Northwest Indian Storytelling Festival
Friday and Saturday, November 12-13, 2010 from 7:30 to 10:00 PM
Sunday, November 14, 2010 from 1:00 to 4:00 PM
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This year’s Northwest Indian Storytelling Festival celebrating our fifth season of tribal storytelling in the Pacific Northwest. was held November 12-13 atLewis and Clark College. Our Emerging Storytellers Matinee was held on Sunday.
The California Indian Storytellers Association participated this year and two members, Chumash teller Georgiana Sanchez and Hawaiian Paul Kealoha Blake presented canoe stories. Georgiana Sanchez (Chumash), CISA Board Member, is a storyteller, poet, writer and professor of Native American Literature at California State University, Long Beach. She works extensively in the community as a cultural tradition bearer, language learner and activist. Paul Kealoha Blake (Hawaiian), CISA Hawaiian Cultural Advisor is a videographer, musician and cultural activist. He has worked within the Native Hawaiian community for more than 20 years. His production, with the Pacific Island Cultural Association, concerning the arrival of the voyaging canoe Hoku’lea in California has won numerous awards both nationally and internationally.
This year’s festival theme was Canoe Journey. Traditional canoe stories by tribal storytellers from Washington, Oregon, California and Alaska were featured, along with a presentation by the Grand Ronde/Chinook Canoe Family. Some of the region’s finest traditional tribal storytellers were spotlighted, including guest storytellers from California and Alaska. Events included tribal drumming and singing and opening prayers and comments by spiritual elders. A Silent Charity Auction was held to benefit the Northwest Indian Storytellers Association. Items included Pendleton Woolen Mills blankets & clothing, Native American arts & crafts, getaways, & other items.
For centuries, canoes have played an important role in Northwest tribal culture. This year’s festival honored Canoe Journey communities from Northwest tribes. WISDOM has been reaching out to tribal communities throughout the Northwest to invite individuals and communities who celebrate this ancestral mode of travel. Many Pacific Northwest tribal communities have reconnected with long-held canoe paddling traditions, traveling by canoe each summer to a central location to celebrate. This annual event culminates months of family oriented cultural activities of Native American and First Nations peoples and has become a major cultural revival, providing tribal communities the opportunity to focus on building healthy communities.
A two-day workshop for emerging tribal storytellers was held Saturday and Sunday, 13-14 November. Tribal members from any community were welcomed to join NISA and attend the workshop, culminating in our Emerging Storytellers Matinee Sunday afternoon at 1:00 PM.
NISA was formed in October 2005 by Wisdom of the Elders, Inc. (WISDOM) to encourage, preserve and strengthen traditional storytelling among tribes in Oregon, Washington and Idaho, and to share tribal oral cultural arts with our entire regional community. This organization and its festival events helps fulfill WISDOM’s mission of Native American cultural sustainability, education and race unity.
NISA participates by sharing the festival with Portland’s increasingly diverse multi-cultural community. Among tribes throughout America, winter is storytelling time. Wisdom and knowledge, traditional cultural values and spiritual qualities, as well as tribal oral history and prophesy, have been passed down from generation to generation during these wintertime storytelling sessions by treasured elders from hundreds of Native nations all over Turtle Island (America).
Sponsors include the Indigenous Ways of Knowing Program and Center for Community Engagement at Lewis and Clark College, the Northwest Indian Storytellers Association, and Wisdom of the Elders, Inc. This year’s festival is funded by National Endowment for the Arts. The event is endorsed by United Way of the Columbia-Willamette, one of the organization’s partners who is also committed to honoring diversity in our community. (Map to Lewis and Clark College http://legacy.lclark.edu/GENERAL/MAPS/) For more info, you can contact Emily Olson emily@wisdomoftheelders.org or call (503) 775-4014.