Music showcases culture and acceptance
Written and photographed by Elaine Koustenis
“Can you hear that?”
Hawk Henries, 54, looks out at the small audience that gathers in front of him and leans into a microphone on the Bowdoin College basketball court. The audience filters throughout the space, as Hawk roots through cloth bags surrounding his chair.
Hawk Henries, a Native American of Nipmuk descent, is giving a presentation of his flute music. He is well known for his flute making workshops, his numerous song recordings, and his constant presence in the state of Maine’s schools and recovery facilities. His music is said to have rehabilitative qualities. His hair creeps towards his lower back, tied off with a series of elastics all the way down. Grey has begun to encroach upon the crown of his head and is displayed prominently throughout his mustache that wires its way around his lips.
From one bag he pulls out a flute made from bamboo, fire, and hand tools. With the use of metal files and a canister of MAPP gas, Hawk files down the edges of the bamboo and burns holes into the exterior to make keys. He lifts the flute to his lips and allows for a slow tweet of air to escape.
Onlookers bob their heads in approval.
Hawk throws his arms forward and beckons the onlookers to come closer with quick sweeps of his hands. “We can make ourselves and the world better through knowledge… [we can] improve the condition of how we live when we show little pieces of ourselves and others.”
Skirting the out of bounds line on the basketball court, independent merchants have set up 
goods on folding tables; including Hawk and his wife Lisa, and daughters Sequan, 21, and Sierra, 23. Hawk has his flutes on display, while his daughter Sierra has pyrography (burning images onto birch bark) for sale. The disjointed cadence of a handheld drum can be heard; a child taps his fingers against the rim as his mother tries to hold it out of reach. On each table a sign denotes a name whether it is Lakota, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet, or Nipmuk; the Wabenaki Arts Festival has brought together Native American tribes not only from Maine, but from all over the country
Beginning his tradesman ship in the 1980s, Hawk is nearing his 30th year as a flute maker and musician, bringing his craft to Maine over 23 years ago, on a whim.
“Well, my interest before moving to Maine, was people, you know, psychology or whatever.” What brought Hawk to Maine was a trip that he and his wife took, leaving their home in Rhode Island behind to travel to Newfoundland. They were searching for the setting in Farley Mowat’s book A Whale for the Killing. The story is about a town that struggles over what to do with a whale stuck in a Newfoundland inlet. While there, they found they were not able to access the island where the story occurred, but found a new place that they could call home. They stopped in Acadia National Park while traveling back through Maine. “We didn’t even know about Acadia National Park before that and we both agreed that we would just drive over to the park and find a place to sleep for the night instead of getting a hotel and finish the journey the next day. And when we woke up, sleeping in the car, we were facing the ocean, and woke up just as the sun was rising and we sat silently for a while and both agreed that it felt like home.”
With responsibilities and work back home in Rhode Island, they returned. Both Hawk and Lisa worked with children handicapped by developmental disabilities. In between their busy workdays, the couple spent all of their free time in Maine due to the connection they felt with the landscape there. After about 3 years of traveling back and forth, the house that they were renting went up for sale and that proved the best opportunity to move North. “We had been subscribing to a local [paper, The] Ellsworth American, and that came in the mail that afternoon. I looked in the Want ads, the help wanted ads, and there was a job for a residential treatment counselor. So I called them on the phone and told them who I was and what I do and they gave me the job. And two weeks later, we were living in Maine.” Hawk was still working full time, so his musical abilities and craftsmanship were only yet in their developmental stages.
Hawk picks up a flute, about half the length of his forearm, petite in comparison to his other flutes. Hawk explains his song, a song that his youngest daughter, Sequan, requests him to play. It is the “Bird Song” and birds “no matter the color, size and shape, are able to live together peacefully and in harmony.” He exchanges quick puffs of air for gentle twitters as he moves his fingers across finger holes of his flute. His eyes are closed and his body sways in rhythm.
A female onlooker grasps onto her black fanny pack, stares at Hawk, and proclaims silently through moving lips, “Wow, he is awesome.”
“I love birds,” Hawk says after he finishes his song, “I love them with sweet and sour sauce as well.” He leans his head back and displays his teeth, waiting for a laugh.
Hawk finishes his presentation as men dressed in fringed clothing come towards the floor, readying for the drum circle. He steps outside and walks to his car where he grabs a pipe and smokes sweetly scented tobacco intermittently, blueberry wafts through the air as he speaks; puffs of smoke creep out from his nostrils.
Hawk is a proponent of equality for all people. He is well aware of the tribulations that plague humans and the world in which they live. “People are more than happy to discriminate. People are happy to share their biases you know, we all have them. Some people are more willing to have them than others…I mean, there are people that do things that I don’t like, but I don’t disrespect them for what they look like. It just doesn’t make sense to me. ” Hawk is not a stranger to discrimination. He grew up in a time where it was better to ignore his Native American culture.
In the 1970s coming from Rhode Island, a predominately white state, Hawk was arrested on not one, but two occasions because of the color of his skin. Pointing to a falcon cutting through the skyline, he recalls the first arrest when he was 17, one that involved not only him, but his five brothers.
“We didn’t have a clue what was going on. They said that we stole a car. We said ‘No, no, no that’s our house. We just walked out of the house.’ We had a basketball in our hand. They didn’t care. We just had the right color…That kind of stuff really affected my life, you know. And there are lots of instances, but it was enough to make me think, I don’t ever want to treat people like that.”
He uses his flute skills as an olive branch, reaching out to diverse populations through his artisan-ship. “I think it’s vital that human beings know each other, because when we don’t, we create a lot of images and fears around our perceptions and misperceptions and I think in part, and it’s a small part, that’s one of the reasons we hurt each other. We have fear about each other, you know?”
Hawk was unacquainted with his culture growing up. “I think that, when I was very young, I didn’t know much about being Nipmuk, being Native. And in part because, for a lot of people, and I think a lot of people here in the east; one, there has been an active effort to exterminate us, not just eastern Native peoples, but Native people’s all over the continent.” Hawk scratches his forehead as he speaks, pausing his thoughts momentarily. “And that’s been pretty successful in the sense that there have been a lot of Native people who have been forcefully removed from their own culture. Boarding schools were uh, that was the tool that was used for that.”
Boarding schools such as the Dartmouth and Harvard Indian Schools surfaced in the 1769 and 1665 respectively. These schools were brought about to “Christianize” and assimilate Native American people during the colonization of America. They were used as tools of redirecting Native peoples away from their own cultural identity and assimilating them into Western ideology. Structured schooling is still very hard for many Natives to trust because of their experiences with dissemination; Hawk home schooled his own two children. The Dartmouth and Harvard Indian schools are directly related to the well known institutions of today. One of the worst schools, according to Hawk, was the Carlisle Indian School established in 1879.
“Harvard and Dartmouth were different from the Carlisle Indian School. They were different because in Carlisle Indian School, children were tortured or beaten when they engaged in their own culture…children were removed from their homes and families and forced to go 1000 or 2000 miles away from their homes, and forced to engage in a different culture altogether.” Hawk’s grandmother was forced into these boarding schools. He stops for a moment, catches his breath, and swallows hard. “So, um, for a lot of Native people, and I’m using that very generally, there was a time where to be successful was not acknowledging who you were.”
Hawk travels to many schools and conferences around the world to display his abilities and to conduct workshops. The state of Maine has a mandatory curriculum of Maine history which includes the cultural, historical, economical and political systems of the Wabenaki peoples in accordance with Title 20-A of the revised education statute. Hawk is one of the people available to teach the traditional arts to students. He notes the importance of having a person of Native American culture teach these lessons. “I think when scholars, or whoever it is that are teaching outside of their own culture, it can be difficult to present a full picture.”
***
Hawk Henries navigates an unfinished basement, picking up metal files from a toolbox and placing them on a makeshift table constructed from a piece of D grade plywood and a saw horse at each end. Each time he walks by it, he catches his boot on the leg of the table, stumbling while giving a hearty laugh; “We’re going to have to put some orange flags on these things!” A rope of burning sage lays upon a bowl of burning charcoal tablets, in attempt to cover the smell of mildew, and set a mood. People filter into the basement; their above entrance is from Native Arts, a shop located in Woolwich, ME.
Those people being taught the process of flute making all have their different reasons for coming. One is a teacher, Laurel Dufton, from the Lisbon Falls area who saw Hawk in Belfast over 8 years ago while he was teaching in schools. “I saw him play at the American Folk Festival. If I do anything having to do with Native American arts in school, I would call Hawk.” She has brought her 11 year-old daughter Cicely today to learn a new craft.
Flute making is a way to bring people together, no matter their experience, no matter their age, no matter their ailment. Hawk smoothes his green sweater down towards his pant line, his hand carved hawk necklace shivers upon his chest. He knows that a large part of what holds people back in life is fear. “I was teaching at a school in Boston for non-traditional high school students. There was one boy who was 18 years old from Haiti who had terrible burn marks all over his body from when he was very young…when we got to the fire part; he just shook his head no at me. I said to him ‘why not?’ He looked at me and said ‘don’t you see me?” I said ‘of course I do so will you try?” He said ‘but I am very afraid.’ I said ‘aha’ to that. Now we have acknowledged the fear. I looked at him and said ‘I am going to use this fire to burn the holes into the flute. Hold onto my hand, and I will show you how to do it.’ Well, by the end of the day, he was ready for me to hold onto his hand! For the rest of the week, he wanted to burn the holes for everybody else!”
A propane canister roars to ignition near the doorway of the basement where Cicely is heating up a metal file to create finger holes for her flute. “The metal file heats up red hot but will cool down quickly because of the moisture in the bamboo. See all the smoke there?” Hawk motions excitedly with his hands. “Open the door so we don’t suffocate ourselves!” Cicely laughs as he comes closer to her and whispers directions to her. “So, now, when you finish burning those holes, you can teach the next person. You’re a good teacher right?” Hawk half closes his eyes waiting for her answer. She nods her head and smiles; Hawk responds in kind.
Hawk examines a piece of red cedar the size of a match box, turning it over and over in his 
hands, checking the channel that is being bored out of the bottom. He shows Cicely how to make a saddle for a flute, a wooden piece which covers the two holes made closest to the mouthpiece. It helps to create the sound and the tuning of the flute. He pantomimes a piece of wood and exact-o-blade for Cicely to mimic. “For a good part of my life, I was very creative but I didn’t do anything with music.” Flute making is something that connects music to culture, and culture to ancestry. “Culture and tradition oftentimes get misconstrued as something from the past and it’s not, you know. Tradition is a living entity, culture is a living entity that changes shape and form…”
Hawk did not learn the art of flute making from a traditional source. He was not taught by another Native American person; he is self taught. His cousin from New Brunswick brought him his first flute. “He used to live all the way up in northern New Brunswick and he came to my home with a flute that someone had given him. And he said here, try this flute Hawk, and I thought it was beautiful. It just had a really sweet voice and so I tried to make the flute sound like his and really all I did was ruin it. In five minutes, it didn’t play. So for the next six months after that, I worked at trying to make it work again. I was able to rebuild it and make it work. So that’s how I learned how to build flutes, was from that experience.”
Hawk stands back from the group of amateur flute makers, acknowledging the importance of the shared experience. He stands up tall for a moment then hurries out the door. He returns moments later with a cloth bag almost six feet long and an odd block of wood covered in long metal keys, mimicking a piano in the composition. From the bag, he pulls a didgeridoo, a musical instrument known from the aboriginal people of Australia. What he holds in his hand, is called mbira dzavadzimu, an instrument from Zimbabwe. He says that sometimes, instruments just “yell” to him. “When an instrument does yell to me like that, I get it, I kind of explore the instrument myself and just my nature; I’m inquisitive. I want to know about the history, the use of it, how people used it and how they use it today.”
Culture, and the shared experience of culture, has always intrigued Hawk in his adult life. Over twenty years ago, he and his family were invited to Quebec City for a world gathering of indigenous peoples. When invited to attend the gathering by the female organizer, Hawk at first declined. “I said to her ‘Are there going to be any white people there?’ She said, ‘Oh, no, no. This is a gathering of indigenous peoples.’” Hawks voice gets deeper as he mimics the woman’s voice, showing indignation. “And I said, ‘Well, I don’t think I’m going then.” Hawk clears his thought and a smile comes to his face. “I said ‘well, I’ve been discriminated against because of the color of my skin, I know what it feels like. I don’t want to do it. So if people are being excluded for that reason, I don’t want to do it.’” The organizer eventually did call him back and told him that there would be white people there; indigenous people from Scandinavia would be attending.
As a child, Hawk knew he was different. Instead of torturing fish and frogs as some young children tend to do, he “wanted to look at them and get to know them and sit with my back against trees…I don’t know if that has anything to do with being Native as it does with being human…as I got older, when I started looking more closely at who I am and who my ancestors are, it gave me a context with which I could put some of my feelings and wonderings and thoughts into, it made a little bit more sense to me.”
The sound of a didgeridoo fills the room with its deep intonations as Hawk does a circular breathing technique that he had learned through mimicking an indigenous person from Australia at the Quebec City gathering. His eyes focus on the six foot long instrument and his chest heaves up and down. Instruments like the didgeridoo and mbira dzavadzimu, and even Hawk’s flutes
are living parts of culture and tradition; things that even through hate and discrimination, cannot be taken away.
Hawk places the didgeridoo to his side and leans against a high table, watching Laurel bore holes into her flute; her daughter Cicely places her hand on her mother’s, directing it towards the flame. “ I’m letting them discover and help each other, all kinds of things blossom, some things about woodworking, flute making, it’s really more about who they are as human beings which is really the impetus behind my flute workshops. I love teaching people how to make flutes but I really like to encourage people to be in touch with who they are and be happy with that.”
***
Elaine in Maine 