Internship 1:
Orono Transitional Landscape Internship
Live-in, low rent permaculture. $300/week rent
May 31-Aug 31
Contact: William Giordano on first class.
Faculty sponsor: Prof. Joline Blais

This internship is a living/learning opportunity that focuses on training and experience. Live and work in your own garden in Orono, and assist in the development of a home-scale edible landscape, in exchange for reduced rent. food harvest and permaculture training in a shared household.

The home, on the south edge of campus, is a transitional edible landscape and includes fruit/berries/nuts, medicinal herbs, kitchen herbs, annual and perennial vegetables, a greenhouse, cold frames and an ebible plant/tree nursery. Interest for summer interns could include engaging any of these areas. Opportunities for permaculture design training and certification available via summer projects/classes. Internships involve 1 day per week in the garden and grounds.

• - Live on site for $300/month, and work 8-10 hours/week.
• - Laundry/dishwasher on-site. eat-in kitchen, dining room, finished basement, 2 bathrooms.
• - 3 Rooms available. 1/8 mile from campus and 1/2 mile from downtown Orono.
• - Mature highbush blueberries in July/August
• - Pick salad greens from outside the front door daily
• - Learn/assist in caring for edible tree crops (plums, pears, apples, butternuts, hazelnuts etc)
• - Learn/assist in growing herbal medicines
• - Make far less trips to the grocery store
• - Help establish a lively evening bonfire/music scene for summer fun
• - Connect with Lucerne Lakeside permaculture side for exchanges, swimming, boating, camping

Seeking:

• - Garden skills of any kind, or willingness to learn quickly
• - Ability to make clear observations and record findings
• - Research skills for connecting available models to actual gardens
• - Ability to work well on team and on own
• - Holistic/Systems thinking an asset, seeing patterns and whole picture as well as local details
• - Design & digital skills helpful for documenting (photography, video, web skills)

This internship is for a Native American student interested in learning more about your own culture's gardening methods and permaculture gardening and how to weave the two together. The Internship will involve one day gardening in Dedham, Maine (4-5 hours in the garden, 1-2 hours on the lake--swimming, canoeing, etc), as well as researching your own garden traditions and finding out how to integrate the two together. When Europeans came to this continent they often clear cut forest and planted their own crops. This form of gardening is about making peace in the plant kingdom--learning about polycultures that integrate European and Native types of edible and medicinal plants.

You will also learn about local native plants, especially weeds (which are highly nutritious and healing to earth and body), mushroom, insects, local fauna, medicine and ceremony. The intent is for you to act as an ambassador between cultures, brining the best from both worlds across the cultural divide and into the earth where we all are related. We will document and catalogue this research using digital photography, video, and web skills, as well as writing about our experiences. Our goal is to create enough interest to apply for grants for future funding for ongoing research. Must be motivated, hard-working, enjoy outdoors, enjoy talking to elders, and willing to learn and integrate skills in digital culture, permaculture and Native Culture. Child care possible for young parents interested in this opportunity.

• - Lucern, Maine, on the edge of Phillips lake
• - One day/week, $50/day
• - Lunch & tools included

Seeking:

• - Eagerness to conduct research in field and in culture
• - Keen observation skills of natural and cultural phenomena
• - Interest in digital skills
• - Connect with LongGreenHouse site in Orono for more urban permaculture options

Fall 2010-Spring 2011 Internships

Fall internships will pick up on the work of both internships, and involve students in UMaine degree/for credit courses. All Students living at LongGreenHouse are required to link at least one of their courses with LongGreenHouse work, whether as a capstone project, a course research project, or an independent study project.

LongGreenHouse is a cross-cultural partnership for regeneration of social and ecological networks and webs, involving the Anikwom WholeLife Center, UMaine Permaculture Club, and Still Water Lab at UMaine.

Moving beyond sustainability as a mere business slogan, LongGreenHouse weaves together indigenous culture, permaculture, and digital culture. Together we are developing a Living/Learning model for thriving cultures in this bioregion based on the intersection of evolutionary wisdom, natural patterns, and social networking.

LongGreenHouse includes a multi-age integrated homeschool, Wassookeag, based on an experiential and ecological curriculum; operates a Permaculture research lab for UMaine graduate and undergrads; develops and implements protocol for Longhouse living in partnership with Wabanaki elders; and develops global social networks with state-of-the-art network technologies.

After three centuries of colonial hubris, Euro-ethnic civilization is finally coming to the realization that the indigenous cultures it absorbed or eradicated may hold the key to undoing its legacy of rampant commercialism and environmental devastation. Yet surprisingly few of the thousands of sustainability initiatives launched in the past few years are looking to indigenous peoples, despite their uncontested expertise in millennia-old forms of sustainable ecology, economy, and governance. Obstructing this essential conversation on the native side is a mistrust due to promises broken by national governments, and on the colonial side an ignorance of real native beliefs and needs due to the skewed representation of native culture in movies and other mass media.

Into this cultural gap LongGreenHouse inserts a series of micro-treaties designed to foster trust among Native and non-Native individuals and organizations, with the goal of weaving a fabric of trust. While such trust is a valid goal in itself, LongGreenHouse aims to use this foundation as a basis for trade--not trade in crafts or money, but trade in essential skills for sustainable living. Natives bring to this trade sacred knowledge about medicinal herbs and flexible family structures; colonials bring to this trade skills in deploying information networks and resources for promoting the visibility of native issues.

LongGreenHouse is collaboration between Wabanaki elders Miigam'agan and gkisedtanamoogk and Still Water co-directors Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito. This collaboration is built on a legal innovation that LongGreenHouse's founders helped to devise, called the Cross-Cultural Partnership framework.

The Cross-Cultural Partnership framework is meant to encourage ethical collaboration across the many cultural divides that criss-cross our society: between drug companies and rainforest shamans over medicinal herbs; between Native peoples and musicians over ceremonial chants; between artists and technologists in art and science collaborations; and between libertarians and communitarians over control of software design.

In the case of LongGreenHouse, the collaboration is both thematic and practical. LongGreenHouse attempts to forge a microtreaty between families whose peoples have been at war for five hundred years, based on the common desire to trade strategies and techniques for living sustainably on the land.

For more information on the Cross-Cultural Partnership, please visit Still Water's Connected Knowledge Web site, which includes the latest framework draft as well as information on the project's goals, contexts, and contributors.

In their courses in Indigenous Media at the University of Maine, LongGreenHouse co-founders gkisedtanamoogk and Joline Blais draw parallels between the interpersonal social networks of Native peoples and the electronic social networks of the Internet. Still Water Senior Fellow Craig Dietrich has collaborated with anthropologist Kim Christen on the Mukurtu Archive, a culturally sensitive database of public and private heritage for the Waramungu people of Australia.

Recent student projects in Indigenous Media include the design for a post-Peak Oil game entitled "Back to the Land Bridge" and Ian Larson and Sam Hunter's Passamaquoddy Living Language System. The Passamaquoddy Living Language System is a collaboration between Still Water and the University of Maine's Wabanaki Center that leverages the Passamaquoddy's tradition of multigenerational oral teachings to help preserve their rich language. Powered by Drupal open-source software and a suite of Apple iBooks purchased with a RUS grant, this system encourages younger members of the tribe to seek out grandparents and other elders, contributing videos of their stories to database records related by Passamaquoddy vocabulary.

Established in 1985, Wassookeag is a nondenominational, not-for-profit cooperative homeschool based on parent involvement, ecological curriculum, and experiential learning for grades 1 through 8. Wassookeag is a community of home school students, university students and faculty, families, elders and educators with a shared philosophy working to create a progressive learning environment based on Earth Community. Wassookeag builds community by nurturing each child's individual strengths and accommodating their needs in a responsive and respectful environment.

Since fall 2007, Wassookeag makes its home in the green belt at the south edge of the UMaine campus, in alliance with the LongGreenHouse project of the University of Maine, and Anikwom Eldership Training models. More at Wassookeag.org.

Eldership Development In Wabanaki Culture, Elders are keepers, transmitters, repositories of Traditional Knowledge, Empirical Wisdom, and Direct Lifetime Experience, and are frequently sought after for advice, their knowledge, and help. Responsible to the needs of their People, Elders substantially aid in making decisions that consider the interests of the Community and each Person, Member, and Family in the Community. Anikwom encourages participants to learn, deepen, and balance their self-awareness, needs, and interests with the needs and interests of one another in an integrated whole, to make healthy and effective life choices. This is the skill of Eldership--whether young or old.

Opportunities for Eldership Development An Elder is a keeper of knowledge. An Elder understands that Wabanaki economics, for instance, is based on the interrelationship and interdependency with the Creation/Nature. S/he is conscious that the Tribal/Community decisions must take into account the decisions, legacy, and history of the Generations before, for the protection of the land and People of the next seven Generations. As we have said, Eldership is not dependent on age – anyone can embody the eldership spirit. Anikwom will develop with Wabanaki Communities and Leaders, the goal of creating a new Generation of Elders for Wabanaki Nations.

LongGreenHouse aims for a deep sustainability that starts with reducing our carbon footprint but goes beyond to consider the economic, political, and cultural demands of reconnecting to the land. Several university classes have constructed a four-season unheated greenhouse on site, as well as a sweat lodge, and the grounds are the site of a permaculture gardens used by Wassookeag schoolchildren, University of Maine undergrads, and adult gardeners alike.

Economically, LongGreenHouse explores alternative currencies anchored locally yet linked together via human and electronic networks, creating a social structure that is neither colonial nor indigenous but arising on the interface between the two cultures. Max Terry's experiment in online currency, AUX, is one student project to come from this exploration.

Politically, LongGreenHouse combines indigenous models of community organization with network models of global connectivity. LongGreenHouse co-founder Miigam'agan emerged as a recognized leader in the Burnt Church affair of the Maritimes, and she remains active in both formal and informal work in Wabanaki communites. LongGreenHouse has also hosted student debates over global warming and premiered a film about the political schism between ethnic Greeks and Turks on the island of Cyprus.

Culturally, LongGreenHouse's goal is to pursue an art of connecting people to each other and the world around them, as is the case in many indigenous cultures. The Tambaran of Papua New Guinea consider its major art form the creation of children and spirits--including all the social and ecological ties necessary to sustain their lives. Malanggan, another Reite art form, creates webs of social trust across generations and families while producing wood carvings. The songlines of Australian Aborigines crisscross a continent and centuries of history, articulating dense, discreet social networks. LongGreenHouse aims to follow these models of artistic co-creation that inform indigenous 'art' in a way that builds working webs of trust, locally and globally.

LongGreenHouse has been the site of numerous workshops, including this event from the 2011 Digital Humanities Week:

Social media and sustainability

Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2011

5-7pm at 5 Chapel Road; 7-9pm at 42 Mill Street

Joline Blais, Claudia Lowd, gkisedtanamoogk, and Craig Dietrich lead local growers and media activists in a discussion about how social networks can support edible backyards and local farmers. Projects presented include LongGreenHouse, a living/learning center based on the Wabanaki Longhouse model and permaculture design principles, including a multi-age school, a UMaine journeyperson program, and Native elders all under one roof. Also featured will be LA Green Grounds, a grass-roots gardening initiative in Los Angeles that has become a YouTube phenomenon. The event begins with a tour of permaculture gardens at the south edge of campus at 5 Chapel Rd., followed by a potluck at an urban garden site at 42 Mill St. in downtown Orono. For more information contact ude.eniam.timu@sialb_eniloj. Sponsored by Still Water.

Northeast Permaculture Convergence

Learn more about the Northeast Permaculture Convergence, July 2-4 2010 at MOFGA's Common Ground Education Center in Unity, Maine.

Water Fall Arts Summer 2010 workshop
Aug 9-13, 4-7 pm
Joline Blais, Miigam'agan, gkisedtanamoogk'

Design With Nature: Return of the Natives

This hand-on workshop focusses on skills designed to reconnect Art with Nature via the four elements--earth, air, fire, water. We will practice techniques drawn from permaculture design, indigenous ceremony, and network culture to create art that nourishes and sustains life: Life Art. Through the process of Observe/Listen, Discern/Create a Pattern, and Intervene/Interact you will find ways to connect your deep inner voice to the creative forces in the Web of Life. In the process we will symbolically overthrow "the kingdom" and recognize the Creative Commons flourishing at Waterfall Arts.

Joline Blais teaches NewMedia and InterMedia Art at UMaine in Orono. Her book, At the Edge of Art explores the ways art and creativity have been redefined by the Internet age. Her creative practice spans poetry, fiction, digital art, permaculture, ceremony, social networks and mothering. Her most recent projects include LongGreenHouse which weaves together Permaculture, Network Culture and Indigenous culture, and RFC: Request for Ceremony, an online portal for learning and sharing emerging ceremony, ie. the practices that reweave humans into the ecological web.

Miigam'agan is a member of the Mi'kmaq (Micmac) Nation, founder of the Elders and Youth Council, and cofounder of the Wabanaki Nations Cultural Resource Center, the Miingignoti-Keteaoag, the Esgenoôpetitj Mi'kmaqesk women's council, and Anikwom WholeLife Center. Apart from my activities as a Still Water Research Fellow at the University of Maine, she is also affiliated with the Wabanaki Confederacy, New Brunswick Native Womenâ€'s Council, Elders and Youth Council (Burnt Church New Brunswick), Esgenoopetitj Mi'kmaqesk (Burnt Church New Brunswick), Wabanaki Language Immersion Program (St. Thomas University), Aboriginal Rights Coalition Atlantic (centered in New Brunswick, Canada), and Tatamagouche Center (Nova Scotia). As a clan mother, Miigam'agan's life-work is dedicated to supporting empowerment for women, youth, families and communities and preserving and teaching Wabanaki culture and spirituality.

gkisedtanamoogk practices 'creative' ways to bridge the socio-political polarization of the Indigenous Nations of Turtle Island and the newcomer nation-states of North America. His professional background is in human and community development and his interests include Law, History, and Spirituality. gkisedtanamoogk is Wampanoag from the Federation of the Pokaunauket and practice the Ceremonial Life of my People; he is Otter and Turtle Clan; married with three Children; Education and Cultural Specialist and co-founder of the Anikwom Wholelife Center in Maine whose work and proximity correlates to the Wabanaki Confederacy Territories; he teaches in the Peace Studies and Native american studies programs at UMaine, and is a Still Water Research Fellow.

Green U-Me

May 1, 2009 1-4 pm

Bangor Room, Memorial Union, UMaine Orono

Generate a Green Design for campus, curriculum and community with UMaine students, faculty, neighbors and their special guests, including:

Free and open to university and community members

Please click on stories at right or visit the LongGreenHouse blog directly.

You can see recent photos of LongGreenHouse and its projects at Flickr.com/photos/green-house/.

Wabanaki elders Miigam'agan and gkisedtanamoogk became the first Still Water Research Fellows in 2007, but their ongoing participation in Still Water programs has a longer history. They have participated in the Cross-Cultural Partnership initiative, the Connected Knowledge summits in 2006 and 2007, classes in indigenous media, and LongGreenHouse.

Miigam'agan is a member of the Mi'kmaq (Micmac) Nation, founder of the Elders and Youth Council, and cofounder of the Wabanaki Nations Cultural Resource Center, the Miingignoti-Keteaoag, the Esgenoôpetitj Mi'kmaqesk women's council, and Anikwom WholeLife Center. She is affiliated with the Wabanaki Confederacy, New Brunswick Native Women’s Council, Elders and Youth Council (Burnt Church New Brunswick), Esgenoopetitj Mi'kmaqesk (Burnt Church New Brunswick), Wabanaki Language Immersion Program (St. Thomas University), Aboriginal Rights Coalition Atlantic (centered in New Brunswick, Canada), and Tatamagouche Center (Nova Scotia). Her life-work is dedicated to supporting empowerment for women, youth, families and communities and preserving and teaching Wabanaki culture and spirituality.

gkisedtanamoogk brings to Still Water a background in finding creative ways to bridge the socio-political polarization of the Indigenous Nations of Turtle Island and the newcomer nation-states of North America. His professional background is in human and community development and his interests include Law, History, and Spirituality. He is Wampanoag from the Federation of the Pokaunauket and practices the Ceremonial Life of his People; he is Otter and Turtle Clan; married with three Children; Education and Cultural Specialist and co-founder of the Anikwom Wholelife Center in Maine, whose work and proximity correlates to the Wabanaki Confederacy Territories. gkisedtanamoogk is currently adjunct faculty at the University of Maine at Orono.

Joline Blais, Associate Professor of New Media at UMaine, co-directs Still Water, and co-founded LongGreenHouse. At the Edge of Art (2006), co-written with Jon Ippolito, investigates how new strategies of empowerment--execution rather than representation, arrest rather than entertainment--work in communities of new media artists, and how these practices reshape both art and real world contexts. Blais' publications and creative work explore the overlap of digital culture, indigenous culture and permaculture. This cross-cultural braid suggests tribal and networked alternatives to conventional socio-political and cultural structures, and co-creates models of deep sustainability. LongGreenHouse (2007), for example, weaves the Wabanaki Longhouse, permaculture gardens, and networked collaboration together in a hybrid "communiversity", in partnership with UMaine, Wassookeag homeschool, and ESTIA Eco-Peace Network. Other projects include FC: Request for Ceremony, a call for re-investing quotidian life with ceremony; and the Cross-Cultural Partnership, a legal framework for developing trust networks with indigenous peoples.

Jon Ippolito hopes building networks will help keep digital culture alive and kicking--but he has his hands full in today's climate of unfettered media monopolies, accelerated obsolescence, and looming co-optation by academia. He is the digital doyen of The Variable Media Network, an international consortium of museums and archives that devises medium-independent strategies to preserve new media art. As grand vizier of The Open Art Network, Ippolito works with a growing number of prominent digital artists to promote an open architecture for the Internet and digital media. As chief constable of the Still Water lab at the University of Maine, he works with Co-director Joline Blais to enforce an expansive definition of networked art in the academia and the art world, as argued in their 2006 book At the Edge of Art. The recipient of Tiffany, Lannan, and American Foundation awards, he has exhibited artwork with collaborative teammates Janet Cohen and Keith Frank at the Walker Art Center, ZKM/Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Harvard's Carpenter Center, and the Yale Art and Architecture Gallery. As Associate Curator of Media Arts at the Guggenheim Museum, he has curated Virtual Reality: An Emerging Medium and, with John G. Hanhardt, The Worlds of Nam June Paik. Ippolito's critical writing has appeared in periodicals such as the Art Journal, Artforum, Flash Art, the Washington Post, and in his regular column for ArtByte magazine.

Debby Bell-Smith graduated from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst with degrees in English and Education. She has been teaching professionally for twenty years. She was trained at the Parkway School in Philadelphia, the first alternative school to be established within a public school system. She has since taken numerous courses and workshops and has attended conferences all over the country with other progressive educators. Debby believes that teachers are facilitators in children's educational process and should be available to provide resources and tools for discovery. Elementary education should provide an environment for children to develop strong skills in literacy and mathematics and exposure to all other disciplines. The school environment must feel safe so that children can take risks and learn from their mistakes. She believes that students need to learn social as well as academic lessons. School should allow kids to experience and work through interpersonal experiences in a real and supportive environment.

Australians Julia and Charles Yelton are internationally recognized experts in the study of sustainable design known as Permaculture. Armed with backgrounds in computer engineering, ceramics, and landscape design, the Yeltons cut their Permaculture teeth at Australia's Crystal Waters community, then went on to work with the INSAN Permaculture Institute in Nepal, hill tribes in northern Thailand, an alternative energy group in Wales, and a natural Permaculture village in Bali. In Whitefield, Maine, the Yeltons established a passive-solar, energy-efficient homestead with a four-season garden to demonstrate that it is indeed possible to grow lettuce in January--not to mention staying warm without oil or gas and redirecting waste water and food to build fertile soil.

Since establishing a presence in Maine, the Yeltons have joined in a number of projects by the local ESTIA eco-peace community established by U-Me Peace Studies professor Emily Markides, including leading U-Me students on a two-week Permaculture intervention in Hawai'i's main island and coordinating the design and growth of a community food forest on the island of Cyprus. Julia and Charles are hands-on advisors to Still Water's LongGreenHouse project, where in fall 2007 they joined U-Me students led by Markides and Still Water co-director Joline Blais in erecting a 50-foot greenhouse, coldframe, and 200 running feet of swaled gardens.

In a world of shrinking energy resources, Charles and Julia Yelton offer a positive and practical approach to redesigning environments and livestyles to live more lightly on the planet.

UMaine Green Living Internships

Summer 2010

UMaine students can choose a green living option in this pilot project at the south edge of campus. Walk to your classes, live in a shared home, practice quotidian sustainability from harvesting berries and apples, to catching and filtering runoff water, to composting food. Options for course credit, or independent study projects on site. This fall the IMFA Life Art class will hold outdoor classes on the cedar deck, and explore art projects along the stream watershed that flows through the property to the Stillwater river. A Mitchell Center grant will supplement this with a permaculture design for transforming university stormwater into edible forest gardens, waterfalls, and sound installations.

LongGreenHouse also offers other options for learning and practicing sustainable living while at UMaine, from workshops to art projects, from independent study to related courses or course projects. We also maintain a site at Phillips lake for forest/lake ecology permaculture and wildcrafting, as well as swimming, canoeing, kayaking and hiking. If you would like sustainable living to be part of your edcation, drop us a line, give us your suggestions, and find a way to join our team!

Fore more information contact longgreenhouse At gmail DOT com

UMaine Year-Long Apprenticeships

New positions available Fall 2010

Successful interns will be eligible to apply for year-long apprenticeships with local trades people, farmers, engineers, builders, economists, storytellers, and media artists. These "green apprenticeships" will partner local skill with Permaculture techniques and technologies to "retrofit" the regional economy, focusing on what some have called the "core economy" or "natural capital" without which all political and social systems fail. Apprentices will be developing job opportunities to continue the work of regenerative design of Maine's green future. Apprenticeships will begin fall 2010 and will be open to undergraduate and graduate students.

For more information contact longgreenhouse At gmail DOT com

Courses

We run a number of University courses at LongGreenHouse, taking advantage of more experiential learning in a natural setting. We take advantage of the octagon cedar deck overlooking the permaculture gardens and he duck pond. UMaine professors teaching related courses may also choose to run a single session by signing up on our calendar.

Courses include:

• Indigenous Media
• Permaculture
• Intro to Native American Studies
• High School
• Upward Bound
• Elementary/Middle School
• Wassokeag

Independent Study

Students may sign up with a faculty member to do an independent study project at LongGreenHouse.

Please contact us via longgreenhouse At gmail DOT com.

Please contact us via longgreenhouse At gmail DOT com