Theresa Secord
Theresa Secord is an artist, basketmaker, geologist and activist from Maine. She is a member of the Penobscot nation, and the great-granddaughter of the well-known weaver Philomene Saulis Nelson. She co-founded, and was the director of, the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance in Bar Harbor, Maine.
When apprenticing with basketmaker Madeline Tomer Shay, Secord learned that she was one of few young Wabanaki people who was taught to make brown ash and sweet-grass baskets. After Shay's death, Secord founded MIBA in 1993 as a way to preserve Wabanaki language and culture. In 2003, the MIBA received the International Prize for Rural Creativity in part for lowering the average age of basketmakers in Maine from 63 to 43.
Her work has been shown at the Hudson Museum at the University of Maine, at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York, and at the Southwest Museum of the American Indian in Los Angeles. She is the great niece of the renowned Penobscot dancer, actress and writer Molly Spotted Elk, and her great-grandmother is Philomene Saulis Nelson, considered an "acclaimed weaver."Education
Secord earned a B.A. in Geology from the University of Southern Maine in 1981 and an M.S. in Economic Geology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1984. She served as Staff Geologist for the Penobscot Nation. Secord studied weaving and Penobscot language with Madeline Tomer Shay from 1998 to 1993.Awards & Honors
In 2009, she received the Community Spirit Award from the First Peoples Fund. She was named a 2016 National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts, and the 2017 Bernard Osher Lecture speaker at the Portland Museum of Art. She received the "Prize for Women's Creativity in Rural Life" by the Women's World Summit Foundation in 2003 for helping rural basket makers rise out of poverty, becoming the first US citizen to receive this award. Secord presented her work at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland.Published Works
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