BETHEL — Two Maine artists shared their Native American culture Saturday in a festival that is increasingly pursuing its native roots while trying to escape its stereotypical past.

The MollyOckett Days Festival is named for MollyOckett, a Pequawket Indian who lived among and befriended the early settlers of Western Maine.

Conni St. Pierre of Bethel told one of her ancestral stories through music with flutes and percussion, accompanied by Aranka Matolcsy, a flautist and executive director of the Mahoosuc Arts Council.

St. Pierre is a graphic designer, composer, recording artist and philanthropist. She is also a well-known performer who owns Tourmaline Media, The Outlook recording studio and the smasheasy record label.

St. Pierre composed the “Reconciliation Story Suite” especially for Saturday’s festival. She said it tells the history of Native American children from the 1890s to the 1970s who were taken from their relatives and reprogrammed in white and Christian schools to fit in with white culture, as well as the pain that caused and current cross-cultural efforts at reconciliation.

“In reconciliation, there’s an opportunity for healing, the truth to be told and reconnecting to native culture,” St. Pierre said. “For me, this is a personal exploration experience of a family story.”

She said the composition is in honor of her four-times great-aunt Eva who was taken from a reservation to an Indian school in Illinois.

“And by happenstance, someone on an Internet genealogy site found a photo album that belonged to Eva and it made its way to me,” St. Pierre said. “It’s from just after her time at the Indian school.”

She said she researched the background of her aunt’s story, then set it to Native American flute music and percussion.

The musical journey began with a segment about a young girl and her family on an Indian reservation in 1886. It spoke of her home, her family and her place on Earth.

The second and third parts speak to the priests, whom her people used to call the “Black Robes” — the people who took Eva on a long journey to their city, cut her braids and separated her from her native culture, clothing and language.

The other three parts are about her dreams of home, learning to behave and speak as a white person and trying to reconnect with her past.

Richard Silliboy, a Micmac Native American from Littleton, shared his tribal culture stories and life in Aroostook County by weaving potato baskets in demonstrations.

Silliboy started his brown-ash basket-weaving demonstration by wielding a small sledgehammer to pound the heck out of a milled board he held over a utility pole section.

“By pounding it, it breaks the fibers between years’ growth,” he said.

Silliboy said the emerald ash borer, a forest insect pest, is going to kill brown ash trees if the species is not killed first.

“Oh, I’m impressed!” one woman in the audience said upon seeing the tree rings slab off as Silliboy pounded the wood.

“You should be,” he said, laughing. “This is hard work.”

He said he was the youngest of eight children growing up in poverty in a basket-making Micmac family in Aroostook County.

When told by another audience member that it seemingly doesn’t take very long to make a potato basket from the wood slats, Silliboy said with a straight face, “No, you have to wait 60 years for a brown ash tree to grow. After that, it comes together pretty fast.”

He said he makes about four baskets a week. But there was a time in his life when he left basket-weaving. As a child growing up, he said he had to make baskets for potato farmers to help support his mother and siblings who were abandoned by their father.

His mother used to sell her baskets for 50 cents each when a loaf of bread cost a dime.

Silliboy said he left home at the age of 13 and never wanted to make another basket.

“But in 1985, I realized that basket-weaving was a dying art and I said, ‘Well, I know how to do this, because I learned it as a child,'” he said.

On Saturday, Silliboy weaved the pieces together in no time until he had the bottom done. Then, he asked his growing audience, “Anybody want to buy a wall plaque before I put the sides up on this?”

Native American events ended at 9 p.m. Saturday with three hours of drumming and dancing on the Common.

The festival continues Sunday with races, float tubing on the Androscoggin River and a treasure scavenger hunt. For a schedule, visit mollyockettdays.com/schedule.html.

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