LIVING PLANETARY LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENT:
OBSERVATORY (smudge studio’s physical space) is sited upon the unceded, ancestral homelands of the Wabanaki people. This area, presently called Maine, was colonized by European settlers. As newcomers to this place, we pay respect to all indigenous peoples by recognizing their long and ongoing relationship with this land. We also acknowledge that indigenous cultures, for thousands of years, have fostered intentional connections among land, people, living and nonliving things.
In order to enact the content of this land acknowledgment, our work at OBSERVATORY aims to further recognition and deep appreciation of human coexistence with nonhuman geologic materials and forces, which indigenous peoples have recognized continuously. We acknowledge that geologic materials and forces directly support human inhabitation of this area — and precede human presence on this land.
545-495 million years ago, during the CAMBRIAN period, what is now called coastal Maine was located 2500 miles to the tropical south as a chain of islands in the Iapetus Ocean (ancestral Atlantic Ocean). During the Penobscottian Orogeny, the Iapetus chain collided into the ancient coast.
During the ORDOVICIAN period, 495-443 million years ago, the Taconic Orogeny greatly impacted what we now call “The Northeast,” instigating uplift and igneous activity related to repeated collisions of offshore volcanic island arcs with North America.
At 158 High Street in downtown Belfast, OBSERVATORY exists upon a slice of bedrock called the St. Croix Belt of the Penobscot Formation. It is a material trace of CAMBRIAN and ORDOVICIAN geologic events that occurred on pre-historic Earth.
More recently, during the Pleistocene, Belfast was covered by a massive glacier called the Laurentide Ice Sheet. It entered Maine around 35,000 years ago and reached its maximum position 25,000 years ago, terminating on Georges Bank in the Gulf of Maine. At that time, ice covered all of Maine to a depth of at least 1.5 miles. The Laurentide’s retreat from Maine began 18,000 years ago, eroding and fracturing bedrock for thousands of years.
We gratefully live and work among this jumbled collision of geologic forces, materials and peoples. We aim to deepen human stewardship of place through work that furthers respect and living connections with planetary materials — over vast spans of time — through our ongoing work at OBSERVATORY.
Bedrock Geologic History of Maine
Passamaquoddy Tribe of Indian Township
”Bedrock geology of the Belfast quadrangle” Maine Geological Survey
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“…dragon that wanders in the form of of continents drifting through their massive slow-motion collisions; dragon thrust up into towering peaks, lazing in the form of mile-deep glaciers that scoured those high peaks away, and idling in these low summits they left hinged, all veined with tumbling streams like this one; dragon breathing through the ceaseless modulations of weather that are slowing wearing this mountain away with wind and rain, and today brought the low clouds and ridgeline mist of my walk among the ripples and folds of dragon’s body. When I listen, I listen with the ears of dragon. When I breathe, I breathe with the lungs of dragon. And when I look up from the stream and gaze into this mountain trailing out streamers of mist into its geologic flight, dragon gazes into dragon.”
— David Hinton, from Hunger Mountain: A Field Guide to Mind and Landscape