In This Issue:

• Music: Native American school band rocks the oldies– and the ancients
• Culture: Latest crop to spring up in museum garden: Native farmers
• People: Retirement, yes–but not from helping Indian people
• Theater: Play leaves musem echoing with Hawai'ian historic themes

MUSIC
Native American school band rocks the oldies–and the ancients

Standing Rock High School visits the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in NY to perform an ancient Lakota warrior song, “The Land You Fear”

By Kara Briggs
American Indian News Service

New York—Ten years ago Kim Cournoyer answered an ad seeking a music teacher at the high school on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in Fort Yates, N.D.

An urban Indian, Cournoyer was raised in the Chicago suburbs, far from the rural reservation of her forbears, which straddles the border of North and South Dakota. But the University of South Dakota-trained clarinetist had a dream of starting an all-Indian high school band.

“What we do is get a flatbed truck,” said Kim Cournoyer, Standing Rock High School band director. “We put a generator on there, we plug in the electric bass, and we play.”

Courtesy of Kim Cournoyer Kim Cournoyer, trumpet in hand, directs the band as it prepares for its June tour, including performances of a Lakota warrior’s prayer that Cournoyer transcribed and arranged from the oral tradition.

The Standing Rock High School Band 2009 Tour: 3 p.m., Tuesday, June 2, Como Zoo Pavilion, St. Paul, Minn. 10 a.m., Wednesday, June 3, Nichols Hall, Chicago Institute of Music, Evanston, Ill. 1 p.m., Friday, June 5, National Museum of the American Indian, New York. Contact the Standing Rock High School Band by phone at school 701-854-3461, by e-mail at kim.cournoyer.1@sendit.nodak.edu or by mail at Standing Rock High School 9189 HWY 2 Fort Yates, ND 58538

On June 5 at 1 p.m., the Standing Rock High School Band will perform a free concert at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York. For details, visit www.americanindian.si.edu.

The museum appearance is part of a tour on which the band will play an ancient Lakota prayer song called “The Land You Fear.” Cournoyer spent the spring transcribing it from the oral tradition and arranging it for the band.

“I believe the students need to embrace their culture, kind of like I did,” said Cournoyer, 45, who is Standing Rock Sioux, like most of her students.

Learn more about the Standing Rock High School Band by going to www.myspace.com/standingrockschoolband.

American Indian marching bands emerged in the boarding-school era, when students were trained in European musical instruments and patriotic marches. From the 1930s through the 1950s, dozens of Indian nations had their own marching bands made up of musicians trained in boarding schools. A few of these bands survive, such as the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe Band of Arizona and Nevada, which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2006.

But today all-Indian high school bands are rare, said Georgia Wettlin-Larsen, director of the First Nations Composer Initiative. Musical education, beyond culturally-based drumming and singing, is almost nonexistent in tribal schools, she said. That makes Cournoyer’s program both distinctive and important.

“I was so excited when I first saw them,” Wettlin-Larsen said. “Native kids playing instruments. Like other high school bands, they play high school band music. Now, they are incorporating traditional Lakota music.”

The high cost of music instruction is a common barrier, but the Standing Rock Sioux community, where unemployment hovers around 70 percent, does not let that stand in the band’s way. The school district buys all the instruments, although the band lacks marching harnesses, equipment to support massive instruments such as tubas.

“We don’t have tubas, so I substitute with bass lines,” Cournoyer explained. “What we do is get a flatbed truck, we put a generator on there, we plug in the electric bass, and we play.”

“The Land You Fear” is a song that Courtney Yellow Fat, lead singer of Grammy-nominated powwow drum group Lakota Thunder, introduced to Cournoyer. Yellow Fat is also the culture and language teacher at Standing Rock Middle School.

"The Land You Fear” is old, probably from before Columbus landed in the Americas. It was recorded in the early 1900s by anthropologist Frances Densmore (1867-1957). But like most indigenous music, it had not been written down before.

“That song was meant for a warrior to go off to war and not have any fear,” Yellow Fat said. “In contemporary times, we put out a warrior who must be a well-rounded person, who must be a warrior for the people.”

Those close to the band say they hope the song will become a bridge for understanding between Native people and mainstream America.

New York City composer Maurice Patrick Byers, former composer in residence at LaGuardia Arts High School, the renowned “Fame” school, likens the potential of Cournoyer’s program to what happened in the 1990s when the Soweto String Quartet began transcribing the traditional music of its members’ South African tribe and performing it on stringed instruments.

Hear the Soweto String Quartet at www.sowetostringquartet.co.za

“Imagine apartheid in South Africa, and these four African musicians show up with this (indigenous) music on the string quartet,” Byers said. “Blacks and whites go crazy for it. That is the same kind of bridge-building that is necessary in the United States.”

Once "The Land You Fear" is written, it has the potential to be published as sheet music other bands could perform. Standing Rock High School’s rendition promises to be dramatic. In addition to the student musicians, Cournoyer will play the cedar flute, Yellow Fat will sing, and powwow dancers will perform.

Byers said, “You could create something that sort of sounds like it, and is superficial. But that’s not her at all.”

What most concerns Cournoyer, speaking between classes late in the school year, is her students’ future.

In the 10 years since the band started—with 14 kids—nearly 100 percent of the band’s students have graduated. Some of them have used the discipline they gained in learning to play music to go to two- or four-year colleges. Most are employed, and living productive lives in the community. Yellow Fat said many are involved with their culture.

Cournoyer hopes this tour, into which she has built time to explore New York City, will broaden her students’ horizons. It is the Standing Rock Sioux teacher’s prayer that her students, as the ancient song says, will learn to walk with victory, instead of fear.

“I want them to know that this world is bigger than they think it is,” Cournoyer said. “And they are capable of so much more than they think they are.”

Hear Lakota Thunder by going to www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwQFmTwbQpE.

Visit the First Nations Composers Initiative at www.fnci.org.

CULTURE
Latest crop to spring up in museum garden: Native farmers

A group led by two tobacco farmers demonstrates traditional practices, both religious and horticultural, adding a new educational dimension to the indigenous landscape

By Kara Briggs
American Indian News Service

Photo by Katherine Fogden National Museum of the American Indian For the first time, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian invited Native farmers to Washington to guide spring planting of historic crops, such as tobacco, on its grounds.

Photo by Katherine Fogden National Museum of the American Indian Incorporating traditional ceremony into the practices of the NMAI garden, a song of blessing was offered during last month’s tobacco planting, led by two Native farmers from North Carolina.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Redell Collins, a Lumbee and Tuscarora man born 70 years ago to a share-cropping family, planted tobacco last week outside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

Collins, daughter Beverly Collins Hall, and 20 young friends traveled six hours from North Carolina to the museum, where they were welcomed by elders of the Piscataway, the original residents of the Washington metropolitan area.

“I had the most powerful ancestral feeling I have ever had,” said Beverly Hall, a farmer and president of the nonprofit rural service organization American Indian Mothers. “I was handing out tobacco and cotton plants, and then I turned and saw people of all races planting in the museum garden.”

All spring, federal agencies in Washington have ripped up lawn and jackhammered concrete to make way for new gardens. First Lady Michelle Obama worked with schoolchildren to plant a White House kitchen garden on the South Lawn. At the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a new 612-square-foot “people’s garden” features organic vegetables, culinary and medicinal herbs, and flowers to attract pollinators.

By contrast, the five-year-old National Museum of the American Indian is an old hand at planting crops in its landscape. On its sunny south side, the museum employs the traditions of many indigenous nations in the planting and care of crops grown across the United States, including tobacco.

But the idea of inviting Native American farmers, the keepers of knowledge about indigenous plants, to demonstrate their practices in the garden represents a new dimension this year. Glenn Burlack, a procurement officer at the museum and descendant of Lumbee tobacco farmers, developed the idea for a pilot project that would bring traditional prayers and horticulture onto museum grounds. He hopes that the program can grow to include Native farmers from other nations in the future.

Genetic lines tracing back 10,000 years are among the tobacco seeds that Hall and her friends grow on their own land. She plans to send some plant starts descended from ancient tobacco to the Piscataway she met at the museum, so they can establish them in its beds next year. Cultivation of ancient indigenous plants is occurring across the hemisphere, part of an effort by Native peoples to preserve important heirloom species in an era of herbicides and hybrids.

Hall and her father plan to return in mid-summer to pinch sprouts off the tobacco, a process called suckering. They will return again in late summer for harvest. Afterward, Redell Collins will demonstrate how to string up the tobacco for curing in a heated barn, just as his family did in the 1930s. Others will show how to tie up the plants for air curing. Both techniques remove bitterness.

“Tobacco was like money to our people,” Hall said. “It was done in ceremony. The medicine man was the only one who had the right to use it, and the rest of the people weren’t puffing and picking and chewing.”

Burlack, the procurement officer, hopes to bring planting and harvest traditions to the museum, where visitors can experience the sacred and celebratory traditions of Native American horticulture.

“Being the first Native Americans to be able to plant at the museum,” Hall said, “we made history.”

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PEOPLE
Retirement, yes–but not from helping Indian people

Helen Maynor Scheirbeck, 74, leaves the museum as her lifetime of influential work moves into a new phase

By Kara Briggs
American Indian News Service

Photo by Marilu Lopez-Fretts Helen Maynor Scheirbeck, who is Lumbee, recently retired from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, capping a long career in public service on behalf of Indian causes. She was awarded an honorary doctor of law degree in May from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“The key thing she did in all her positions was she would bring community people into Washington, D.C., and train them to work in the bureaucracy,” said Tom Davis, dean of instruction at Navajo Technical College in Crownpoint, N.M.. “And she helped all these people with careers in Washington when they were young—doesn’t matter whether they were white, Indian or black.

click image to access high resolution photo page

In 1963, a young Lumbee woman, Helen Maynor Scheirbeck, wrote a letter to political prisoner Nelson Mandela and to a young priest in the Anglican Church of South Africa named Desmond Tutu.

She wrote, “The Indians in America have about the same problem as you do.”

More than four decades later, Scheirbeck met Tutu at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where both received honorary degrees this May. She told the 77-year-old cleric about the letter, she said, and “we laughed about it.”

Scheirbeck, 74 and recently retired from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, was awarded an honorary doctor of law degree. It recognizes her work advocating for American Indian rights, and particularly acting as champion for the tribes of North Carolina.

“I told them I would accept this degree only for my ancestors, not for Helen Scheirbeck,” she said. “They are the ones who fought so hard for us to remain Indians.”

At the National Museum of the American Indian, Scheirbeck served in many capacities, beginning as a member of its founding board of trustees and rising to assistant director for museum programs before retiring.

In her long career, Scheirbeck also played a leading role in national political events such as the hearings that led to the 1964 American Indian Capital Conference on Poverty that opened the door for tribes to receive poverty-fighting grants; the passage of the 1968 American Indian Civil Rights Act; and the development of tribal colleges and Indian Head Start.

Scheirbeck still gauges her success in life by the guidance she received from her late father, who told her that she would help Indians. Judge Lacy Maynor, a distinguished Lumbee leader, made international headlines in 1958 when he stood up to the Ku Klux Klan.

“He was an enormously articulate man like Helen is articulate,” said Tom Davis, dean of instruction at Navajo Technical College in Crownpoint, N.M. “She is an outgoing person, that’s how she got on Senator Sam Ervin’s staff. The only civil rights legislation Sam Ervin (D-N.C.) ever supported was the Indian Civil Rights Act.”

Scheirbeck helped to persuade Ervin to convene the hearings that led to passage of the 1968 act, which extended many rights contained in the Bill of Rights to Indians living on their reservations.

In 1972, she obtained a $40,000 grant to register voters. “Three friends of mine went out and registered every Lumbee and every black we could find,” Scheirbeck said. “It was kind of like Obama supporters in the last election—people really wanted to vote. Now we are the majority of commissioners in Robeson County, and we always have Indian school commissioners.”

Scheirbeck also worked for the U.S. Department of Education, where she was on the staff of the first Indian desk in the early 1970s. She advocated for the Indian Education Act, writing provisions for Indian parent advisory boards to schools. Eventually, she became director of the Indian Head Start, introducing language and culture to the program for low-income preschool students.

“The key thing she did in all her positions was she would bring community people into Washington, D.C., and train them to work in the bureaucracy,” Davis said. “And she helped all these people with careers in Washington when they were young—doesn’t matter whether they were white, Indian or black. That’s where her network comes from.”

Now semi-retired, though busy giving lectures and writing books, Scheirbeck is working to develop an Indian arts co-op in Pembroke, North Carolina. She has many ideas about how she will continue her involvement with the National Museum of the American Indian.

“I am supposed to be retired, but I can’t tell it,” she told the Fayetteville Observer recently. “I love the museum and will always work for it no matter where I am.”

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THEATER
Play leaves museum echoing with Hawai'ian historic themes

“The Conversion of Ka'ahumanu” brings the Hawai’ian queen, and her epic political and religious dilemmas, back to life

By Kara Briggs
American Indian News Service

“I wanted to deconstruct this idea that Native peoples are children who need to be led around, that our chiefs didn’t have the intelligence to have informed choices for themselves,” said playwright Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl. “When we look back at history we don’t realize how difficult it was.”

Courtesy of Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl Playwright Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl’s “The Conversion of Ka'ahumanu” in May became the first play to be mounted at the National Museum of the American Indian with a local cast and production.

Washington—Elizabeth Ka'ahumanu, the queen regent of the Hawai'ian Islands two centuries ago, reigned again—if only on the stage—in a play produced recently at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

“The Conversion of Ka'ahumanu,” by Native Hawai’ian playwright Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, is the first play to be produced at the museum in Washington using exclusively local acting talent. It explores the powerful, controversial leader’s decision to destroy the male gods of the ruling classes, and later to convert to Christianity. More than 550 people attended the May 15-16 performances, including many from the Native Hawai'ian community in Washington, D.C., joining a discussion with the author afterward.

“I wanted to deconstruct this idea that Native peoples are children who need to be led around, that our chiefs didn’t have the intelligence to have informed choices for themselves,” Kneubuhl said. “When we look back at history we don’t realize how difficult it was.”

Kneubuhl, 60, came to the story of Ka'ahumanu (1768-1832) in the 1980s while working at the Mission Houses Museum in Honolulu. As a tour leader and role player in museum dramatizations, she was steeped in the history of Native Hawai'ian women and female missionaries at the time of first contact. Kneubuhl wrote the play in 1988, followed by several other dramas and books.

“The Conversion of Ka'ahumanu,” with its all-woman cast and powerful soliloquies, remains her most popular play, having been staged in theaters and universities all over the world. Vincent Scott, a cultural arts program specialist at the National Museum of the American Indian, directed the recent version and documented it on the blog www.nmainativetheater.blogspot.com.

The play exposes collisions of culture, religion and politics, Scott explained. It accomplishes this via discussion among three Native Hawai’ian women and two women missionaries who are building relationships with each other.

“She gives voices to women, whether historical or in a historical context,” Scott said. “She gives them voices that you don’t normally hear in history because history is generally written by men.”

Ka'ahumanu, as a historic figure, is respected for her leadership by some Native Hawai’ians and reviled by others for her religious actions. Kneubuhl leaves open the question of whether Ka'ahumanu’s Christian conversion was really a political move aimed at gaining the status of a Christian nation to the invading Americans.

Melonie Leihua Stewart, who played Ka'ahumanu in the museum’s production, said the queen regent was making difficult decisions at a time when foreign diseases and internal strife left many Hawai’ians dead.

“This play has made me realize how the death of over half of her people in such a short period of time impacted her decision to convert,” Stewart said. “Although there were many other influences, this one particular fact struck me emotionally, and it helped me to provide a stronger delivery on stage.”

Kneubuhl, the playwright and author, said one consequence of Ka'ahumanu’s conversion was that missionaries taught reading and writing to Native Hawai'ians.

“The population became literate very quickly,” Kneubuhl said. “In the 19th century, we see all these Native Hawai’ian newspapers, which lots of elders contributed to. Because they wrote things down, they were preserving things like the Hawai'ian language.”

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CULTURE

Courtesy of The Mountain Apple Company A concert by top Hawai’ian contemporary musical group The Brothers Cazimero, plus hula demonstrations, games and activities from lei-making to poi-pounding, will entice families at the “Celebrate Hawai’i” festival June 12-14 at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. The Brothers Cazimero, with guests the Aloha Boys, will kick off the museum’s Indian Summer Showcase outdoor concert series on Saturday, June 13. For information, go to www.nmai.si.edu/hawaii/2009. click images to access high resolution photo page

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The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian is located in Washington, D.C., New York City and Suitland, Md. View online exhibitions at www.AmericanIndian.si.edu

The American Indian News Service is edited by Kara Briggs, a Yakama and Snohomish journalist. She owns Red Hummingbird Media Corp., which is contracted by the National Museum of the American Indian to provide this service. Contact her at editor@nmaie-newservice.com or by phone at 503-577-0012.

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Kara Briggs, Editor
Eileen Maxwell, National Museum of the American Indian, Director of Public Affairs
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