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NARRATOR: Jeff Gusky leads his team
to a section of the quarry that has always
intrigued, yet baffled him.
JEFF GUSKY: There's mystery in this place,
never been able to figure it out.
Why, here, do you have Indian carvings?
And I think I can find some of them above, let's see.
Wait, here.
Look at this.
JONATHAN BRATTEN: Oh.
JEFF GUSKY: It's a canoe.
JONATHAN BRATTEN: Yeah, that's your typical birch bark canoe.
JEFF GUSKY: Do you have any idea why you have Indians here?
JONATHAN BRATTEN: What this could be a symbol of
is there were the nine Passamaquoddy in Company I,
and they all came from Pleasant Point, Maine, which
is where the nation exists now.
JEFF GUSKY: So there were Indians here?
JONATHAN BRATTEN: There are, yeah.
JEFF GUSKY: They were American--
JONATHAN BRATTEN: There were--
JEFF GUSKY: --Indians?
JONATHAN BRATTEN: --Indians, yeah, in Company I.
NARRATOR: Initially skeptical about the story
himself, Jonathan Bratten digs deep
into the main military records.
JONATHAN BRATTEN: When I got down
to examining the actual roster, lo and behold, it's true,
there were nine of these guys, including
the chief's son, Moses Neptune.
And these guys served in Company I throughout the war.
NARRATOR: Military historian Jonathan Bratten
has come to find out if Jeff's photos contain details only
a Passamaquoddy tribal member can identify.
JONATHAN BRATTEN: And is this type of headdress--
DONALD SOCTOMAH: At the time period,
this would be the type of headdress.
Our traditional head dress is shaped a little bit different,
but in the late 1800s, a lot of men joined the Wild West show.
And they came back with the Sioux bonnets.
Wow.
JONATHAN BRATTEN: You can see the profile.
DONALD SOCTOMAH: To me, it looks like one of the soldiers,
and then he's got the headdress sort of radiating out of him.
JONATHAN BRATTEN: Yeah.
DONALD SOCTOMAH: If I saw this earlier,
I could have showed you some paintings
of the exact same thing.
We have lines radiating out of them
to show the spiritual connection.
NARRATOR: But it's this image of a simple object which turns out
to conceal hidden meaning.
JONATHAN BRATTEN: Can you see the outline?
Do you think it's a canoe?
DONALD SOCTOMAH: Oh, oh yeah, yeah.
Took a while.
I was focusing on--
JONATHAN BRATTEN: Right, yeah.
DONALD SOCTOMAH: --the symbols.
JONATHAN BRATTEN: Yeah.
NARRATOR: The crucial clue is invisible to anyone
who's not Passamaquoddy.
DONALD SOCTOMAH: I don't know if you see that, but you can see,
it's almost like a German swastika.
For us, it's been a cultural symbol
for thousands and thousands of years,
and it means peace and friendship.
The images of culture are more important than an individual's
initials or names.
JONATHAN BRATTEN: Yeah.
DONALD SOCTOMAH: Yeah, these are powerful, powerful symbols.
That they were there.
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