The River is our Relative | The Story of the Penobscot Nation
The Penobscot Nation has been around for millennia. On Indian Island, a river gives the Penobscot people life. "The tribe views the river like its own highway. We look at her as a relative, a sister, someone that gives life. Sea Lamprey, Sturgeon, Striper Bass." Jan Paul works for the Penobscot Nation in the Department of Natural Resources and Water Quality. She's using open-source technology, like R and the RStudio IDE, to keep the river healthy, so in turn, it can keep her people healthy. This is Jan's inspiring story, featured for the first time at posit::conf(2023). ------ Credits: Creative Director: Jason Restivo & Scout Studios Art Director & Illustrator: I-Nu Yeh Animator: Theera (Jay) Keeree Content Producer & Writer: Shannon McGarvey Sound Mixer: Caleb Theimer
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Transcript#
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
The Penobscot Nation has been here, while I've heard tribal leaders say, for millennia, they called us nomads, but nomads just wander. We went with the seasons. The tribe used the river like its own highway, so that was our road system. And that's where our traditional fishing was. It was all kinds of fish, like sea lamprey. We ate sturgeon, striper bass. Everything that runs up the river now, those are our traditional fish. So that's why we look at her as a relative, a sister, someone that gives life.
So that's why we look at her as a relative, a sister, someone that gives life.
My name is Jan Paul. I work for the Penobscot Nation in their Department of Natural Resources, Water Quality. I was born and raised on Indian Island. I've lived here my entire life. Growing up on Indian Island was poor, but close-knitted. My mother and father ingrained in us a fear for the river, because she's so powerful that she would take you if you got too close. So when we were younger, we had that fear.
But then, as I got older, you know, you could smell her sometimes. On the edge, it was stinky. And so, as I got this opportunity to work for the tribe, then that's when I started noticing, yeah, our river is really polluted. And I did my first summer. And that's when I saw an algae bloom. During the day, they come to the surface to get the light. So they're getting all their oxygen from the sun. And then when the sun starts to go down, they sink to the bottom. They take all the oxygen out of the water column. So what that does is they put strain on the aquatic life, but especially the fish. So they won't be able to breathe, and so you'll see fish kills.
When you see someone you love getting polluted, not by choice, but just by the air they breathe, or someone's putting something in your water, it just, it's heart-wrenching.
When you see someone you love getting polluted, not by choice, but just by the air they breathe, or someone's putting something in your water, it just, it's heart-wrenching.
Water quality monitoring
But all the males above us now are gone. Once we were able to be viewed as people and started getting help from the United States, that's when we started taking care of her, in the sense that we started our water quality monitoring program.
Our data was going on a piece of paper, and it would take years to get into our database. It was tough getting our data in, and tough getting it out. There's a story about me losing all my data sheets. The wind took them off my clipboard, and they went floating down the river. And you can't recreate data. Once you're there, it's going to be different because it's a flowing river.
But then we went paperless. From the field, we checked in to what we call the workstation. From the workstation, and then we'd send it off to the lab so they could add their data in. And then from the lab, permanently stored in our database, which we use RStudio to write code to pull it out so we can run reports and do graphs and stuff like that. Open source tools and POSIT help keep us fast and efficient in dealing with the health of the Penobscot River.
Our data has showed the Department of Environmental Protection a couple of sections of the river is meeting a different classification, and so the upgrades were passed in 2019.
My hopes for the river's future is that she's healthy, in the sense that when she's healthy, we're healthy. And so the healthier she is, the healthier we are as a people.
