Storytellers Festival 2008 March 13 - 16

"Threads of Change"   scroll down for the Schedule, Biographies, and Sponsers

"Traditional Teachings of the Dakota-Sioux"
with Velma Goodfeathers.

Date: Thursday, March 13th 7:00 pm
Location: at the Gathering Place, 4001-3rd Avenue N, Regina
Admission: Free admission

Sacred Voices Concert
featuring Meewasin Oma, Eekwol, Jason Burnstick, Jason Chamakese, Tom Porter, Gayle Anaquod, and Marilyn Dumont.
Directed by Floyd Favel.

Date: Friday, March 14th 8:00 pm
Location: at Reid Auditorium, Scott Collegiate, 3350 - 7th Avenue, Regina
Admission: Tickets $10 at the door

Guest Storytellers and Panels:
9:30 am Welcome and Opening Remarks from Artistic Director Robin Brass
10:00 - 12:00 pm "The Epic-Retelling of the Great Law of Peace: The True Roots of Democracy" with Tom Porter (Mohawk). Please be prepared to stay for the full 2 hour recital
12:00 - 1:00 pm Lunch
1:00 - 2:30 pm "Re-Spinning the Cover of the Nation-State" panel with Steven Newcomb and Tony Cote. Moderated by Edward Poitras.
2:30 - 4:30 pm Danny Musqua "An Anishinabe Perspective"
4:30 pm "Open Session"
5:00 pm Dinner with Host Annie Brass.
After supper Performance Artist Warren Arcan.

Date: Saturday March 15th 9:30 am - 6:00 pm
Location: at Scott Collegiate, 3350 - 7th Avenue, Regina
Admission: Free admission

Guest Storytellers and Panels:
9:30 - 11:00 am Roderick Cote "Saulteaux Stories"
11:00 - 12:00 pm "First Nations Leadership and Spirituality" with Dr. Jacqueline Ottman and Senator Luke Nanaquewetung.
12:00 - 1:00 pm Lunch
1:00 - 2:30 pm "The Effects of Historical Trauma on Artistic and Cultural Expression" panel with Bonnie Devine, Marilyn Dumont, Dr. Dawn Martin-Hill, and Warren Arcan. Moderated by Lynn Acoose.
2:30 - 3:30 "Open Session"

Date: Sunday, March 16th 9:30 am - 6:00 pm
Location: at Scott Collegiate, 3350 - 7th Avenue, Regina
Admission: Free admission

For more information, contact Sâkêwêwak Artists' Collective at 780-9485

Biographies:   in order of appearance

VELMA GOODFEATHERS
Velma Goodfeathers is a Dakota-Sioux Elder from Standing Buffalo First Nation. For fourteen years she was a Dakota-Sioux language teacher and continues to serve on the Saskatchewan Indian Cultural Centre's Dakota Language Retention Committee providing translations and direction on language development materials. Velma recognizes that we are continuing to lose our languages at a rapid rate and feels that we must recover them in any form.

Velma is a mother and grandmother and she is currently the Elder in Residence at First Nations University of Canada. She is also one of the Elders in Residence at the Eagle Moon Health Office (part of the Regina-Qu'Appelle Health Region) where she teaches Cultural Awareness to Health Workers, helping them to understand and better serve their First Nations' patients and families.

FLOYD FAVEL, Director
Mr. Favel studied at the Tukak Teatret of Denmark, and at the Centro per la Sperimentazione e la Ricerca Teatrale in Italy. He has worked in many venues nationally and internationally. His focus has been artistic and cultural development amongst Indigenous Peoples. A co-founder of Centre for Indigenous Theatre in Toronto, Floyd was also an exercise d'ensemble instructor at the National Theatre School of Canada using methods derived from aboriginal song and dance forms. He has choreographed and performed traditional dance shows with Muscwacis Dance Theatre, Hobbema-Alberta, and with Wanuskewin Dance Troupe, Saskatoon. He was the director of the contemporary ballet performance, 'Child of Ten Thousand Years' at New Dance Horizons and the Canada Dance Festival, and director and choreographer for 'Nitaskenan', contemporary dance based on aboriginal themes, performed at New Dance Horizons, Peterborough Dance, and L'Espace Tangente - Montreal.

He has been a guest instructor at University of Victoria, Melbourne-Australia, presenting theatrical theories and exercises based on aboriginal ritual and social structures, and conducted research with Siberian Aboriginal theatre artists in Moscow, Russia. He has been published in Canada, Gare d'Theatre (France), Native Peoples (Arizona), Klewer Publishers (Netherlands), The Globe and Mail (Toronto), Isuma Publications (Montreal). Floyd was narrator and host of 'Making History', an ongoing video installation at the National Museum of the American Indian - Washington, D.C, and performed a solo show based on the Wounded Knee Massacre; Santa Fe Institute of American Indian Arts, Denver Art Museum - Colorado.

MELISSA WORME, Host
Melissa is a fancy shawl dancer and makes all of her own regalia and that of her family members. She also acts, completing Night Wind Theatre's Professional Development Workshop, and performed in "Smoke Mirrors and Fallen Tears" (by Dominga Robinson). She has also done radio plays for CBC and had a small role in "The Englishman's Boy".

Melissa hosted for Storyteller's Festival in '07 and is a single mother of two small boys.

MEEWASIN OMA
Meewasin Oma is an a cappella group that sings intertribal prayer songs from the Native American Church. The group, which was recently nominated for a Native American Music Award, originates from the Red Pheasant First Nation in Saskatchewan.

The group's members include Darwin Daniels, Kelly Daniels, Ashley Benson, with invited guests Maynard Whitehawk and Lance Crow.

EEKWOL (Lindsay Knight)
Eekwol has taken many years of dedication to the culture of Hip Hop, mixed it all together, added her own style, and created something unique and astounding to give back to the community. With a strong drive to promote her Hip Hop and Indigenous cultures, she is currently one of the main artists of the independent label, Mils Productions, which she co-owns with her producer/brother, Mils. Through their original music they display their activist roots by living and creating as supporters of both Hip Hop and Indigenous culture and rights.

Eekwol's plan is simple. She takes pride in hip-hop and Indigenous culture, making a point to immerse those roots in her music and all aspects of her life. With a new album and video, constant bookings and tour plans, numerous album features and a steady, growing popularity in Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities stretching past Canada, she's got her work cut out for her.

JASON CHAMAKESE
Jason has been honing his skills as a Native American Flute player for the last 9 years. Self-taught, his music has been described as haunting and timeless. He hails from the Pelican Lake First Nation and was raised with a deep respect for his Cree language and traditions. His interest in traditional stories and songs led him to discover the Native American Flute nearly a decade ago and he has since produced his debut CD entitled "Midnight at Clearwater, Native American Flute songs, volume 1."

Jason cites world-renowned flute players Kevin Locke and William Gutierrez as his greatest influences. He describes his music as a blend between the Southwest style of flute playing with the Northern Plains style of traditional flute playing. Jason's music has taken him to many schools and venues throughout Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Arizona. Through his music and stories, he hopes, like his mentor Kevin Locke, to promote the commonality found in all races of people and to act as a positive First Nations role model for youth everywhere.

MARILYN DUMONT
Her first collection, A Really Good Brown Girl, won the 1997 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award presented by the League of Canadian Poets. This collection is now in its eleventh printing and selections from it are widely anthologized in secondary and post-secondary literary texts. Her second collection, green girl dreams Mountains, won the 2001 Stephan G. Stephansson Award from the Writer's Guild of Alberta and her third collection, that tongued belonging, was awarded the 2007 Anskohk Aboriginal Poetry Book of the Year and the McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year.

Marilyn has been the Writer-in-Residence at the Universities of Alberta and Windsor, and at Grant MacEwan Community College in Edmonton and Massey College, University of Toronto. She was a mentor for the 2006 Wired Writing Program - Banff Centre for the Arts and is presently on leave from her Creative Writing teaching position at Athabasca University while she is the 2008 Edmonton Public Library - Writer in Residence. Marilyn continues to work on a fourth manuscript in which she explores Métis history, politics and identity through her ancestral figure, Gabriel Dumont.

TOM PORTER
Tom Porter is the Leader of the Mohawk Community of Kanatsiohareke (Ga na jó ha láy:gay) in Fonda, New York. A member of the Bear Clan, he was raised as part of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation in upstate New York. Recognizing that Mohawk language and culture were dying out, he co-founded the Akwesasne Freedom School for grades K-8, with a curriculum entirely in Mohawk.

In 1993, after problems stemming from Mr. Porter's opposition to gambling on the Akwesasne Reservation, he and a number of other Mohawks founded a community on a 400-acre property in the Mohawk Valley that was their original ancestral land, known as Kanatsiohareke, or "place of the clean pot", with the goal of living self-sufficiently and in accordance with traditional Mohawk spiritual beliefs. Kanatsiohareke was founded on the principle that language restoration opens the door for culture and traditions to become living entities.

Mr. Porter is committed to implementing programs that facilitate an understanding of Native American culture. In 1998, he launched the first Iroquois Immersion Program, a language and lifeway restoration project for the Haudenosaunee (People of the Longhouse). The Iroquois Immersion Program is the cornerstone of a larger project, the Carlisle Indian Boarding School In Reverse, an institution designed to reverse assimilation and cultural genocide.

JASON BURNSTICK
Jason Burnstick is a Cree musician who has been living in Vancouver, BC. His cultural roots stem from the Alexis and Alexander First Nations, and from the Duffield reserve west of Edmonton. Jason's interest in music grew from the guidance and support he received from his family, and from the pivotal blues influence of his older brothers. His ability to move from one style to the next is largely contributed to the Juno nominated Andean group Kanatan Aski and the rhythms of Latin Music.

His passion led him to pick other instruments along the way such as the Weissenborn guitar, mandolin, charango and ronroco which are all within the genre of Jason's music. Currently, Jason has stepped back into his blues guitar roots and has armed himself with the Weissenborn lap slide guitar. Jason feels that he has finally found his voice and that the Weissenborn may be his final resting place. Jason's debut album "Burn" was nominated for and won Best Instrumental album of the Year at the Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards, and was also nominated for Best International album of the Year. "Burn" was also nominated for a Juno for Best Aboriginal Recording of the Year.

ANAQUOD FAMILY (YOUNG DOG SOCIETY SINGERS)
Greg, Gaylene and Gwendy Anaquod are from the Muscowpetung First Nation and have been singing all of their lives. They are very honoured to be blessed with the gift of voice and song, and it is through the use of their voices that they celebrate, honour and show respect to who they are as First Nation people - singing at pow wows and various community ceremonies.

In recent years they have been singing as the Young Dog Society Singers but prior to that the Anaquod family singers were most known as the Riverbottom Singers.

ROBIN BRASS
Robin Brass is an interdisciplinary artist originally from the Regina/Qu'Appelle region of southern Saskatchewan. She was raised in Regina and on her home reserve of Peepeekisis. A graduate of the Indian Art Dept., Saskatchewan Indian Federated College, Robin played an active role in the Regina arts scene as an advocate for artists of Indigenous ancestry to practice and produce their work with full artistic and intellectual freedom; first through her involvement with both Ironbow and Circle Vision, and later as co-founder of Sâkêwêwak Artists' Collective.

In 1999 she took a teaching position with the First Nations University of Canada, teaching Native Art History on outlying reserves. She moved to northern Saskatchewan in 2000 where she has produced new work based upon the intimate relationships between Healers/Plants and Patients/Humans as well as delving deeper into new performance work based in the Nakawe language further pursuing her true love of Indigenous orality.

TONY COTE
Tony Cote was born at the Cote First Nation Reservation. His great-grandfather was Chief Gabriel Cote who was the main spokesperson for all the Saulteaux Tribes at the gathering of Treaty 4, 1874, at Fort Qu'Appelle, SK.

Tony is a man of many achievements. He is a Korean War Veteran - 25th Infantry Brigade, 81st field regiment RCA, as well as the Former Chief of Cote First Nation (1970-1978). He has held numerous positions including Yorkton Tribal Council Tribal Chief, Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations - F.S.I Treasurer.

Tony has been very active in sport his entire life and has utilized his role as a leader to promote sport and athletics to many young First Nations Athletes across the province. He is a recipient of the Tom Longboat Medal and founder of the Saskatchewan Indian Summer Games.

STEVEN NEWCOMB
Steven Newcomb (Shawnee-Lenape) is the Indigenous Law Research Coordinator for the Education Department of the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation (San Diego County, California, located within the traditional boundaries of the Kumeyaay territory). He is co-founder and co-director of the Indigenous Law Institute, and a columnist for the newspaper Indian Country Today.

In 1993, New York University School of Law's "Review of Law and Social Change" published Newcomb's law review article, "The Evidence of Christian Nationalism in Federal Indian Law: The Doctrine of Discovery, Johnson v. McIntosh, and Plenary Power". In 2004, Mr. Newcomb received the Writer of the Year Award in Journalism from the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. Newcomb's book "Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery" has just been released by Fulcrum Publishing (February, 2008).

He lives with his wife Paige in Alpine, California.

EDWARD POITRAS
Edward Poitras was born in 1953 in Regina, Saskatchewan. He is a member of the Gordon First Nation and resident of Treaty Four Territory. Poitras has been active as an artist since the early 1970s, when he began his studies at the Saskatchewan Indian Cultural College in Saskatoon and then Manitou College in Quebec. Over the past twenty years he has exhibited extensively, in 1995 representing Canada at the prestigious Venice Biennial and most recently winning the Governor General's award in media and visual arts.

The themes of assimilation, genocide, displacement and survival permeate his work. Poitras explores tensions between past and present, nature and technology, western culture and First Nations cultures, combining natural materials with manufactured objects. He has exhibited at the Canadian Museum of Civilization (Gatineau), the National Museum of the American Indian (New York) and the Museum of Modern Art (Tampere, Finland).

In 2002, he was awarded the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts. The jury said: "His artistic voice is one of the most compelling and eloquent to have emerged from the rich creativity that is contemporary Canadian art... He reflects issues of identity, culture and race through a sensitive and subtle engagement with history and heritage. His sculpture, painting, drawing, installation and performance cross borders, and do so with the mystery of the trickster coyote."

DANNY MUSQUA
Dr. Danny Musqua, Saulteaux Elder, farmer/professor, is an honorary doctorate degree recipient from the University of Saskatchewan. Danny Musqua is a valued lecturer, Elder and teacher and long time worker for social justice, education, and peace through traditional teachings and knowledge.

Danny Musqua had been a teacher and Elder for many years in the School of Indian Social Work and the Department of Indian Studies, First Nations University of Canada. Danny currently is the resident Elder for the Indigenous Peoples' Health Research Centre, First Nations University of Canada, Saskatoon campus.

WARREN ARCAN
Warren Arcan is a writer and performance artist. He's from Muskeg Lake but was raised in BC. And that's all he wants to say about that.

DR. JACQUELINE OTTMANN
Dr. Ottmann is of Saulteaux (Ojibwa) heritage from Fishing Lake First Nation in Saskatchewan. After years of elementary and secondary teaching in public, separate and private systems in Saskatchewan and Alberta, she entered the graduate program at the University of Saskatchewan. She received a M.Ed. degree in 2000 after completing research and her thesis on "First Nations Leadership and Spirituality with the context of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples: A Saskatchewan Perspective". In 2005, she earned a PhD after completing research and writing a dissertation on First Nations leadership development.

Dr. Ottmann has been at the University of Calgary in the Faculty of Education as Assistant Professor since 2004, and teaches in both the teacher preparation program and the graduate program. She has participated in research on numerous school effectiveness reviews in First Nations and Provincial schools throughout Saskatchewan. She has also been active in research and studies that focus on successes of Aboriginal education, supporting Indigenous students in higher education, Aboriginal language and literacy, First Nations and Indigenous leadership and governance, First Nations leadership development, First Nations organizational culture and change and intercultural leadership.

She has presented at educational conferences and established scholarly, educational, business and political relationships in Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Australia.

SENATOR LUKE NANAQUEWETUNG
Senator Luke Nanaquewetung is from the Fishing Lake First Nation. He's 72 years old and his wife is 68. Together they had eight children. His wife drove bus for 26 years up until her retirement while Luke served his community as a band councillor for 27 years. He also worked as a grader operator for the band until his retirement.

After retirement, he applied for the position of Senator for the Touchwood District and was immediately accepted by the Chiefs of the Tribal Council. He regularly attends to his duties as a Senator with the FSIN. Senator Nanaquewetung is frequently asked to say opening prayers at small cultural events, and has not taken on more, for as he says, he is blessed with many children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

Fishing Lake is now an independent First Nation.

BONNIE DEVINE
Bonnie is a member of the Serpent River First Nation in Northern Ontario (Ojibway) and an artist, curator, writer and educator. Her primary interests are sculpture and installation, which she studied at the Ontario College of Art and Design and York University. During the past five years she has developed an interest in new media and has been exploring the possibilities of sound, video and electronics within a narrative sculptural practice.

Early in 2007 she exhibited Medicine River, a sculpture and sound installation at AxeNeo7 Gallery in Gatineau Quebec. In February 2008 in Writing Home, curated by Faye Heavyshield at Gallery Connexion, in Fredericton, New Brunswick, she showed new sculptural works, photography, drawings and sound, based on the stories carried in the rocks of the Canadian Shield. History and narrative have been and remain a constant in her work. She is interested in stories and the voices that tell them, the conveyances that carry them and the land that birthed them.

Bonnie lives and works in Toronto.

DR. DAWN MARTIN-HILL
Dr. Dawn Martin-Hill (Mohawk, Wolf Clan) holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology and is one of the original founders of the Indigenous Studies Program at McMaster University, where she is currently the Academic Director. Dawn's research includes: Indigenous knowledge & Aboriginal women, spirituality & Indigenous traditional medicine, residential schools, and the contemporary practice of Indigenous traditionalism.

Along with three other colleagues, she is working on a research project in Aboriginal Capacity & Development Research Environments (CIHR), which has recently been renamed "The Indigenous Health Research Centre", located at Six Nations Polytechnic. She is also a research member of the "Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition" at McMaster University which is funded under the SSHRC.

She is a mother of four children, ages four to twenty, and resides at Six Nations of the Grand River.

LYNN ACOOSE
Lynn Acoose has worked in the arts as an artist, programmer, editor, arts consultant, producer and curator. From 1992 to 1995 she worked with Circle Vision Arts Corporation as program officer, managing editor of Talking Stick Magazine and executive director. She was director of Sâkêwêwak Artists' Collective from 1999 to 2002 and the artistic director of the Sâkêwêwak Storytellers Festival from 2002 to 2004. She is also a former general manager of Common Weal Community Arts in Regina.

Her curatorial work has included Lateral Threats (performance art), Multicultural Perversions (Video), Constitution (group exhibition) and Surveillance in the Rock Garden (solo exhibition, Edward Poitras). Lynn has completed terms on the Aboriginal Advisory Committee - Canada Council for the Arts, Media Arts Advisory Committee - Canada Council for the Arts and the Minister's Advisory Committee on the Status of the Artist - Government of Saskatchewan. She also served as a director of Artist-Run Centres and Collectives Conference / La Conférence des collectifs et des centres d'artistes autogérés (ARCCC-CCCAA).

Most recently, Lynn has been serving in an advisory capacity for the Saskatchewan Arts Board in developing a provincial Indigenous arts gathering for August 2009. In July 2007, she was elected as Councillor for Sakimay First Nation and holds the Health and Social Development Portfolio, including the responsibility for culture and recreation.

Lynn maintains a multidisciplinary art practice, which includes writing and video installation. Her ongoing interaction with traditional knowledge keepers and investigation of the dialogic in traditional narratives began with her writings and progressed to collaborative work in the art web site, Speaking the Language of Spiders with the late Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew and the interdisciplinary project Nomadic Recall with Edward Poitras. Her most recent works have been collaborative video installations with Elwood Jimmy, a Regina-based media artist and arts activist. She has exhibited at Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina), Centre for New Media, Canadian Cultural Centre (Paris, France), Mendel Art Gallery (Saskatoon), Art Gallery of South-western Manitoba (Brandon) and Soil Digital Media Suite (Regina). EXEMPT, a video installation created with Elwood Jimmy, is currently in the exhibit, Honouring Tradition: Reframing Native Art (Glenbow Art Gallery, Calgary) until July 2008.

Lynn Acoose is Saulteaux/Cree/Irish and is from Sakimay First Nation where she resides with her partner, Gilbert Panipekeesick and their daughter, Riella.

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