Rose High Bear, Wisdom of the Elders Radio Executive Producer
You are invited to the Northwest Indian Storytelling Festival which is celebrating its fifth season of tribal storytelling in the Pacific Northwest. The festival will be held on Friday and Saturday evenings, November 12-13, 2010, at Agnes Flanagan Chapel, Lewis and Clark College, 0615 SW Palatine Hill Rd in Portland, OR.This year’s festival features some of the region’s finest traditional and contemporary tribal storytellers, plus guest storytellers from tribes in California and Alaska. Events will include tribal drumming and singing and opening prayers by spiritual elders. A Silent Charity Auction will be held at the events to benefit the Northwest Indian Storytellers Association. Items will include Pendleton Woolen Mills blankets & clothing, Native American arts & crafts, getaways, & other items.
A two-day workshop for emerging tribal storytellers will be held on Saturday and Sunday, 13-14 November. Tribal members from any community are welcome to join NISA and attend the workshop which culminates in an Emerging Storytellers Matinee on Sunday afternoon, 14 November. If you are enrolled with a Native American or Alaskan Native tribal community, or self-identified as Native American, you are welcome to join NISA and register for this workshop.
This year’s festival theme is Canoe Journey. Traditional canoe stories by tribal storytellers from Washington, Oregon, California and Alaska will be featured, as well as a presentation by the Grand Ronde/Chinook Canoe Family. For centuries, canoes have played an important part in the lifestyle of Northwest tribes. To honor 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 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.
NISA was formed in October 2005 to encourage, preserve and strengthen traditional storytelling among tribes in Oregon, Washington and Idaho and to share tribal oral cultural arts with the entire regional community. Among American Indian tribes throughout America, winter is storytelling time. Knowledge and wisdom, traditional cultural values and spiritual qualities, as well as tribal oral history and prophesy, are all imparted to younger generations through storytelling from generation to generation during the winter months.
Admission is on a sliding scale from $5 – $20. Festival sponsors include Lewis and Clark College’s Indigenous Ways of Knowing Program and Center for Community Engagement, and Wisdom of the Elders, Inc. For a map to Lewis and Clark College and campus location, go to http://legacy.lclark.edu/GENERAL/MAPS/http://legacy.lclark.edu/GENERAL/MAPS/.