Bookmarks (18)

Pataxó has no direct translation in English: it is the sound of water against stone as it travels to meet the sea. Once, the Pataxó people of coastal Brazil lived freely in the forests, river lands, and tropical shorelines of southern Bahia and northern Minas Gerais. But more than 500 years ago, Portuguese settlers invaded the region, leaving legacies of trauma, violence, and environmental...

Skateboarding is a way of being in physical dialogue with the space around you, and although you can skate alone, its power is in convening and bringing community together. At the 2024 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, we sought to open such a space. So, on the corner of Jefferson Drive SW, in front of the National Museum of the American Indian, we set out a...

Halfway through their concert at the 2024 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the band Pamyua paused to throw in an Arctic game demonstration. Peter Pilak Griggs (Yup’ik and Sugpiaq), a spirited nineteen-year-old, sprawled on the floor, readied himself for a leap. Prompted by the audience’s chant of uh-oh-a, rising and falling like a seal’s wail, he sprang forward on fists and toes, channeling his Indigenous ancestors...

By the time David A. Boxley was born in 1952, Tsimshian traditions involving song, art, dance, and regalia had been outlawed or almost forgotten for nearly a century in his village of Metlakatla, Alaska. Boxley described the Anglican missionary who came to northern British Columbia in the late nineteenth century as “so very successful” in moving Tsimshian (pronounced like sim-she-ann) people away from their...

In the Indigenous Maya Mam language, the term awal translates to “the sower.” Marimba Maya AWAL, founded by Julia Sanchez and Luisa Lopez in the Washington, D.C., area in 2005, aims to sow the knowledge of their Maya ancestors from the mountainous west of Guatemala for future generations. At the 2024 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the group performed “Sal Negra,” a marimba piece traditional to...

Hālau ʻŌhi‘a traveled from the island of Hawai‘i to share traditional mele and oli (chants) with visitors at the 2024 Smithsonian Folklife Festival’s Indigenous Voices of the Americas program. Oli refers to both the chant culture and the vocalized components, while mele are poetic or lyrical compositions. Together, they nurture community and harmony with the natural world. Tone, rhythm, and meaning in oli are...

Traditional storytelling can serve many purposes: explaining why things are the way they are, exemplifying how to be a better person, or… poking fun at your friends. The Indigenous storytellers at the 2024 Smithsonian Folklife Festival shared all these types of stories and more. On Sunday, June 30, all four storytellers gathered in the National Museum of the American Indian’s Amphitheater for a one-time-only...

“The games are like a prayer.” —Phillip Blanchett The anticipation and uproar on the National Mall was palpable watching Peter Griggs execute a strong two-foot-high kick. This kick requires the athlete to jump and kick, with both feet, a hanging target, then they must land on two feet and maintain perfect balance. Two-foot-high kicks were among the many tradition-based Inuit games demonstrated at the...

Powwow dance exemplifies the spirit of community and the energy of competition. Some powwow dances are modern expressions, while others stem from resilient cultural stories and religious traditions that have survived decades of suppression. For fifty years, the United States government prohibited Native American dances and religious practices, only lifting the ban in 1933. Canada likewise outlawed dances, powwows, and similar gatherings from 1876...

“Silk? From Mexico?” Many visitors were surprised as they admired a delicate white rebozo, a type of shawl, exhibited in the Zapotec Weaving tent in the 2024 Smithsonian Folklife Festival’s Indigenous Voices of the Americas program. “A lot of people don’t know there are communities in Mexico creating beautiful silk textiles,” said Moisés Martínez, a member of Yagaa, a collective dedicated to growing and...

“I was born in the middle of the jungle, where we are connected by river—not by road.” By the time he was eight years old, Johnson Cerda found himself alone at Lake Limoncocha every day after school. His household chores were to fish for his family’s meals, and he took it upon himself to catch extra for families in need. One day, he met...

What started for the musicians of Pamyua as a way to keep their Yup’ik and Inuit cultures alive within their communities in Anchorage and Juneau, Alaska, grew into a critically acclaimed band that shares their traditions with the world. In Yup’ik culture, the phrase “breaking trail,” in regard to advancing through snow, is typically used to describe exactly what Pamyua has achieved: making the...

When Cornelio V. Campos starts a mural, he has a solid idea of what he is going to paint, incorporating symbols from his Indigenous Purépecha heritage and bright colors to accent his shapes. He sketches it out and prepares the materials for painting. Then, he’s ready to invite everyone in. Campos, a self-taught artist originally from Chéran, Michoacán, Mexico, recreated this collaborative experience at...

Before Wade Fernandez’s fingers fretted the Fender Telecaster hanging on his shoulder, he invited the audience to reflect on their surroundings. The towering elms provided shade from the relentless summer sun. The solid earth cradled their picnic blankets and chairs below. The Menominee rock musician spoke softly into the microphone, each syllable lingering in the air at the 2024 Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the...

The Gaudry Boys—brothers Dylan, Ryan, and Zachary Gaudry (Métis)—first played music together as children over twenty years ago. As their skills grew, they offered entertainment at retirement homes and hospitals in their hometown of St. Laurent, Manitoba, Canada. As professionals, they have performed at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., and, this past summer, at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Here, in the National Museum...

“I am a woman of the earth.” Rufina Ruiz López spoke with unassuming strength, her gleaming black braids threaded with pink ribbon. The clay calavera skull she had sculpted bounced gently on her knee, her fingers wandering the hollows of its black eyes. It was the third day of the 2024 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, spotlighting Indigenous Voices of the Americas. López (Zapotec/Mixtec) sat in...

As a multidisciplinary artist, Di’orr Greenwood expresses herself through skateboarding, creating pyrographic and mixed-media skate-deck art, and designing skate apparel inspired by her Diné heritage, including her signature maroon and turquoise Nike Dunks. In this interview at the 2024 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, she talks about what pushed her from and pulled her toward skateboarding, the strength of the Indigenous skating community, and her dream...

“Music paints a portrait,” Tambura Amondawa says. For the Amondawa Indigenous “river people” of Brazil, their songs “take shape by writing, like poetry.” The storytelling in these songs recounts a bittersweet experience, encompassing their loss of land, people, and forest due to commercial greed, diseases brought by outsiders, and steadily rising temperatures. But the songs are also full of pride and resilience, evoked by...