David Moses Bridges works in a brand-new woodworking space at Leddy-Houser wood shop in South Portland while he receives cancer treatment in the Portland area. Whitney Hayward/Staff Photographer
David Moses Bridges prefers to continue to be alive long enough to build yet another canoe.
In a friend’s South Portland workshop, he’s building a 4-foot model of his 16-foot canoe. It’s small enough that he can easily build it on the shop’s tabletop, and he can easily muscle it about devoid of disrupting his chemo bag, which hangs about his belly love a fanny pack, or the chest port where the drugs enter his body. Maine’s most celebrated builder of traditional Passamaquoddy birch bark canoes, Bridges has actually begun his second treatment for cancer in four years. He’s staying along with his sister in South Portland while he receives care at Maine Medical Center.
IF YOU GO
WHAT: “Rhythms of the Heart,” a documentary movie concerning David Moses Bridges, gained by Maine filmmaker Thom Willey
WHEN: 7 p.m. March 1; doors open at 6:30 p.m.
WHERE: SPACE Gallery, 538 Congress St., Portland
BENEFIT: The screening is a benefit for Bridges and involves a silent auction; suggested donation is $20.
INFO: space538.org
Building the canoe keeps him or her busy, he said, makes him or her feel alive.
“job keeps my mind off where I am,” Bridges said. “If I think of where I am, I would certainly be under the covers every one of day, merely peeping out waiting for the inevitable. I don’t hope to do that. job keeps my mind in a happy place. I am attempting to balance the honest truth by living today, one moment at a time. And today I feel great.”
The 53-year-old grew up in Portland and South Portland, and lives along with his wife and their two children, Sabattus and Natanis, in Bar Harbor. (A grown son, Tobias, likewise lives in Maine.) However Bridges’ residence is the Pleasant Point Reservation on the shores of Passamaquoddy Bay, near Perry.
The Passamaquoddy call it Sipayik.
That’s where Bridges learned from his great-grandfather Sylvester Gabriel exactly how to build canoes the traditional way, big and strong to navigate the rough ocean and sleek to cut in to the bays and rivers. He learned to identify the good trees, exactly how to scale them along with his arms and legs and exactly how to harvest the bark devoid of damaging the tree As soon as the sap is operating in the spring. He learned to appreciate the smells and sounds of the forest, the sustaining lessons of the earth, and the culture of his family and of his tribe.
His parents the two worked, so an extended family of elders raised Bridges. He heard their stories, and some were told in the Passamaquoddy language. He learned the songs. The women taught him or her to weave baskets. The men taught him or her to make canoes. They passed their knowledge in a natural way, so it became section of Bridges’ soul.
Today, his canoes, baskets and others examples of his job are in museums across Maine and about the country, said Julia Gray, director of collections and interpretation at the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, which is dedicated to Wabanaki culture. It owns several of Bridges’ birch pieces, and he serves on the museum board.
The Maine Arts Commission named him or her a Traditional Arts Fellow, the state’s highest honor in craft. He finished initial for traditional basketmaking at the Heard Museum Guild Indian Reasonable and Market last March in Arizona. The Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis awarded him or her an artist residency and purchased a birch wigwam for its collection.
Bridges is recognized as a cultural leader, Gray said, and his disease has actually shaken his community. On March 1, SPACE Gallery in Portland Will certainly prove to the movie “Rhythms of the Heart,” a Bridges documentary by Maine filmmaker Thom Willey. The screening Will certainly contain a silent auction to benefit Bridges and his family. He has actually healthiness insurance through MaineCare However cannot job throughout his treatment.
“This is something I would certainly never ever ask for,” Bridges said of the benefit. “However a great deal of my friends hope to help. I don’t regularly ask favors of people, However they hope to assistance and I’m going to let them.”
‘HE’S A STRONG-WILLED MAN’
Willey gained “Rhythms of the Heart” along with a happy ending, along with the news of Bridges’ recovery from sinus cancer that was diagnosed in 2013. The cancer returned in October, and Willey updated the movie. “It’s not the ending any kind of of us are looking for,” Willey said. “However he’s a strong-willed man. He prefers to live.”
Bridges went for his two-year scan last fall, expecting to be told he was cancer-free. Instead, doctors told him or her the cancer was back, and this time in a poor spot near the base of his skull and alongside the carotid artery. It’s a small tumor in a difficult-to-reach location.
He’s heard various diagnoses from various doctors. One has actually told him or her the tumor is inoperable and Will certainly be fatal. yet another has actually told him or her that surgery is feasible if the tumor can easily be shrunk along with chemotherapy.
“That’s Exactly what we’re hoping for,” he said.
Donna McNeil was director of the Maine Arts Commission As soon as it awarded Bridges its inaugural Traditional Arts Fellowship. One criterion needs that the recipient learn the tradition through family and community. They cannot have actually received formal schooling for their specialty and need to view themselves not as an artist However as a conduit for cultural continuum, McNeil said.
Bridges embodies tradition. He learned a specialty that’s unique to his community and stayed close to residence to share it along with others as an educator, role model and, now in his 50s, as an emerging elder himself.
Bridges came of age throughout a time of renewed Native pride in America. He was 11 As soon as the American Indian Movement seized and occupied the town of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota in 1973. That action got his attention. He became thinking about Native complications and began status up for Native rights and traditions. Later, he helped lead a community movement protesting the potential location of a liquefied natural gas terminals near Pleasant Point, and was a plaintiff in a successful lawsuit versus the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs asserting Native rights in self-determination.
Andy Verzosa became friends along with Bridges As soon as their families moved to Willard Square in South Portland concerning the same time in the 1970s. Verzosa and his brother went to junior higher school along with Bridges and his sister. The youngsters from the two families stood out since they had dark skin. “We used to grab called names, beaten up and tormented,” Verzosa said. “There weren’t several brown children in school. people couldn’t find out me and my brother. We befriended David and Jennifer since they were going through the same kinds of things.”
When Verzosa operated Aucocisco Galleries in Portland, he exhibited a 16-foot canoe of Bridges in the front room, right off Congress Street. Verzosa lives in Connecticut now and is aiding to organize the SPACE Gallery benefit. It was gratifying to exhibit Bridges art in Portland, and it’s gratifying to assistance him or her now, Verzosa said. Bridges has actually constantly stood up for himself, his family and his community.
“His being sick on a personal degree is upsetting, of course,” Verzosa said. “However it’s supreme upsetting for his culture and for his family. He’s a contemporary modern-day warrior that is doing, in whatever method he can, something to make a difference for his community.”
The effects of cancer are apparent in Bridges’ appearance. He’s a Solid man, and his core strength has actually served him or her well. However he looks gaunt. His most recent chemotherapy left him or her hospitalized for 6 days afterward. He was so sick complying with that treatment, his friends feared his death. He’s lost concerning 10 pounds, and is down to 142.
Bridges merely began his second round of therapy, which Will certainly last two a lot more weeks. His family Will certainly come down from Bar Harbor and visit As soon as they can, and Bridges Will certainly job on his scale canoe as long as his power holds up. He expects to be in Portland through April.
If points go well, he’ll grab spine in to the forests soon after that. He could lack the strength to scale tall trees this spring, However he hasn’t lost his vision – of his past, present and, he hopes, his future.
“It’s been a long, long trip through the arts globe of Maine and through the forests of Maine,” he said. “It’s rather a transition, merely to say alive.”
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