You are invited to join us on Friday, September 26, 2025, at 6:00pm, for the second of Blue Hill Heritage Trust’s Wabanaki Speaker Series, “Discovering Penobscot Bay”, a presentation by Mark Ranco, Penobscot tribal elder.
Mark Ranco, MSW, LCSW, has been a social worker for Bangor Veteran’s Administration home based care program since 2011, and a competitive canoe racer most of his life. Introduced at the age of nine to ancestral paddling techniques by his older brother, Mike Socalexis, and tribal elder, Eugene Loring Sr., Mark has accrued many accomplishments on the water since, in the rich state of Maine and other New England waterways. In 1992, he was part of the “Sacred Canoe ‘92”: a team of Penobscot paddlers that traveled to the Yukon River in Alaska, to canoe upriver when the Yukon was at flood stage. The local Athabascans doubted this feat could be
accomplished! But the team succeeded, and a grand cultural exchange with the Athabaskan peoples followed. While the rest of the country celebrated the quincentennial, they celebrated
the determination it took to paddle against the spring flood current on the Yukon – – and 500 years of still being here as indigenous peoples of Turtle Island.
Register is required at:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89257473843?pwd=qsMJAQXoruXY5YbCymQnfZGVAsBakH.1
Mark started kayaking 23 years ago as another way to explore the river systems and venture out into ocean waters. This has become a means to rekindle ancestral ties to the Blue Hill Peninsula, Penobscot Bay, and the islands, where Penobscots and other Wabanaki thrived off the marine ecosystem for thousands of years before colonization resulted in coastal access being lost.
Mark’s daughter Ann Pollard-Ranco has been instrumental in the movement to regain access, and rebuild spiritual connections to these places along the coast and islands that were so beloved by the ancestors–and where erasure of indigenous presence and history had been ongoing for centuries. It is through these efforts and those of many other Wabanaki people and their allies, that indigenous people are being welcomed back for the first time in about nine generations.
Mark will share his paddling experiences and spiritual enlightenment from this renewed relationship with the sacred waters that abound in the Penobscot River and Bay, including a
2022 canoe trip from Ellsworth to the Salt Pond in Blue Hill, retracing an ancestral canoe route that included traversing an ancient portage on Newberry Neck for the first time in centuries, thanks to the generous permissions of property owners along that portage and help making those connections by Blue Hill Heritage Trust!
You may also like the following events from Blue Hill Heritage Trust:
Also check out other
Sports events in Brighton,
Trips & Adventurous Activities in Brighton.
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