In November of 2024, I went out on the river so Jan could show me the “headwaters of the Stillwater River.” The name is a joke. The joke, for those who are unaware, is that there is no such thing as the Stillwater River and, therefore, no headwaters. Instead, there is a section of the Penobscot River that flows east of what is commonly called Marsh Island. In the Penobscot language, this section of river is described as being still water and, therefore, easier to paddle than the section to the west of the island.
True headwaters start as small streams. Small streams join to create larger streams, which eventually empty into rivers. Headwaters cannot be a branch of a river. Naming the Stillwater River as such gave advantage to the state of Maine during an ownership dispute with the tribe over Marsh Island. The state predominated and the island became home to the town of Orono and UMO.
“The Headwaters” of the “Stillwater River” aka the Penobscot (photo by Fiona Hopper, 2024)
Jan’s humor was part of how she educated. She invited you in with a joke, with laughter, and in so doing eased the way for dark, hard truths, truths that the human mind (particularly the settler mind) shies away from. Shared laughter invites relationship, the relentless dropping of truth bombs does not. Jan knew this. She was not there to bombard, nor to coddle either. She was there to build relationships in order to build a shared understanding of the river she loved and in so doing to build a network of protection for the river Jan simply called “her.”
We laughed our way upriver to the spot where the branch renamed the Stillwater River splits off from the main stem of the Penobscot. It was there that laughter stopped. Jan knew that I, like most people who haven’t grown up with a Wabanaki river-view, couldn’t really understand the absurdity and the hubris of the state’s action until I saw it: a split in the river, not a brand new river miraculously appearing from the mist. She knew that experience is how we learn best. Though she would never have identified herself as such, Jan was a master teacher, and anyone lucky enough to learn from her knew it.
Jan saw me shivering and asked if I wanted to go back fast or slow. Slow would be less freezing, but would also keep us in the cold for longer, fast would be really freezing but get us all back to warmth more quickly. Angie, her long time colleague and dear friend, and I opted for fast. And I am grateful we did because Jan, who had driven the boat at a snail’s pace on the way up river, now grabbed the wheel and let it rip. She tore down that river like a bat of hell. Even with the freezing November wind in her face, she wore the wide grin of a child on a roller coaster ride. Her joy was contagious, overpowering, even. In the face of it, I forgot my fear and the biting wind.
Jan zipped her truck up to the trailer and had the boat attached in the blink of an eye, then she deftly maneuvered both into a narrow parking spot in the lot in front of the Penobscot Water Resources office. To watch a highly skilled person, whether a professional athlete or an artist, execute their craft is a gift. It was this way with Jan. She was a river navigator, a river advocate, a scientist, an educator, and a water protector at the top of her game, and it was a gift to behold her in action.
I, as well as my colleagues in the Portland Public Schools, have had the opportunity to work with Jan on a number of educational initiatives related to Wabanaki Studies. Jan’s legacy will live on in many ways. Education is just one, but it is an important one. Education has a ripple effect into the future, ripple effects Jan knew could improve the river’s future. We want to pay tribute to her work by enumerating her contributions to k-12 education in the Portland Public Schools and beyond.
Curriculum
In 2024, Jan reviewed a case study developed for ninth graders as part of the Portland Public Schools, k-12 Wabanaki Studies curriculum. The case study, For Profit Rivers, explores the impact of the paper industry on rivers and Wabanaki nations. Students engage with the topics such as environmental racism and greenwashing while grappling with the question: Can worldviews be reconciled? as they explore data, narratives, and history. Included in the case study are the fish consumption lessons Jan and Angie created. These lessons use colored goldfish in a hands-on activity that illustrates the connections between pollution and Penobscot food sovereignty. The activity allows students to understand how pollutants accumulate in fish tissue, the health risks associated with eating those fish, and the impact of both on Penobscot cultural identity.
Jan loved the case study and was so pleased that these important issues were not being avoided in the classroom. She wanted all Maine students to be able to engage in this critical study of worldview, history, colonization, and industrialization. I know she would be happy to learn that as of March, fifty districts across the state applied for and gained access to the full curriculum, including For Profits Rivers, after having their applications reviewed by Wabanaki Studies advisors.
For Profit Rivers was inspired by Jan. It wouldn’t exist without her because it was Jan who made the critical connection between worldview and water use, a connection no one in PPS would have ever heard if it had not been for Jan’s willingness to talk with and teach teachers.
Films
Portland Public Schools was awarded a sizable grant from the Kellogg Foundation in 2021 that funded the creation of a series of short, documentary-style films to support the k-12 Wabanaki Studies curriculum. The goal of these films was to allow students to learn directly from Wabanaki cultural educators in their own voices. I was fortunate enough to be on site for almost all of the twenty plus interviews. Jan came with Angie for an interview during which we spent a lot of time laughing, as usual. But we also got serious. Jan told a story of being watched by someone on the riverbank in front of one of the papermills when she arrived to collect water samples from the river. It did not matter what time of day or night she came, she recalled, there was always someone watching. Eventually, she asked her brother, who was a Penobscot game warden at the time, to accompany her. Her brother’s presence allowed her to feel safer, but that alone could not make up for the attempts at intimidation while caring for the river she loved. In her interview, Jan talked about the devastation caused by a worldview that worships the “all mighty dollar” above all else. She talked about what it was like to love something under constant attack from industry and ignorance.
Sections of Jan’s interview are used in Take Me to the River, a unit for third graders that explores the impact of dams on river ecosystems and elevates the long legacy of water protectors from Wabanaki and other Indigenous nations. The central text, We Are Water Protectors, is about the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. Jan was there for the protests against the pipeline in 2019. She knew that the threats facing the Penobscot were not different from those facing rivers across the nation and the globe. Her voice is central to the Water Protector Profile video created as part of Take Me to the River.
Parts of Jan’s interview are also used in For Profit Rivers. In fact, the teacher who drafted the unit emailed to tell me that it was Jan speaking in that video that made the information click for students. One student said in her feedback form that, “It was inspiring to see someone so dedicated to preserving the environment for future generations. When Jan used the pronoun ‘she’ to describe the river, it helped shift my understanding to see humans as being part of nature, not separate from it.”
I did not realize then what a gift it is to have Jan Paul on camera speaking truth about the river she loved. The video footage belongs to the Wabanaki Studies advisors, not to PPS, and can be used however they deem appropriate. Jan is not done being a water protector.
Teacher Professional Development
Between the summer of 2019 and the summer of 2025, over one hundred and twenty teachers from the Portland Public Schools participated in professional development on Sugar Island. Sugar Island is part of Penobscot Nation, and the Office of Cultural and Historic Preservation has run educational programming on the island for many years. Portland teachers prepared for their time on Sugar Island by engaging in a series of preparatory classes, then traveled to the island for a multi-day cultural immersion on the river.
Jan visited teacher groups on the island for most of those six summers. She did not come because she loved presenting or the sound of her own voice. In fact, anyone who knows Jan knows that she did not like talking in front of crowds of strangers. Despite her reluctance, Jan came, and every year it was Jan’s voice that made the critical difference. Teachers who listened to and learned from Jan experienced a radical change of perspective. Like the student mentioned earlier, they experienced the shift from thinking of the river as a means to an end, a separate entity, a thin line on a map, to seeing, even if just briefly, a river as a living being, a relation, a giver of life. I watched the flicker of understanding pass across the group year after year. Teachers came to the island river-ignorant, or perhaps river-loving in the recreational sense, but they left the island with a river-awareness that prepared them to teach For Profit Rivers and other units like it. These units plant the seeds of future water protectors. They help to carry on Jan’s work.
Students
Jan began collaborating with teachers at Casco Bay High School, in Portland, in 2018. Casco Bay High School follows an expeditionary learning model, which allows teachers to design highly engaging, integrated learning experiences for students. One such integrated learning experience, Junior Journey, allowed nearly one hundred students per year to learn about water quality, sea-run fish, and Penobscot sovereignty. During the fieldwork portion of Junior Journey, Jan worked directly with students, teaching them how to collect water samples and how to interpret data. During the planning phase of the expedition, Jan listened patiently when collaborating with teachers to refine the expedition goals and essential questions from among a tangle of ideas, themes, and topics. Jan helped the team simultaneously narrow and deepen their focus on water quality and Penobscot food sovereignty, making the inextricable link between the two clear to both teachers and students alike. Ultimately they landed on the central question: How can we build reciprocal relationships with Wabanaki communities to support the removal of barriers to Penobscot food sovereignty?
During the first year of their collaboration with Casco Bay High School, Jan and Angie traveled to Millinocket in early April and stayed overnight for multiple days with students. Jan took students out onto the frozen lake at the foot of Katahdin. She held ceremony at the headwaters of the river that is sacred to her people, and then worked with students to drill holes in the ice and extract samples for testing. Students saw the blending of Wabanaki knowledge and worldview with Western science methodology, a blend that Jan demonstrated everyday in her work with Penobscot Water Resources and her work in education.
The teachers who collaborated with Jan shared that, “She was never the one shouting from the front. But she is the person we turned to every time we needed direction for the most important decisions. In addition to her integrity, wisdom and discernment, Jan offers her caring for all the students we worked with together.” Many students produced the best work of their high school careers during their study of water quality, relationships, and sovereignty. Their increased interest in and engagement with learning was in no small part due to Jan’s involvement in both planning and fieldwork. The teachers, too, were changed from their time with Jan. Neither will ever view a river the same way again.
Legacy
There is a pair of stories by Ernest Hemingway titled, “Big Two Hearted River” about a young man who returns from war and seeks healing by a river. The river in the story is the east branch of the Fox River in what is now called Michigan. That river is part of the ancestral homeland of the Meskwaki people, an Algonquin speaking group related to the Wabanaki nations of the Dawnland.
In the days leading up to and the days after Jan’s passing, the title of that story echoed in my mind again and again. I barely remembered what the story was about, nor is Hemingway the author I would have expected to reference in a tribute to Jan Paul, but he is not what matters, neither is the story. It is the name. Big Two Hearted River. The name describes Jan, it describes the two hearts, East and West, of the river she loved, of two full hearts she held for the river and the people of that river, the two professional roles she held as scientist and educator, and the two worldviews she worked to reconcile using the power of her heart. To the Big Two Hearted River herself, Jan Paul, your impact is lasting and may your voice sing as part of the river-song long into the future.
“There had been this to do. Now it was done. It had been a hard trip. He was very tired. That was done. He had made his camp. He was settled. Nothing could touch him. It was a good place to camp. He was there, in the good place. He was home where he had made it.”
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[1] From The Finca Vigia Edition of The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, “Big Two Hearted River,” 167.