MONTAGUE — Celebrating thousands of years of rich cultural history, Native Americans took to Unity Park in Turners Falls Saturday to display a diverse set of traditions.
It was the fifth annual Pocumtuck Homelands Festival, started by the Nolumbeka Project, which aims to “promote a deeper, broader and more accurate understanding of the Native Americans of New England before and during European contact and colonization,” as stated on the event’s handout.
The location at Unity Park was significant, according to Diane Dix, event coordinator and Nolumbeka Project co-founder, given that the park was the site of a reconciliation ceremony in 2004, 328 years after the colonial Captain William Turner massacred countless Native Americans during a raid near the location.
According to Dix, “the Indians” were not wiped out and never completely went away. Saturday’s event seemed to prove her thesis correct, as singers and musicians, authors and storytellers, artisans and advocates showed up to celebrate and display their Native American heritage.
“We are teaching the old way,” said Linda Longtoe Sheehan, an artist and a member of the Elnu Abenaki tribe in Vermont.
Sheehan specializes in wampum, quahog jewelry — jewelry made from clam shells of a deep violet that are fashioned into necklaces and bracelets.
According to Sheehan, the importance of the event lies in the fact that it brings together different types of people, including many people descending from Native American tribes. The cultural diversity before and after the arrival of Europeans in North America should be celebrated, she said.
“I love supporting the Native traditions and events,” Sheehan said. “There’s a lot of people who bicker these days, and we think it’s important to bring people together. It’s amazing how they come together here, help each other out, share different things. There’s a lot of caring.”
Sheehan, who has attended the event for the past three years, is knowledgeable in other forms of Native American art, too, and expressed pride in teaching young children the thousands-of-years-old craftwork “from the very beginning.”
“We teach younger people to do the native craft from the get-go,” Sheehand said. “For art with porcupine needles, for example, they are taking the porcupine needles and actually plucking them. Then using things like milkweed rope. It’s all from the earth.”
Others, like Leah Hopkins of the Kingfisher Singers musical group, also focused on the importance of nature in Native American cultures and products.
The Kingfisher Singers played in front roughly 50 people Saturday afternoon and, between traditional songs, Hopkins had a chance to explain the instruments the group used to complement their songs.
“There are lots of different types of instruments that were used — buffalo horn rattles, birch bark rattles,” Hopkins said. “Inside these rattles we have different things. There’s rattles with corn in it, with beans in it.”
Musician Bryan Blanchette also performed, using a guitar and singing in the ancient Abenaki language. For him, it was about keeping an aspect of the old culture alive.
“I like to think I’m a promoter of the language, not a true speaker of the language because there’s so much to the language,” Blanchette said.
He sang a song about paddling up river in a canoe, a traditional way of Native American travel, but also said he was singing songs about the struggles of indigenous peoples. One of the latter type of songs was a new rendition of Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down,” and another was a song called “White Dog,” which he wished to leave to the audience’s imagination regarding its subject matter.
“The resolve of the Abenaki people is something most people couldn’t imagine,” he said, while the festival-goers bustled around him.