Wabanaki Artist Jennifer Pictou on Art, Storytelling, and Abbe Museum's Dawnland Festival’s Evolution
BAR HARBOR—The Abbe Museum’s Dawnland Festival of Arts & Ideas is an event that always catapults art, voice, community, and dialogue into the Bar Harbor landscape and this year’s event brings yet another sharpened focus as it uplifts Wabanaki voices through art, dialogue, and community.
Set for July 12–13 at the College of the Atlantic, the free two-day gathering will include panel discussions on topics ranging from Indigenous food systems to the 250th anniversary of the United States—all through a Wabanaki lens. More than 50 indigenous artists are expected to participate in the festival’s marketplace. They’ll do so alongside performances by award-winning creatives like Ty Defoe and the Wabanaki women’s hand drum group Cipelahq ehpicik.
For artist, storyteller, and Abbe Museum board member, Jennifer Pictou (Mi’kmaq Nation), the festival marks a meaningful shift in visibility and community-building for indigenous creators in the Northeast.
Pictou, who also runs Bar Harbor Ghost Tours and has a book coming out soon, graciously spoke with us about her deep ties to the Abbe, the role of artists in cultural truth-telling, and the stories that weave their way through the land and water of MDI.
THE INTERVIEW
Jennifer, can you tell me about your affiliation with the Abbe and why you are affiliated?
I have been affiliated with the Abbe Museum since 2013. I have been an employee, a community/business partner, an artist, and now a board member. Basically, I’ve been a big cheerleader for the Abbe Museum and its incredibly important work for a long time.
What are you excited about in terms of the upcoming festival?
Several things! First, I’m excited to be surrounded by other indigenous artists. I get so inspired by what they create and love to talk to them as much as I can. It fills my metaphorical cup because as artists, we all tend to work in a vacuum to some extent and don’t have a lot of opportunities to gather like this very often.
It is energizing and food for my creative spirit, helping me feel connected to the larger Wabanaki artist community. When Wabanaki people gather there is always a lot of laughter, language, and love.
Secondly, I am excited to see how the changes in the festival lineup will play out this year with the bulk of the artists being Wabanaki and a few others from further New England states. It is a defining moment in festival history to promote eastern indigenous work like this. Regional representation and selling opportunities like the festival are just as important as going to bigger shows across the country.
Lastly, I am excited to see the Abbe Museum take a serious and pivotal role in promoting Wabanaki artists beyond the gift shop. Museums are at a critical tipping point for several reasons and they have to find their voices in what socially relevant projects and positions to promote. Artists are protectors of ideas and identities, of cultural shifts and challenges, as well as continuity and tradition. I am proud of what the Abbe Museum is doing in terms of continuous refinement of Wabanaki history and truth-telling. In addition to the artists, there will be panel discussions on timely and highly relevant topics, from indigenous voices, that festival-goers won’t want to miss.
When it comes to your art, from what I know of it, a lot of it seems to be about reclaiming narratives. Can you speak to that and to the importance of story for you as a person and as an artist?
My art is always evolving and oftentimes feels like a too-caffeinated, sleep deprived gremlin is sitting inside my head trying to tell me what I should make in fourteen different languages. When an idea hits me just right, I am obsessive with it until I get it out of my head whether that’s on paper, my iPad, notes in my phone, or scribbled on the back of a napkin.
Lately I have been making serious investments in time, money, and educational opportunities for personal skill building to further my art practice. At heart, I am a storyteller. My art not only reclaims narratives of identity from the past but also the present. I like to bring uncomfortable things into the light. I try to balance light and darkness, shadow and luminescence, as well as ideas of community and our cultural landscape.
If I had to define my art in a sentence, I think it would be about resilience and the strength to keep moving despite obstacles no one else can see or even understand, yet finding simple and profound moments of joy in the seemingly mundane moments of life.
You’re affiliated with the Mi’kmaq Nation and also with the Bar Harbor community. You have a presence here, a company, art, a story, multiple stories. Is that hard? Easy? Both? What inspired you to bring Dawnland Tours and your upcoming book out into the world?
After many years in the museum field, I struck out on my own to create a tour company that filled in the voids of history and culture that museums often didn’t have the ability to publicly present.
Dawnland Tours, LLC started in 2014 and I named it out of respect for my tribal homelands. Wabanaki People call this place the Dawnland because we are the first to see the sunrise and have been here for tens of thousands of years. A couple years later, I rebranded as Bar Harbor Ghost Tours. With the rebranding came a more defined offering of ghost stories from a dual perspective–the Euro-American and Wabanaki tales speak to many aspects of Colonialism and shared history as well as Wabanaki perseverance. It also speaks to what we have known for thousands of generations…. There are spirits in the lands and waters that regular ghost stories just don’t adequately explain and getting first-voice information can answer many questions. It also might just keep you up at night.
Balancing my art, storytelling, business, and community is all of a piece, so to speak. Many of my professional circles overlap, creating what I know as a typical Mi’kmaq life. No Mi’kmaq person I know, or Wabanaki person for that matter, does just one thing. We are busy, industrious people.
The book, Haunted Bar Harbor, is set to release May 27, 2025. It is the exciting culmination of years of historical research, story gathering, and personal experiences of ourselves and guides on tour. I co-authored this with my life-partner and fellow tour guide, D. Michael Fleming.
When we tell people we have been on the US Today “10 Best Ghost Tour” list for seven consecutive years, they ask if we have written a book. We wrote one in answer to public inquiry and a need to tell at least one side of the stories. I made the choice to not include Wabanaki spirit tales at this time so you’ll see several well-loved places in town and spirit activity you may not even know exists. Or maybe you do. We are thankful to be part of Arcadia Publishing’s Haunted America series to share our love of Bar Harbor and its spirits, with the world.
Right now, the book is available only for pre-order through Amazon, but I encourage folks to look for it through the Abbe Museum gift shop in a month or so as well as their local book stores. Shop small, shop local.
You always strike me as so smart and so open and so enthusiastic in the things you love. Is that hard? Is that just who you are? Do you ever just flop in a chair and fall asleep? That’s probably a strange question and I apologize. I’m just so intrigued by people who are so smart, so engaged and so capable and if they ever get tired.
Thank you! That was a lovely compliment. I am very enthusiastic about the things I love. I think my zest and enthusiasm comes from being one of those people who were given a second chance at life. After being struck by lightning when I was twelve years old, dying, coming back, and losing a brother who was also struck, the world seriously changed for me. I don’t take life for granted and am grateful for the opportunity to create art in whatever form it takes from day to day whether that is storytelling, beading, glass artistry, or graphics.
I give a lot of energy to my chosen topics, but it’s also exhausting being an introvert in an extroverted world. I flop in a chair on a regular basis. I consider it this way–when I’m on, I’m giving it all I’ve got (even if that’s only 65% on a bad day) and when I’m in my down-time, I zealously guard my opportunity to recharge my mental batteries. If I get the rest I need, I am a better business woman, artist, and human in general. I live the total opposite of a 9-5 schedule and a few years ago, I had an epiphany that I live an unconventional life and that’s okay. We aren’t all cut out for the corporate universe and I needed to stop beating myself up over it. The world needs artists in all forms and I am fulfilling at least part of my soul contract in doing what I do.
You truly are. Thank you, Jennifer, for all you do for this community and all the stories you bring.
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Acadia Brochures of Maine.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
The full festival schedule is available at www.DawnlandFestival.org.
Early bird registrations (before June 1, 2025) will be entered into a drawing for a season pass to the Abbe Museum and a gift certificate to the Abbe Museum Store. The grand prize winner will be announced on June 2, 2025.
Assistance with registration is available by calling Abbe Museum at (207) 288-3519 or emailing info@abbemusuem.org.
Haunted Bar Harbor is available for preorder (if you can’t wait until it gets to the Abbe) here.
Check out the Abbe Museum here.
Check out Bar Harbor Ghost Tours here.
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