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 educate about Native Americans of New England before and during European contact and colonization.
The location of 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” never completely went away, and were not entirely wiped out. Saturday’s event seemed to prove her 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 member of the Elnu Abenaki tribe in Vermont.
Sheehan specializes in wampum, quahog jewelry — jewelry made from clam shells of a deep violet fashioned into necklaces and bracelets.
Sheehan said the importance of the event lies in that it brings all different types of people together, including many people descending from different Native American tribes. The diversity of cultures that existed 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 last three years, is knowledgeable in multiple forms of Native American art and expressed great 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,” Sheehan 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 of an audience of around 50 people Saturday afternoon and, between traditional songs, Hopkins had a chance to explain the instruments the group used to complement their voices.
“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 as the festival-goers bustled around him.