriculum.

This is two third grade classes, and they are taking some of the stuff that was grown in the three sisters garden and turning it into food.

So we're grinding up some corn for making corn bread.

And we have some wheat from the fifth grade garden, which we're using in that corn bread.

So it just comes on around.

They planted it, and now today they get to eat it.

- One of the things that we really work on in elementary teaching and science is working on different cycles, water cycle, food cycles and things.

So I think this really fits into that really well.

The kids love it.

They think it's great.

- You are going to construct the worm bin yourselves, okay?

- Well I'm holding here a worm farm that we put three worms in.

We named them Daniel, Danny, and Evan.

Well, it's more funner to learn this way, because you can experiment.

- [Child] He's so cute!

- Well, I have asked them what they liked the best, and it's usually, it's either the food or the worms.

Or I'm known as the worm lady.

Nutrition hasn't been as much the focus as I thought it would originally be.

But it's certainly becoming that way as the kids get to taste more.

Why do we take a plastic box, add newspaper and food scraps?

- So the worms can eat it and turn it into soil.

- Perfect.

I consider it the trickle up theory where the kids learn in the classroom some skills that they can then take home.

As a result, some of the parents have, in fact, called me up to learn how to do the worm composting.

- I tell my mom, "Guess what, we're doing worms.

"And we're getting to see what kind of foods worms eat "and stuff like that."

Instead of throw your food away, instead of having somebody burn it or something, you should have a compost pile.

- It's a life skill that's important for all of us to learn I think.

We've gotten away from the land.

Most of our food is processed that's consumed today, and we have a health crisis with the rate of obesity in this country.

Childhood health habits go into adulthood, and if we can start them off on the right foot, that's my goal.

- I think that somehow that the glamor of the city is often what is touted.

And I think it's too bad, because I think that the farming community is a very strong part of America.

I think they need that support of knowing that their neighbors feel that they're doing a good job and are a contributing part of the community.

- One farm that's a contributing part of the community and not just in Maine but in the world is the Kelmscott Farm in Lincolnville.

How wonderful to be a little kid on a field trip, going to the Kelmscott Farm and getting to hold a piglet in your hands.

And these are not just ordinary piglets either, for there, you will find rare breeds.

- Who wants to hold a pig?

(gate creaking) - You can hold pigs here, you guys!

- This is Matilda.

(pig squealing) - This particular subject, the whole issue of endangered or vanishing livestock breeds is a very positive piece of conservation.

Well, the thing that's interesting to people when they first hear about it is they don't realize that there are so many breeds of livestock, number one, and that we've become so dependent on so few of them for our domesticated food supply.

For example, 95% of all the drinking milk comes from one breed of cow, the Holstein.

Three breeds of swine make up the source of all of our pork.

So we have an incredible dependence on a very few number of breeds, which means all the rest of them are now commercially undesirable, unattractive, and are kept really by hobbyists, and in some cases, not very effectively kept, meaning they have become extinct.

(rooster crowing) Well, what's the danger in that?

I mean, someone can say like, "Well, so what?

"I mean here's natural selection "or market selection at work.

"Don't mess with it, let it happen."

Well, the reason that it's important has to do with several things.

One of them has to do with the fact that from time to time, some of the commercial stock becomes susceptible to a disease or a virus, for example.

And we just heard about this mad cow disease that was going on in Britain.

And then way back, remember the Irish potato famine, and that's a botanical equivalent to this same issue where a whole breed becomes at risk.

And that case you'd go back and look for genetic strains that are resistant to that virus, and they might reside in any of these rare breed animals that you have here on the farm.

You have to be able to go back to those genes and be able to find that and have it still exist, and be able to restructure, recreate a new commercial strain that would have that resistance.

You're so spoiled.

(kissing) Utility is a really important concept on the farm.

Each of these animals, along with their genetics are useful in some way.

For example, the border collie that greeted you when you came here, that's Tess.

Tess has a specific job description and role here on the farm and that's to herd the sheep.

The sheep provide wool.

And we then in turn sell products made out of that wool to showcase what they're doing.

There's purpose and utility in all of these animals, which has made that relationship in the domesticated human, man environment, really work.

I find people take away from this experience what they want to take away from it.

And it's different for everybody.

I mean, whereas we're deeply committed to the message of preservation of these heritage and endangered breeds, some children come in here, and they're thrilled with George, the cat.

'Cause George, who remains absolutely a recluse for the whole time of the week, when a bus of children come up the hill, he comes out and holds court.

It's really for all ages including the senior citizens who remember that chicken that they grew up with on their farm or that cow that they hadn't seen for 50 years.

(chicken clucking) The important thing here is twofold.

It's the educational issue, meaning that you tap into the schools and the community and create an awareness or help them become aware of these disappearing breeds.

But I think it's important to get breeding stock out into other people's hands, so that these spread the safety net across numerous farms and individuals, so that it doesn't happen that all the livestock reside on one farm.

This is Josephine, and she's a Gloucestershire Old Spots pig.

They're deep into nap now, which is something they really do best.

(pig snorting) This is her first litter.

She's got four absolutely adorable piglets here.

We have Napoleon, who's the boar.

And we have Matilda, Lola and Abigail.

Josephine came with a group of Gloucestershire Old Spots pigs that we imported from England right around the first of the year this year.

There were only about four breeding adult Gloucestershire Old Spots pigs left in the United States at that point, so that they had become critically rare.

The other thing that occurred at the same time that these pigs arrived was an animal adoption program that we launched that has to do with adopting these pigs.

We announced this program and have found it to be enormously successful.

There's almost, well probably over by now, 400 people all over North America that have adopted these four, and maybe soon eight, Gloucestershire Old Spots pigs.

This book is called "All Pigs Are Beautiful," and it's written by Dick King-Smith.

He's from England.

Do you know who Dick King-Smith is?

Have any of you guys seen "Babe?"

- [Child] Yeah.

- The movie, "Babe?"

He wrote this book as well as "Babe."

We're very much a tactile place, very much an experiential place, whether or not it's the smell that's coming out of the sweet hay in the barn or whether or not it's stepping in a pile of who knows what in the field.

But in this particular room, it's opening the drawers, feeling the wool, feeling the texture, the textural differences between one breed and the next, picking up a big hank of wool and smelling that lanolin, feeling the grease on your hands.

So, whereas I think much of our existence today has become almost third and even fourth dimensional with video screens and computers, this is a dimension that is very real.

(gentle music) - What an amazing difference between the Kelmscott Farm of today with the Maine farm I grew up on years ago.

And also, what a reminder of how globally connected Maine is now.

I'm Sandy Phippen, and I hope you enjoyed this edition of "The Best of RFD Maine," that you'll be visiting us again, next time.

Be sure to visit "The Best of RFD Maine" on Maine Public Television's home page on the worldwide web.

"The Best of RFD Maine" was taped on location at the Page Farm and Home Museum at the University of Maine.

- [Announcer] Production of "RFD Maine" is made possible through a television demonstration grant from Rural Development, part of the US Department of Agriculture.

(bright music) - The biggest advice I'd give is do what you want to do.

Don't do what someone else wants you to do, because you're not going to be happy with it.