Mihku Paul collection, 1984-2025

Full finding aid (pdf)

Collection Scope and Content

The Mihku Paul papers include drafts of published and unpublished writing, correspondence, news clippings, event planning notes and promotional material, and a few personal effects such as photos and name tags.

Most of the drafts are poetry, from examples of her early MFA work to poems from a manuscript in progress in 2025, along with two personal essays from the 1990s. Other documents, such as correspondence and news coverage, relate to the many artistic and educational projects Mihku has contributed to. These materials showcase the variety of collaborators she works with (including museums, schools, and nonprofits) and frequent areas of focus in her art and activism: Indigenous history, language, and foodways, as well as ecological preservation and sustainable agriculture techniques.

Biographical/Historical Note

Mihku Paul (1958-) is a Wolastoqey (Maliseet) elder and knowledge keeper who grew up traditionally on the Penobscot River in Maine. She learned from her Wolastoqey grandfather, a trapper and river guide who served in WWII and traveled in a Wild West Show, and a mother who ensured that she had every opportunity to acquire divergent skills. She also attended public school. This upbringing shaped her holistic understanding of Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures. Her family hails from Kingsclear, New Brunswick First Nation in Canada.

Paul attended the University of Maine Farmington and Orono before completing her Bachelor of Arts at the University of Southern Maine, with concentrations in Communication and Human Development, Magna Cum Laude, in 1993. At the age of fifty, she entered USM’s Stonecoast MFA program, earning her master’s degree, then went on to publish, leveraging both her visual art and poetry to increase awareness of Waponahki culture and presence in Maine. She is the author of the poetry chapbook 20th Century PowWow Playland (Bowman Books, an imprint of the Greenfield Review Press; 2012). Her poems have appeared in Canada and the U.S., in Cafe Review, Poesis, Cabildo Quarterly, Dawnland Voices, and Port City Poems, among other venues.

Paul is a multidisciplinary artist and storyteller, her work appearing in many forms. For example, her one-woman multi-media exhibit, “Look Twice: The Waponahki in Image & Verse,” appeared at the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine in 2009. Text from her poems “Mother Tongue” and “History 101” has been incorporated into an original performance piece by Sacabuche!, a Canadian 17th century early music ensemble that performs internationally. Her painting All Nations Seek Peace was featured on the cover of MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States). Her experimental film Putep Qotatokot-te Elewestaq “The Whale Was Speaking” (with Dawn Nye and Riley Pillsbury), which debuted at the 2023 Belfast Poetry Festival, addresses climate change and its effect on sea life. Other collaborative projects include Spinning Wampum, a Waponahki-led public art initiative working to bring historical awareness of the 18th-century Casco Bay Treaty negotiations to Maine communities; the Pejepscot Portage Mapping Project, charting the ancient and ongoing Waponahki connections to the Brunswick area, including a Google Earth Countermap; and Skoniminol Kuliwot (“Good Seed”), an Indigenous seed saving initiative (Paul is a food sovereignty grower and consultant). She was also the only transnational artist to participate in Craft New Brunswick’s 2021 Atlantic Vernacular collaborative craft-poetry exhibition, responding to the work of two visual artists.

Paul’s contributions to the community take many forms and are extensions of her creative work. She has taught poetry and fiction writing to diverse groups, including the Waponaki Writers Project and Rise Up!, and she is both an alumna and former facilitator of the Maine Women Writers Collection’s Gathering of Writers and Craft & Critique workshop programs. She is executive editor and archivist at Dawnland Voices 2.0, an online journal dedicated to Indigenous literature in northern New England. For more than two decades, she has regularly presented a Waponahki cultural enrichment curriculum in Portland Public Schools; this complements work such as Newonul Temikotokil Waponahkiyik/Four Seasons of the Waponaki, an educational coloring book she co-created with Isabella-Zoe Ciolfi, and the early childhood programming she has facilitated for Maine Audubon. She serves on the board of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance and the Traditional Arts Network at Mayo Street Arts; participated in initiatives such as the Atlantic Black Box Walks for Historical and Ecological Recovery; and remains involved in many other such programs. A Master Gardener, Paul lives and works on her permaculture urban homestead, Bramblewood, in Portland, Maine.