Woven Through Time and Place
A research project on sweetgrass resilience offers an opportunity for a broad collaboration
The sun shone brightly over the salt marsh on a cloudless early summer morning as Cait Cleaver ’06 knelt down by a patch of verdant grasses and scanned them with the intensity of a person looking for something precious.
She was. The assistant professor of environmental studies was searching for sweetgrass, the aromatic herb sacred to the Wabanaki people who have harvested it for millennia to make baskets and for use in ceremonies.
Here, at the Sprague Marsh in the Bates-Morse Mountain Conservation Area in Phippsburg, sweetgrass—redolent of cinnamon, vanilla, and warm hay—is also the starting point for a collaboration between Colby, Bates College, and members of the Wabanaki nations. The partnership aims to amplify aspects of the plant’s ecology and conservation while keeping its importance to traditional Indigenous culture at the forefront.
The project is as much about the web of interconnected human relationships as it is about the grass that grows at the edge of the sea.
“I really love working at the intersection of coupled systems, the human and natural systems,” Cleaver said. “I think, inherently, you can’t separate people from their environment. It’s all so connected. Our actions have implications for the environment and vice versa. Our trajectory is influenced by the environment, and I think the scientific process is really valuable in helping gather evidence and helping us answer questions that we have.”
An enduring plant
The sweetgrass project has a straightforward goal but a fairly complex backstory. Collaborators include Beverly Johnson, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Earth and Climate Sciences at Bates; Natalie Michelle, PhD, a member of the Penobscot Nation and a researcher at the University of Maine, and former visiting assistant professor at Colby; and Arthur Haines, senior research botanist for Native Plant Trust, a Framingham, Mass.-based conservation organization.
They want to find out if the plant, whose native salt marshes are vulnerable to sea level rise and coastal development pressures, can be successfully transplanted. This could safeguard and increase its resilience, something that matters a lot for a species that is so critically important to Indigenous culture.
Last year, project participants identified a robust, healthy sweetgrass bed located next to a shell midden on the Sprague Marsh, carefully dug up plugs, and lugged them in buckets to a spot that is at a higher elevation in the same marsh. This summer, the team returned to check on the progress of the transplants. Sweetgrass naturally spreads through underground rhizomes, and if the elation in Cleaver’s voice was anything to go by, it looked like the grasses had embraced their new home.
“It’s everywhere,” she exclaimed.
For Michelle, who is of both Penobscot and Passamaquoddy ancestry, sweetgrass is woven into her memories as indelibly as Indigenous basketmakers weave the fragrant strands into their creations.
“My mother used to braid for the basketmakers. They’d bring her a bundle of grass because she was such a good braider. She was fast,” Michelle remembered. “Every time I came home from school, I could smell it all through the house, and I’d hear this hum, this buzzing. That was the sound of my mother braiding.”
Traditionally, her ancestors and other members of the Wabanaki Nations would have come to salt marshes like this one to gather sweetgrass. Families would often come to the same harvesting area year after year, and scientists now understand the practice of judicious harvesting actually helped stimulate growth of the plant. At home, families would braid it for use in baskets and ceremonies.
“It’s that kind of scent that during a ceremony, it brings everybody down to a calmness,” Michelle said. “Sometimes, we smudge our sacred objects with it, to clear the energy there. And then we smudge each person in the ceremony so that everybody has that good energy.”
Restoring connections
After Europeans settled what became Maine, the Wabanaki, and the Penobscot Nation in particular, have had limited access to their coastal roots and heritage. The traditional territory included the Penobscot River basin down to Penobscot Bay, but when the reservations were created in the 19th century, they did not include coastal access.
This is a long-standing cultural disconnection that sweetgrass project participants would like to help bridge, or at least not ignore.
“Our objectives are twofold,” Cleaver said. “Can we transplant sweetgrass and make it more resilient to sea level rise? And then also, can we restore connections to place?”
Michelle is willing to try. Last summer, she organized a Wabanaki water ceremony to bless the project, inviting other knowledge-keepers and other project participants to join her on Hermit Island nearby in Phippsburg. Cleaver’s young daughter played with Haines’s daughter in the tide pools as the knowledge keepers passed tobacco, which holds a vital role in Penobscot blessing rituals, and honored the sacredness of water.
“It was really special,” Cleaver said. “It was a magical day.”
After the ceremony, half the team went to the marsh to harvest the sweetgrass plugs and transplant them to the new location, where the other half placed them into newly dug holes, watered, and fertilized them.
“The tide was coming up, and for the last one, we had to wade across the channel in almost thigh-deep water. It was a good end to the day,” Cleaver said. “And we got it done.”
Work that matters
Cleaver is in a unique position to help helm the project. Before she began working at the College, she served for several years as the director of the Bates-Morse Mountain Conservation Area, a roughly 600-acre tract of permanently protected salt marshes and coastal uplands on the Phippsburg peninsula that Bates College manages for research and educational purposes.
“It is absolutely incredible. It’s a jewel of midcoast Maine,” she said. “There are a lot of people who care very deeply about this place.”
As director, she developed relationships with many of the people who love it. She also learned about a recent shift in the conservation movement in Maine. Rather than simply aiming to put land in conservation and protect it from change or development, many people are now thinking about ways to reconnect Wabanaki to places of cultural importance. The change is driven in part by the national Land Back campaign, which aims to restore Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty over ancestral lands, economic prosperity, and cultural revitalization.
That meant it was all the more important to include Indigenous voices in the sweetgrass study.
“We’re exploring the potential to implement two-eyed seeing,” Cleaver said. “It’s basically like taking Indigenous ecological and cultural knowledge, and oral histories, and then working collaboratively with Western science approaches to try and answer questions together and have knowledge sharing occur both ways.”
At Colby, she often tackles projects that involve ecological research, social science, and the potential for policy outcomes that can affect coastal restoration, aquaculture, and fisheries. It’s work that doesn’t happen only in classrooms or laboratories, but in the field and in communities, with all the possibilities and occasional messiness that entails.
It’s also work that matters. Right now, sweetgrass in Maine isn’t rare or endangered, and marshes are considered naturally resilient, with the ability to migrate toward land as the tides leave sediments behind. In some cases, marshes might even be able to outpace sea level rise.
But all of that could change, and quickly.
“We are expecting sea levels to rise pretty significantly in the near future,” Cleaver said. “And we have a lot of coastal development and this phenomenon of coastal squeeze, where we’ve restricted the ability of these natural systems to actually migrate.”
A different kind of place and project
But Morse Mountain is different. At the conservation area, an intact sand dune system with a barrier beach and the marsh behind it makes it a good testing area for the sweetgrass study. Johnson, who described the cross-institutional collaboration as “very fun,” has been studying the physical conditions under which sweetgrass grows. One of her students, earth and climate sciences major Izzy Larson ’25, completed a thesis assessing sweetgrass habitat and how climate change would impact it.
“We found that sweetgrass is very flexible—it’s super resilient,” she said. “The grasses will grow under all different geochemical conditions, which is great for thinking about sea level rise and marsh migration.”
Haines, the botanist, guided the transplantation of the sweetgrass plugs last summer. He was drawn to the project by its emphasis on blending two ways of knowing.
“It’s scientific ecological knowledge, and it’s traditional ecological knowledge,” he said. “It’s Western medicine and Indigenous science and medicine coming together.”
And he was heartened by the early signs that the sweetgrass transplants were doing well, something that was a positive sign for the resilience of a species he described as “ridiculously culturally important.”
“Not every plug has produced new spring shoots of the sweetgrass, but that is to be expected,” Haines said. As he spoke, an osprey flew low over the marsh grasses, which swayed gently in the sea breeze. “There’s a lot of abundance right here, and while a million people can’t come out here and collect, a lot of families can, and that’s historically what was occurring.”
‘Your opinion is relevant’
Rounding out the team were three of Cleaver’s summer research assistants, Erin Young ’27, who is a double major in environmental science and Spanish; Patria Cabrera ’27, an environmental studies and geology double major; and Lillian Blohm ’28, a double major in biology and environmental science.
They were learning how to assess the sweetgrass growth in the transplant areas, which Cleaver counted with the help of a frame, or quadrat, placed on the ground.
Young said she appreciated participating in the project, especially because an Indigenous basketmaker visited one of Cleaver’s classes in the spring semester and talked about the importance of sweetgrass. She brought her materials, including dried sweetgrass, and showed the students how she would weave it into braids.
“It was really incredible,” Young said. “I’ve been able to see many different perspectives, including the people who gather it and make baskets. Coming out here to actually study the transplant bed has been super cool.”
For Cabrera, the research project shares qualities that make Cleaver’s classroom stand out.
“It’s not lecture-based, where the professor is the one talking and everyone else is listening. It’s very much like a conversation,” she said. “That always makes learning more fun, especially for stuff that’s actively being debated and being changed. It’s not just, ‘write it down and retain it.’ Your opinion on it is actually relevant, which is really cool.”
Opinions might not play a role in every scientific project, but they do in this one. Cleaver said she anticipates the group will soon hold one-on-one conversations about opening access to sweetgrass harvesting in the marsh.
“Because of the relationships that exist and the relationships that we’re building, we have a real opportunity to figure out what a model of increasing Wabanaki access to the Sprague Marsh in Phippsburg could look like,” she said. “We want to understand what’s possible.”
