FAYETTEVILLE — Indigenous scholars, artists, activists and musicians are gathering in Fayetteville to share memories, talk about the present and envision the future.

A four-day event titled “Resounding Sovereign Expressions: Resurgent Indigenuity in Ozark Arts Practice & Scholarship,” will be a mix of artist talks and panel discussions with collective art making, a documentary screening and a rousing game of stickball to close out the weekend. All events are free and open to the public. The event kicked off, Thursday, Feb. 27 and goes through the weekend at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville’s Windgate Studio and Design Center and on the campus of Mount Sequoyah.

The gathering is the first event of this scale presented by the Center for Art as Lived Experience (CALE) at the UA.

“CALE’s mission is to promote interdisciplinary approaches to art making, intersecting art and life, and integrating art into communities,” said Aaron Turner, director and founder of CALE. “I think this program hits all three points but especially integrating art into the community. By supporting research and creative activity from artists and scholars, in dialogue with community members, Resounding Sovereign Expressions is staying true to those core principles outlined in the mission.”

To engage with art, people do not need to be an artist or have an art degree — just show up and be curious, he said.

“Everyone can bring an individual lived experience to an art or to an artwork or engage with art with their own lived experience and can learn something and grow and expand,” he said.

“My job with the center is to provide the support so that artists can engage communities that they have not engaged with yet,” he said, “not necessarily to educate audiences, but just to be there, to have a conversation, to have a dialogue about what it is they do.”

‘SIGHT FOR SORE EYES’

Indigenous artists and scholars from all over the country and representatives from the UA’s Native American Student Services program and the Native American Student Association were part of a board of advisers for this event. Interdisciplinary artists Serena Caffrey and Elise Boulanger (Osage), both graduate students working with CALE, also served as co-curators with Turner.

Gregory Jones, director of Native American Student Services, Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative, said being part of the team arranging this event has been a wonderful experience.

“I recently moved here from Oklahoma, where a lot of native events and things are happening quite frequently,” he said. A member of the Shawnee Tribe who works with Native students at the university, he said this event is a “sight for sore eyes.”

He said he thinks Native students will be interested in the panels and performances and especially “learning more about how other tribal people are putting their culture into their art.”

Also, he said using the term “Ozark” in the event’s title holds special meaning.

“A lot of Native students or Native folks that come to (Northwest Arkansas), they see this barrier between Oklahoma and Arkansas as a physical, mental barrier, and ‘Indian country’ doesn’t cross that line,” he said. “What we want to show people is that Indian country can cross that line. You know, Arkansas is home to a ton of tribal citizens and a ton of tribal citizens come to the University of Arkansas to go to school. We should build a community here for those people or for our people as well.”

COLLECTIVE MEMORIES

Event participants will take “creative approaches to visualizing collective memories and Indigenous futurities in the land currently known as Northwest Arkansas,” according to the event’s description online.

“Collective memories, that phrase is really about the land that we’re on in Northwest Arkansas and Eastern Oklahoma – the traditional homelands of the Osage Nation, Quapaw Nation and Caddo Nation,” co-curator Boulanger said. “When I came onto this project, I was really interested in the ways that we were bringing in voices from those communities. And the phrase ‘collective memories’ is talking about what’s been going on here on this land for as long as memory, and what people who are here now — such as myself being a citizen of the Osage Nation — remember about this place, and are able to articulate around the artistic practices that have existed here for a very long time.”

“Indigenous futurity,” she said, refers to how Indigenous creatives and communities share their traditional knowledge and arts practices with future generations of people living on the ancestral lands now known as Northwest Arkansas and Eastern Oklahoma.

Boulanger shared a story about artist Jeri Redcorn, a member of the Caddo Nation, as an example of an artist using collective memories to pass on a traditional arts practice to future generations.

“She’s very well accomplished and known as someone who singlehandedly revived the Caddo pottery tradition from pots held in a museum’s collection that had been unearthed,” Boulanger said. By studying those pieces, the artist learned how to recreate them, then shared what she learned.

“She felt it was really important to return that artistic practice to her people, and that the benefits would be future Caddo citizens being able to participate in that art form and communicate important cultural stories through that art form.”

Redcorn is one of the many artists taking part in panel discussions during the Resounding Sovereign Expressions event. Panel topics include: Retracing the Trail of Tears, Representation in Museum Spaces and Future Monumentality, Land Grant Universities & Academic Justice, and Land Return as an Artistic Endeavor.

“I don’t want the impression to be that it’s hyper-academic,” co-curator Serena Caffrey said of the panels. “They’re complex topics, but the speakers are coming from their own lived experience as Aaron said. It’s not all just heavy conversation. It’s also experiencing these ideas through music and through art.”

EVENT SCHEDULE

The first day of Resounding Sovereign Expressions will include an artist talk with Demian DinéYazhi’ (Diné) who will share work they completed during their residency in the UA’s Printmaking Department. In the afternoon, Caffrey said there will be an interactive sound workshop led by artists Warren Realrider (Pawnee, Crow) and Nathan Young (Delaware Tribe of Indians, Pawnee and Kiowa descent) where participants will be guided through improvisation and collaborative exercises to give them “insight into how Pawnee traditions intersect with contemporary experimental music, fostering a deeper understanding of stochastic composition and Indigenous approaches to sound.”

Later in the day, workshop participants will be invited to perform “Kitawîrisu’” (or “The Gambler”) alongside the composers Realrider and Young. Registration is required for the workshop.

Ahead of the panel discussions on Feb. 28 and March 1, there will be a breakfast and meet and greet with the panelists for students and attendees in Parker Hall on the Mount Sequoyah campus. Margaret’s Juan Rose food truck will provide lunch both days.

The evening of Feb. 28 there will be a screening of the documentary “Drowned Land” by Colleen Thurston (Choctaw) focusing on a group of water protectors on the Kiamichi River, which is “located deep in the Choctaw Nation” and serves as a “lifeline of their community,” according to the description online. Attendance is capped at 30 people; registration is required.

Following panel discussions March 1, artist Mekko Harjo (Quapaw) will close the day with an immersive, performative installation reflecting on his experience as a 2024 artist in residence at the Momentary and “what it means to build new relationships of meaning with ancestral lands.”

March 2 kicks off with coffee, pastries, an open mic and information.

“Sunday overall is kind of a celebratory day for people to come together,” Boulanger said. She’ll host a beading workshop and local mutual aid organizations will have tables with information set up.

UA professor of voice and musician Lauren Nicole Clare (Chickasaw) will give a solo musical performance. A stickball game will follow.

“The cross-generational engagement is really important to me, particularly with Native kids growing up in this region being introduced to something like stickball,” Boulanger said. “I’ve never even seen a stickball game, so I’m really excited for the people on campus who are going to be a part of that to teach us.”

The hope is attendees can “metabolize some of what they’re learning in different ways” by participating in the workshops and attending performances, Caffrey said.

Both Caffrey and Boulanger stress the public-facing aspect of the events.

“All people are welcome to this convening, and I really hope that non-Indigenous folks will feel welcome to come and ask questions and learn from the panelists and participate in workshops and come to the performances,” Boulanger said.

“I think one really important part of this work for me is allyship, and so being on this project and being able to do work that I really care about is my responsibility as a tribal citizen. It’s always so amazing to have people learning more and contributing in ways that they can to sharing Indigenous history and uplifting Native artists in our region.”