Culture Keepers Roster Reboot!

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You asked and we listened. OFN’s newly revised Culture Keepers Roster incorporates numerous changes you requested. Please check out the new format and review your personal artist page before we make a public announcement about the new site. You can send your approval or request for edits through our roster survey. Here’s how:

  • Visit the Roster
  • Type your name into the Name box and click Search. Your profile should come up.
  • Once you review your roster page, please fill the roster survey to indicate your approve or what, if any, corrections need to be made.

Approving your profile helps us empower tradition keepers like you with paid opportunities to support your work preserving Oregon’s rich cultural heritage. Without your approval, we must deactivate your profile.

I couldn’t be prouder of what we’ve all accomplished. Thank you for participating in the Roster, for giving us your feedback, and to all of our staff, interns, and website development team for their care and attention to this project over the years. Ultimately, it is you artists who make OFN and the Oregon Culture Keepers Roster a success. Bravo!

Letter from the Director, June 2022

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It is hard to celebrate the good work that Oregon Folklife Network has accomplished in the first part of 2022 while violence in the U.S. and globally reveals tremendous suffering caused by intolerance. When asked how America appears from the outside, Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, Admiral James Stavridis replied, “we lose the ability to step forward, be an example to the world, if we cannot solve these problems of disorder in our house here at home.” OFN, alongside folklorists around the nation, combat social and political tension with our tools for finding common ground. But is it enough?

The American Folklore Society rushes to aid Ukrainian scholars to preserve their archives of songs, photographs and videos documenting dances, festivals, and cultural celebrations. New York CityLore invites I’m From: Across the Great Divide poems, to get Americans from different backgrounds and political orientations talking to one another about our shared humanity. Meanwhile steadfast programming like the National Endowment for the Arts annual National Heritage Fellowships honor America’s finest master artists whose lifelong commitments to tradition weaves our collective national fabric.

Here in Oregon, OFN does our part to strengthen our unity with statewide programming that celebrates our diversity. We recently brought Western women’s traditions to the High Desert Museum stage, and proudly welcomed as courtesy staff, Native colleague and consultant, Deana Dartt. Watch for this summer’s Oregon Culture Nights to connect with Persian, Black, Irish, and Asian Indian artists from our tenth Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program cohort. As folklorists, we readily marry conservative goals to preserve age-old practices, with liberal goals to sustain all cultures equitably. Harmonizing these apparent opposites is critical to healing society locally and globally.

Supporting Oregon Folklife Network with your donation, advocacy, and participation directly and positively impacts social cohesion in our state, and is critically important to our world. Your support enables us to elevate Oregon’s diverse expressions of individuality while amplifying our common drive to intimately know and practice our cultural roots. Share our newsletter with a friend. Follow us on social media. Donate, and double down your cultural support while leveraging a Cultural Trust tax credit. Your family, your friends, and your neighbors near and far will benefit.

Thank you!

Emily West Hartlerode, Interim Director

Artist Spotlight: Francisco Bautista

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Francisco Bautista, a Zapotec fabric artist, is a 2021 TAAP award recipient.

Listen to a short excerpt from Bautista’s TAAP interview with OFN Interim Director Emily Hartlerode and graduate employee Jenna Ehlinger. Bautista worked with his son David for the TAAP program.

Francisco Bautista

Bautista was born in the town of Teotitlán de Valle in Oaxaca, Mexico. He grew up learning to weave from his father and grandfather, both of whom made a living weaving. In 2003, he and his wife moved to Sandy, Oregon, where they began weaving and taking their rugs to Saturday Market in Portland and other shows in Oregon. As a member of the Portland Handweavers Guild, he has demonstrated Zapotec weaving at several fairs and shows, including Art in the Pearl.

Bautista has taught workshops about the Zapotec method of natural dyeing in Sandy and Bend, Oregon. In 2017, he shared his Zapotec weaving tradition with non-Zapotec immigrants from Mexico through a program sponsored by the Sandy Public Library at Sandy Vista Apartments. Additionally, he volunteers in many demonstrations and teaching programs throughout the community.

This excerpt was edited and produced by OFN graduate employee Lillian DeVane

Intern Reflections on Southern Oregon Traditional Artists Folklife Fieldwork Survey

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This folklife fieldwork internship was funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Folk & Traditional Arts program, to document culture keepers in the southern Oregon counties of Josephine, Jackson, and Douglas. Olivia Wilkinson has been working with OFN’s folklore specialist and retired executive director, Riki Saltzman, to learn how to document traditional artists and culture keepers who carry on occupational, food, music, craft, and other cultural traditions. This work is part of an ongoing statewide survey that has so far interviewed over 400 folk and traditional artists among the state’s federally recognized Tribes and across 35 of its counties.

Intern Reflections on Southern Oregon Traditional Artists Folklife Fieldwork Survey

 By Olivia Wilkinson

 

I interned for OFN’s folklore specialist, Dr. Riki Saltzman, during the Spring term 2022. I assisted with interviews and the resulting data collection for the 2021-22 Southern Oregon Folklife Survey for Douglas, Jackson, and Josephine counties. The experience laid bare the breadth of culture found in Oregon’s southern inland counties and the labor that goes into conducting fieldwork, even remotely.  

 

I had the good fortune to have the opportunity to sit in on interviews with culture keepers Shannon Stutzman, Linda Danielson, and Andrea Luchese. These three women have a special ability to bring people together through their traditional art forms. I somehow found a way to relate to each of them, despite our coming from entirely different backgrounds. 

 

Shannin Stutzman, whose heritage is Hanis Coos and Kalapuya, is enrolled with the Confederated Tribes of Siletz. She is a youth educator, drummer, and storyteller. Stutzman’s interview consisted of a wide range of experiences. She started with her childhood experiences living in Coos Bay and growing up immersed in the cultural traditions of the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians. More recently, Stutzman and her family have been involved in with others in the creation and publication of a dictionary of the Kalapuya language. She is one of few people learning this sleeping language. Her dedication to the preservation of culture for future generations is just one reason why, during the interview, I felt like I had known her all my life. 

Screenshot of zoom meeting with Shannin Stutzman, April 13th, 2022.

 

 Linda Danielson is a folklorist and local old time fiddler who offers instruction at camps and performs throughout the Pacific Northwest. She plays with Shannin Stutzman’s mother, Esther Stutzman, in Slow Ponies, an all-women’s group that features western standards and some original compositions. Riki and I were able to meet in person with Danielson, since we miraculously all live in South Eugene. Danielson has been involved with folklore as a discipline for decades longer than I have been alive. It was humbling to speak with her, to say the least. I caught a glimpse of a world in which I am only starting to become familiar. 

 

Andrea Luchese is a hula instructor based in Ashland. Hula is an area in which the little knowledge I have has come to me recently. Our talk with Andrea helped me understand how vast the tradition is, from its roots in ancient Hawaiian history to its widespread celebration today. She spoke at length about what makes a good student and a good teacher, which both run deeper than just showing up to class. A good teacher is “living in accordance with that which we hold most sacred.”

Screenshot of zoom meeting with Andrea Luchese, May 17th, 2022.

 There is a level of exhaustion that comes from remote work, but when the work rewards me with a deeper appreciation for Oregon, it is worth doing.  

 

Gratitude to 2021-2022 Staff, Interns, & Graduate Employees

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This year OFN welcomed University of Oregon graduate employees Lillian DeVane and Yosser Saidane. Thank you for your work in supporting our programs! Former OFN graduate employee and intern Iris Teeuwen returned as a program specialist, and focused on streamlining the Oregon Culture Keepers Roster, one of our core programs. Olivia Wilkinson joined the OFN team as an intern assisting Riki Saltzman with our state-wide survey, fieldwork, and related research.

Lillian DeVane is a first-year MA student in the Folklore and Public Culture program. Her research interests include occupational folklore, foodways, and labor history. Lillian hosts two podcasts based in New York City, one that focuses on labor in the service industry, and a second that involves traveling to locations associated with supernatural legends. She is a 2022-2023 Wayne Morse graduate research fellow.

Yosser Saidane is an MA student in the folklore program at the University of Oregon. She is interested in areas of vernacular culture in the Maghreb region of North Africa. Her research is focused on the performance of folk religion within a number of Sufi orders in Tunisia. Before turning to folklore, she worked as an instructor of English at the University of Gabès. She holds a B.A. in Anglo-American studies from the Ecole Normale of Tunis and an agrégation degree from the Faculty of Letters, Arts and Humanities of Manouba.

Iris Teeuwen obtained her master’s degree in Folklore and Public Culture from UO and will be a doctoral candidate in Folklore at Indiana University in the fall. Iris accepted the position of Folklorist at the Four Rivers Cultural Center in Ontario, Oregon. Iris has worked at OFN during her master’s program as a Graduate Employee and intern from 2018 to 2020. During that time, she assisted in organizing and photographing the TAAP Master Artist Gathering in 2019 and shadowed folklorists doing fieldwork on the Oregon coast. After graduating, she received a summer fellowship at OFN and then continued as a program specialist working on improving and streamlining the Oregon Culture Keepers Roster, a state-wide online roster of folk and traditional artists in Oregon that local organizations, schools, parks, and others can use to hire people for paid demonstrations, workshops, performances, or talks.

Her primary role at Four Rivers Cultural Center will be to coordinate the annual Tradition Keepers Folklife Festival in 2022, which will be combined with their 25th-anniversary event, which will showcase the region’s rich and diverse cultures through performances and demonstrations. In addition to the festival, she will do fieldwork in Idaho and Eastern Oregon

Olivia Wilkinson is a senior majoring in history and folklore and minoring in music and Scandinavian. After graduation, she plans to enroll in a library science program and learn the archiving profession. Her favorite class has been history of the book, where she gave a public presentation about the historiography of one of James Cook’s original atlases. Born and raised in Oregon, Olivia has always been passionate about the arts; she has been working with Unbound Journal for the past two years as its creative director, and in her free time  she often paints digitally and takes analog photos.

Western Women’s Traditions Featured at High Desert Museum

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by Riki Saltzman, Folklorist, High Desert Museum/Folklore Specialist, Oregon Folklife Network

During the weekend of May 14-15, 2022, the High Desert Museum featured three programs with culture keepers from the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Lake County, and Grant County. The culmination of nearly two years of documenting traditions in the High Desert and around eastern and central Oregon, these public programs appealed to a wide range of interests. All this was made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, Folk & Traditional Arts program.

Starting off the programs on Saturday, May 14, was a Plateau Beading Workshop with traditional artists H’Klumiat Roberta Kirk and her granddaughter AnposKawín Tashina Eastman.

This three-hour beading workshop went an hour over to teach 20 workshop participants the techniques to create a beaded animal charm suitable for a backpack, keyring, or purse. Participants had a choice of several basic designs, or they could use of their own.

We all quickly learned that simpler was better–and easier! Kirk and Eastman brought with them a large variety of beads and showed everyone how to pull off a strand from the larger bunch; the challenge was not to spill beads everywhere.

Next, they showed us how to wax the cotton twine and then pull a threaded needle through the template, thread 6-8 beads, and then use another needle and twine to tack down the beads after every third or fourth one. This was much more challenging than it looked when these master artists demonstrated.

You have to use both hands, hold down the beads with one, and then keep the second needle and twine separate from the first for tacking.

While many of us were frustrated while we beaded the outline of our designs, eventually we caught on and worked more quickly.

Although no one completed her beaded piece, Kirk and Eastman showed us how to finish them at home by gluing the beadwork to a piece of tanned rawhide and attaching a keyring, then beading the edge, and finally cutting off the excess rawhide for a completed beaded keyring.

Besides patiently showing us all how to do this painstaking beading for a small design, Roberta and Tashina also showed off their own artistry with a display of beaded regalia, from dresses and belts to hair ties and more.

Roberta Kirk is a featured artist on the Oregon Folklife Network’s Culture Keepers Roster and Tashina Eastman will soon be listed as well. Kirk has also received many honors including the (Oregon) Governor’s Art Award (2020), the First People’s Fund Community Spirit Award (2020), and Traditional Arts Recovery Program funding (2022) as well as having served several times as a master artist for Oregon’s Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program.

The evening of May 14 featured Western Poet, novelist, and storyteller A.K. Kathy Moss of Prairie City in Grant County. Mentored by Baxter Black and Waddie Mitchell, she is an experienced and lauded cowboy poet and has performed throughout the west including at the Grant County Fair and the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, NV. The International Western Music Association named Moss the 2021 Female Poet of the Year. She also won their award for the Cowboy Poetry CD of the Year in both 2020 (for “They Come Prancin’”) and 2019 (for “The Truth”). Moss is also featured on the Oregon Culture Keepers Roster.

 

 

 

 

 

 

During her performance at the High Desert Museum, Kathy Moss kept an audience of over 60 attendees riveted with her tales and “cowboy” poems about lady buckaroos, ranchers, cows, and horses ubiquitous to eastern Oregon.

Her moving poetry enthralled audience members with stories about horse training and driving cattle. Moss spoke from own knowledge and experience about riding horses, running cattle, doctoring cattle, and a memorable night searching for and finding a newborn calf. Moss brought to life the many characters she has known, especially the women involved in rawhiding, horse shoeing, night-calving, and cowboying. Her keen ear for language augmented with video Long Hard Ride, song sung by Joni Harms – YouTube from Oregon’s ranch country led her audience through the hills and ranges many of us see only from the road.

Moss also brought several copies of her book series and her award-winning CD to sell and sign.  

The next day, May 15, High Desert Museum visitors had the pleasure of meeting cowboy hat maker, farrier, and cowboy Lisa Robinson from Lakeview in Lake County.

Robinson brought a few of her finished custom hats, talked about her cowboying work, and did some reshaping and hat-steaming for those who brought their hats.

Robinson, who grew up in a cowboying family in south central Oregon, spent the years from 14-40 cowboying and horse shoeing. About 10 years ago, she learned to make quality, custom-made western hats of 100% beaver for working cowboys. She knew from experience that good hat makers who make custom hats are hard to come by, so she set out to learn how with the goal of eventually retiring from her physically demanding work as a farrier. In early 2014 she apprenticed with two skilled master hat makers, Mike Moore who owns Buckaroo Hatters in Tennessee, and JW Hats in Salt Lake.

As she explained to the audience, she doesn’t use wool, rabbit, or blends because they don’t hold up as well.

Beaver hats keep their shape through wet, snow, cold, and hot sun. They don’t bleed dye, and they don’t shrink. As a working cowboy (she and her husband, Paul Robinson, run their own small ranch as well as run cattle for other ranches), she knows the value and necessity of a well-made, well-fitted hat; she tailors her individuals and has her own special identifying mark—dots on the ribbon band, which, along with the look of her beaver felt hats, she can spot from a distance.

Lisa Robinson’s thriving business, Top Knot Hats, builds custom hats and also reshapes, sizes, or refurbishes old ones with new ribbons, sweatbands, and more. Robinson is also on the Oregon Culture Keepers Roster and is available for talks and demonstrations within a hundred miles of Lakeview.

Announcing the 2022 TAAP Award Recipients

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We are excited to introduce the 2022 TAAP awardee cohort!

The TAAP program offers folk and traditional master artists and culture keepers a $3,500 stipend to teach their art form to apprentices from their same communities, Tribes, sacred or occupational groups. The stipend supports master artists in sharing their knowledge, skills and expertise with apprentices of great promise who will be empowered to carry on and strengthen Oregon’s living cultural traditions.

Meet the 2022 TAAP Award Recipients:

Mic Crenshaw

Mic Crenshaw

Mic Crenshaw is an emcee, rapper, spoken word artist, poet, activist, and educator. Crenshaw has taught workshops for youth through the Obo Addy Legacy Project, Caldera Arts, Multnomah County Library, the Boedecker Foundation and Young Audiences in Portland schools and in youth correctional facilities across Oregon.

This project will foster future mentor, apprentice relationships formal and informal as the young learn from their elders through observation, discussion, education, critique, and interactive entertainment.

Nisha Joshi

Nisha Joshi

Dr. Nisha Joshi is a Hindustani vocal and instrumental music performer and the director and teacher of Swaranjali Academy of Indian Music in Portland, Oregon. Dr. Joshi was born and raised in Rajasthan where she grew up studying North Indian classical (Hindustani) music and learning folk songs and dances of Rajasthan.  Dr. Joshi will work with her apprentice and produce a musical performance with harmonium accompaniments.

John Meade

John Meade

John Meade is a self-taught banjo player and a practitioner of the Appalachian old-time musical tradition. He has strong ties with the tradition through his family’s origins and the relations he has developed by playing in important gatherings such as the Mud City Old Time Gathering and the Portland Old Time Gathering which is one of the largest gatherings of Appalachian musicians in the West.

John will teach regional banjo and fiddle tunes from Appalachia. The majority of the tunes come from West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, and North Carolina. The tradition developed in this area in the 2nd half of the 19th Century and came out of a blending of musical traditions from Celtic and African cultures.

Brian Ó hAirt

Brian Ó hAirt

Brian Ó hAirt is a master musician in Irish music. He is deeply involved to the preservation of Irish cultural heritage and traditions (especially music) and Gaelic language. He has worked closely with native Irish singers. He studied in Ireland and earned two master’s degrees there before moving to Oregon to work as a full-time musician and music teacher.

Due in part to the deep connection the songs have to their native communities and the very unique features of the Irish language and its congruous singing style, it is very difficult to promote traditional in Irish Gaelic singing here in the U.S. As such, an apprenticeship is an integral way of assuring singing within the diaspora continues.

Hossein Salehi

Hossein Salehi

Hossein Salehi learned the traditional art of Santoor-playing as a child. When his family migrated from Iran to the United States in 1987, he was unable to bring his instrument and purchasing one in Oregon was not an option; it simply did not exist. Homesick, and with the help of a friend with a talent for woodworking, he built his first Santoor.

For the last fifty years, Hossein has accepted and trained over 1000 students. His whole purpose in teaching is to familiarize people with this unique Persian instrument in order to keep it alive, and also assist students of Persian background access, as well as preserve their traditional culture of Iran.

OFN Welcomes Deana Dartt

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OFN welcomes Deana Dartt, PhD (Coastal Chumash and Mestiza), and Founding Director of Live Oak Consulting as OFN’s Campus Affiliate. Descending from the indigenous people of the Californias, Dartt’s scholarly and professional work strive to address the incongruities between public understanding, representation and true acknowledgement of Native peoples, their cultures, histories and contemporary lives.

She earned her MA and PhD from the University of Oregon (welcome back, quack!) and has held curatorial positions at the Burke Museum of Natural and Cultural History and the Portland Art Museum as well as teaching appointments at the University of Oregon, University of Washington, and Northwest Indian College. She recently completed a writing fellowship at the School for Advanced Research where she revised her book manuscript for publication titled, Subverting the Master Narrative: Museums, Power and Native Life in California. Dartt’s courtesy position at OFN allows us to reciprocate the invaluable consulting time and expertise she has donated over the past several years to operationalize our First People: First Priorities initiative. Through her guidance, OFN is developing proposals to fund not only the traditional arts of Oregon’s Indigenous people, but the critical Native ecological knowledge and stewardship essential for these traditions to thrive.

Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program: Application Deadline Extended to January 21, 2022

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The University of Oregon’s Oregon Folklife Network has been awarded a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts plus $40,000 from Oregon Arts Commission to support Oregon’s Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program.

Oregon Folklife Network is accepting applications until January 21, 2022 for the Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program (TAAP) for projects in 2022. The program offers folk and traditional master artists and culture keepers a $3,500 stipend to teach their art form to apprentices from their same communities, Tribes, sacred or occupational groups. The stipend supports master artists in sharing their knowledge, skills and expertise with apprentices of great promise who will be empowered to carry on and strengthen Oregon’s living cultural traditions. Artist may make public presentations through the Museum of Natural and Cultural History.

Oregon’s 2021 TAAP awards supported traditional buckaroo leatherwork by Clair Kehrberg of John Day; Mexican charro (trick-roping expert) Antonio Huerta of Springfield; Black gospel, rhythm & blues singer LaRhonda Steele of Portland; Zapotec weaving by Francisco Bautista of Sandy; Guinean drum making and tuning by Alseny Yansane of Eugene; and Asian Indian dance by Jayanthi Raman of Portland. All mentored apprentices from their own culture groups in the traditional forms noted, with OFN providing technical support as needed for socially distanced teaching, learning, and presenting.

Oregon Folklife Network encourages applications from Oregonians practicing cultural traditions emerging from their heritage or Tribes. This program does not fund historic reenactments or cultural appropriation.

To learn more about application procedures and eligibility or to recommend a TAAP applicant, visit ofn.uoregon.edu, email ofn@uoregon.edu, or call 541-346-3820. Oregon Folklife Network staff members are available to provide application advice and will review and provide feedback on draft applications prior to submission.

Completed applications are due no later than 5 pm on January 21 at the Oregon Folklife Network, 242 Knight Library, 6204 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-6204. NOTE: This is NOT a postmark deadline.  

 

Greetings from Interim Director

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Greetings from Interim Director

This gallery contains 4 photos.

After another unpredictable year, we at Oregon Folklife Network are grateful for the generous support that keeps our doors open. The COVID-19 pandemic has been especially devastating to folk and traditional arts. Artists lost essential income as craft inventories waned with supply chains, and performance venues closed or limited operations. Traditional practices that thrive in […]