YARMOUTH — Amid the chirps of chickadees, clamor of squirrels scampering up hemlock trunks and the soft flow of the Royal River, Passamaquoddy/Maliseet words can be heard in the woods of Yarmouth once again. 

“Nulasihkuwolpon Sipuhsisuwi Kcihq,” says the voice of Dwayne Tomah. “Welcome to Riverfront Woods Preserve.” 

The words emerge from the Wabanaki interpretive sign project in Yarmouth’s Riverfront Woods Preserve. Officially completed this week, the educational signs erected throughout the preserve share the history and cultural life of the Wabanaki Confederacy and its long connection to the diverse ecologies in the 50 wooded acres.

The signs feature QR codes that link to videos of Tomah, the director and curator of the Passamaquoddy Sipayik Museum and Passamaquoddy language keeper. On the phone screen, he narrates Wabanaki stories, playing traditional music and pronouncing Passamaquoddy/Maliseet words wearing his traditional regalia.

“It was really profound, really, because my ancestors’ voices are going to be heard on Wabanaki lands. That normally just would not have happened, but through collaboration and friendship-building, these things happen,” said Tomah. 

By an old beaver dam, a sign shares the Passamaquoddy/Maliseet story of how the beaver got named “qapit,” and how they are a resource for Wabananki tribes. Another shows the plants found along the Royal River that have long been used for medicine and food and the river’s first name, “Sip Wescustago,” meaning “muddy river.”

The preserve is held in an easement by the Royal River Conservation Trust and is owned and managed by the town. Acquired in 2018, town staff and volunteers built boardwalks and the 1.2-mile accessible trail in the following years. But Yarmouth staff and residents felt the project was not yet complete.

“The signs we put on the boardwalk were talking about the history of the land a little bit, but we neglected such a huge portion of that history.” said Erik Donohoe, Yarmouth Community Services parks specialist. 

The Wabanaki interpretive sign project began three years ago, when the Yarmouth Indigenous Awareness Group, a part of Yarmouth Community Alliance for Racial Equity, asked the Yarmouth Rotary Club to apply for a grant to install permanent signage acknowledging the Wabanaki history of the area.

The district Rotary Club granted $4,000 for the project and the Yarmouth club contributed $1,500. Rotary member Dan Ostrye, who wrote the grant and helped lead the project, soon connected with Tomah, who had been previously invited to give the preserve and its trails names in Passamaquoddy/Maliseet.

“I said, ‘I want you to tell your story,’” said Ostrye. “Because that was important to me. Too many times, we sort of appropriate their story and tell it the way we want to tell it.”

Over Zoom and in person, Ostrye, Tomah and other Rotary Club and Yarmouth Indigenous Awareness Group members met to narrow the vision of what should appear on the signs, collaborating over ideas and work on countless iterations and edits. The final elements came down to the wire — a friend of Ostrye’s flew him on his personal plane to Eastport last month to get the final recording of Tomah. 

“The great part to me was everybody was committed to excellence and getting it right, and nobody was so hung up on their interpretation that they weren’t willing to work with the group to say, this feels right,” said Ostrye. 

“It was really a collection approach, it really was. It just gelled,” Tomah. 

The signs display illustrations by Norma Randi Marshall, a Passamaquoddy artist, who incorporated the double-curve Wabanaki motif into the bodies of animals and trunks of the trees. The postings also encourage young visitors to explore the woods through “I spy” as they look for installed silhouettes of native animals hidden on the trees and ground. 

Other interpretive sign projects in other Yarmouth-owned parks are already underway, said Donohoe. With Tomah’s input, the new projects will follow the same methods and format that was developed when creating the Riverfront Preserve signs. 

At the interpretive sign dedication on Oct. 19, Tomah led the group of about 60 local residents in singing a medicine song together in Passamaquoddy/Maliseet. Later in a circle of children, he used his drum to sing a friendship song and a trading song, highlighting a positive and longstanding connection between the colonial settler communities and Wabanaki people. 

On the crisp fall Sunday in the Yarmouth woods, emotions of togetherness and gratitude were high, said Tomah and Ostrye. 

“People were even crying, because they were really connecting to what was going on,” said Tomah. “I thought it brought people together in this community even more, even though they have a close-knit community.”

The signs have meaning to those beyond Yarmouth. Between spending months refining their messaging, the dedication ceremony and walking the trail explaining the project with numerous groups this week, Tomah had not tired of the signs. Rather, he also came out to the Riverfront Preserve early Monday morning to again read them in a moment of solitude. He plans to bring his family down to take the walk soon.

“It’s really profound for me to be able to come here, to be able to see Wabanaki presence here,” he said.