MAY 29TH-31ST 2020

The Wind River Foundation is thrilled to launch our first annual public Indigenous Cultural Connections event.  This event will be our first event to be held annually bringing cultural awareness, education and authentic indigenous presence to the greater Jackson Hole community.

All festival events are FREE to the public.

Goals

As with all of our Indigenous Cultural Connections Programing, we envision a multi-pronged program of engagement and collaboration:

1. Enrich the greater Jackson Hole community with cultural awareness, education and authentic indigenous experiences

2. Empower and amplify the voices of local, national and international indigenous cultural and thought leaders

3. Honor the mutuality of our relationships and cultivate an authentic sense of place

4. Foster engagement that benefits local indigenous communities and elevates the dignity of discourse for all indigenous societies.

Celebrating Cultural Resilience

Event Proposal:

The Foundation’s first annual Northern Indigenous Arts and Cultures Festival (NIAC) is a three day event celebrating the cultural, social and personal resilience of the tribal people and societies who are indigenous to this land. Each year, the NIAC Festival will host an outdoor indigenous art, culture and culinary market, host educational events, cultural awareness workshops, as well as presenter and film based celebrations of art and culture. Each year we will organize around a focus area that will introduce authentic indigenous culture and concepts intended for the greater Jackson Hole community, a broad based non-indigenous majority audience. Our focus is always to dispel simplifications and stereotypes. The greater Jackson Hole community and visitors will be empowered with the knowledge and experiences that support honoring our ongoing relationships with indigenous cultures and societies.

In our inaugural year, the NIAC Festival will focus on introducing the concepts of indigenous cultural strength and resiliency as well as cultural and historical trauma, with particular focus on the boarding school era. We will showcase the premiere of the film Home from School, a film that tells the story of Northern Arapaho youth and elders who travel to the Carlisle boarding school in Pennsylvania to retrieve the remains of their children who were sent and died there, as they bring their children home to repatriate their remains among their people.

Surrounding the presentation of this film, we will host educational panels, cultural activities and workshops that celebrate the strength of indigenous societies and individuals. Our keynote presentation for our event will be the US Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo, the first indigenous US Poet Laureate.

Honoring Relationship and Authentic Sense of Place

As with all of our programing, this event is designed to honor and support tribal community leaders in their work on the Wind River Reservation. One of our primary focuses is addressing the legacy of historical and cultural trauma through fostering healing and resilience.

A few of our current projects include, working with drug and alcohol recovery and prevention programs to bring trauma and resiliency informed tools and training to clinical and other service providers. We are also working toward addressing childhood trauma in multiple sectors including the establishment of a child advocacy center and expanding juvenile programs; bringing trauma and resiliency informed tools and practices to those serving youth and families. Specifically correlated with the film release and proposed event, we plan to hold customized community wide boarding school healing events and cultural celebrations as part of a wider effort to bring healing and resiliency factors to tribal communities on the Wind River Reservation.