Geo Neptune, Maine’s First Two-Spirit Elected Official, Is Ready to Decolonize Education

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Coming back home to rural Maine may sound like a sacrifice to some, but Geo Neptune felt like they had no other option.

The 32-year-old grew up in Indian Township, an isolated part of the state just 30 miles away from the Canadian border. Neptune, a member of the Passamaquoddy Tribe, sometimes jokes that they live in the “middle of Trump Land Maine.” “I am one of the only people that you would describe as visibly queer in the area,” Neptune tells them. over the phone. “When it comes to nonbinary people, there are few of us — and especially two-spirit people, even fewer of us.”

A performance artist, educator, and basket maker, Neptune left Indian Township to attend college at Dartmouth College in 2006 and relished the freedom they found traveling to more populated areas, where it was possible to be just another face in the crowd. “Walking in downtown Manhattan, nobody gave a shit,” they recall. “But here people tend to give a little bit of a bigger shit.”

But even as they found a sense of liberation in anonymity, there was something missing. Neptune moved home in 2010 to be closer to their grandmother, who passed away earlier this year, and because they longed to reconnect with their culture and the land. One of the things that makes the Passamaquoddy unique, Neptune says, is that they don’t have a “migration or removal story.” The tribe, which numbers around 3,500 people, has “lived on the shores of these lakes and our ancestral river for 13,000 years.”

“To take off and just leave in order to pursue a much more personally fulfilling life, rather than one that is fulfilling for my community — it does not feel at all like the right choice,” they say. “This culture is still being held from our own people and I can't perpetuate that.”

In returning to Indian Township, Neptune plans to fight that erasure and help others find the connectedness for which they so often longed. Last month, they made history by winning a spot on the Indian Township School Board — which made Neptune the first nonbinary, transgender, or Two-Spirit person elected to any kind of public office in Maine. The position will allow Neptune to advocate for greater education on Passamaquoddy culture and language, which they feel have been deprioritized by faculty and administrators in recent years.

In an hour-long conversation, Neptune discussed the importance of decolonizing education, the weight of inherited traumas, and the impact of unlocking buried histories.

What inspired you to run for the school board this year?

I have long been involved in education, particularly education around tribal history, culture, language, and our material arts. We knew that there were three seats that were opening on the board, and I was urged by some of my family members, by a couple of my friends, and an elder that I respect — even by some of the youth that I actually work with — to run for school board.

What really spoke to me and compelled me about it is that I can see that the cultural program at our school isn't as strong as it once was. It would be my hope as a tribal member that that program would actually have gotten stronger, as I've gotten older and as our tribe has gotten more resources, but that doesn't seem to be the case. A lot of the things that I used to learn in school aren't as accessible to the kids anymore. Such a big part of my focus as an educator and as an activist is bringing these traditions back to the people that they belong to, and I felt like I could do that in a very meaningful and tangible way being on the school board.

What kinds of things did you learn growing up that you feel are less accessible to today's youth?

My foundation in learning the language came from that school. A lot of my foundation in the songs came from that school, and a lot of other people in my generation have that same foundation. It's a whole mess of things; our reservation school has fallen victim to a lot of the things that plague any public school in any small town. What's frustrating about it is that we're one of the better funded schools in the entire eastern side of the state, because we are a reservation school. It's really disheartening to see that our culture is being put on the back burner and those staff aren't being given the support that they used to have.

The fact that I had to go away to an Ivy League college to even have access to this information just means that my people are that much further away from having access to it. If I had to go that far and spend that much money just to study my own culture, there's something wrong with that system.

When you did finally get access to the information that had been taken from you, what did it feel like to finally be tapped into that? If you've ever seen the movie Pulp Fiction, I imagine it would feel like when they open the briefcase and there's gold inside.

What you've got to realize is that gold is covered with the blood of your family. It's not quite that celebratory; there was a lot of realizing awful histories. There was a lot of realizing my own trauma, and there's still a lot of processing that. Indigenous people live in a world that is designed for us to not exist in it. When indigenous people realize that, it can be a pretty crushing wake. The rate of suicide among indigenous youth is one of the highest rates of suicide of any community, with suicide being the leading cause of death in our young people right now.

It took a long time [to unpack that], especially because I was trying to be fine. I was trying to just keep working and keep working outside my community, but it really all came crashing to a halt when I went to a therapist who said that if I wanted to stay in my job at the [Abbe Museum], I needed to go on antidepressants and antianxiety meds. I decided to quit the job and leave from Bar Harbor, Maine and come home instead. Trying to make it in the Western world was just making me even more depressed.

Now that you've come back home with this access to the culture and history of your people, how do you seek to build greater access to that information in your community?

I can't possibly do that all by myself. One of the reasons running for school board was appealing is that I would be able to work with other community members to make decisions that help move the school in that direction. They might not realize that when they talk about cutting funding for certain programs that in the eyes of the state, that means cutting funding for cultural programs — or they don't realize that there's a direct correlation between children of color having very positive self images of themselves and their own culture and their ability to perform well in school. A lot of teachers come in with this authoritarian viewpoint because they think they need to be strict, but they don't even realize the historical trauma that they're inflicting on the kids.

It's sad that people who know our culture and know our history are "unqualified" for jobs at the school, but they'll still hire people from outside the community that will spew white supremacist vitriol all over Facebook and then still walk into work the next day.

Why do you think it's important for youth on the reservation to have access to their legacy, to a history of their people and who they are?

I think there are two sides to that. One, that's who we are. This land understands our language. It remembers our stories. It remembers our ancestors. Our bodies are literally made from the earth beneath our feet here. Without being taught that connection, it can lead to just this feeling of being lost. When you feel lost within your own culture and feel ashamed to try and pursue it, it compounds that. And then it's compounded when our children leave the reservation and go to high school for the first time and realize that the rest of the world really doesn't have very positive views on our community. They not only become embarrassed to learn their culture, they become ashamed to learn our culture.

It just leads to this long cycle. The average life expectancy of a Passamaquoddy person is 50 years old. All of these things are connected. All of these traumas are connected. They're all directly connected to what has happened to us throughout colonization.

How would it have made a difference in your life to have greater access to those resources of self-knowledge at an early age?

My whole life would be different. If we had this kind of access when I was a kid, the entire well-being of my tribe would be entirely different right now. I think within 20 years, everything's going to be entirely different because of these efforts that not just myself are making, but other people in the community are making. All these kids are going to know their songs. They're going to know their language. They're going to know their stories. They're going to know our history. They’re going to know what happened to us. And they're going to be able to heal from it much faster than their grandparents did, much faster than their great-grandparents did.

We've been through a lot as Passamaquoddy people. We've already suffered a 90% population decrease since colonization. We survived the smallpox pandemic and we survived it with our language, our culture, and our songs intact. I have hope that we'll survive, and that we'll keep going because we've been doing it this long. If anybody knows how to survive, it's us.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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