Ganondagan August News

The new webpage has been created for the A Seneca Encounter with LaSalle Event that is September 26 & 27. Please check it out for full details on the event.

A new slideshow, the first of the Native American Dance & Music Festival slideshows, has been put up. It features pictures of Cercle Celtique's performance and a personal letter from Jeanette Miller, Executive Director of the Friends of Ganondagan, about this exciting traditional music and dance group. Go to our main Gallery page to find the slideshow.

Look for another slideshow to be up within the next week of the "Native Grasses" Hike that took place on August 16th. It was a wonderful hike and a learning experience for all! The picture to the left is from the hike and is a picture of the native grass big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii).

Each year we hold an event for teachers and other educator's which we call "Educators' Day." The themed event features a full day of activities and talks designed to share with educators information on that year's theme. This year's the event will be titled "Educators' Day 2009: A Living History Event - LaSalle Visits Ganondagan" and will be held Friday September 25, 2009 9am - 4pm. For more details as well as the registration form, please see our events calendar or the email newsletter for the event.

We are still taking reservations for our Rockwell Museum Tour & Day Trip on August 29, 2009 8:30am - 5:30pm. This is a unique opportunity - don't miss it! See the Rockwell Tour page for more details.

Finally, on August 22, 2009 starting at 7pm we will be holding a "Long Ball and Storytelling" Event that will be a wonderful family event. It is an event that is FREE for Friends of Ganondagan Members - show current membership card as proof of membership. General public admission fee $3 adults, $2 children. The event will feature a Long ball game that event goers are welcome to take part in, storytelling, and more. See our event calendar page for more details.

-kim

Native American Dance & Music Festival - This Weekend!

Be sure to come out and visit our 18th annual Native American Dance and Music Festival this weekend!

Our performers this year include:

Arvel Bird
World music violinist Arvel Bird is the ultimate fusion artist, integrating his Native American and Scottish heritage with a variety of musical styles to deliver an accomplished sound that spans nearly every genre, including classical, folk, Celtic, country, fusion jazz and bluegrass.

Chef David Wolfman
Chef David Wolfman is a culinary arts professor at George Brown College in Toronto and is Host, Writer, and Executive Producer of the nationally televised Cooking with the Wolfman program on The Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN). David discovered his love for cooking at a young age and has devoted himself to the preservation and promotion of traditional Aboriginal foods and cooking methods.

Cercle Celtique
The award-winning 'Cercle Celtique,' was founded in Rennes, France in 1932 to preserve and promote traditional Breton dance and music. The dancers and musicians wear traditional Breton attire. Round dancing, square dancing, line dancing and the gavotte are all part of their repertoire and are traditionally performed during a Fest Nzo event. The music is performed with authentic instruments, such as the biniou and bombarde. This Celtic ethnic group located in northwest France, trace their heritage to first Celtic indigenous peoples from southwestern Great Britain.

Iroquois Social Dancing
With Ganondagan's Spirit Dancers and Buffalo Creek Dancers.

We also feature master traditional artist demonstrations including:

William (Bill) Loran - Traditional Gustoweh
Bill Loran will demonstrate making the traditional Iroquois men's headdress, the Gustoweh.

Marilyn Isaacs - Fingerweaving
Marilyn Isaacs will demonstrate making sashes in a traditional fingerweaving style, which is a weaving style that does not use complicated loom equipment.

Tonia Loran - Moccasin Making
Tonia Loran is an accomplished leatherworker and beadworker with pieces shown in national art shows as well as adorning the Native clothing of her friends and family. She will demonstrate moccasin making.

Rosemary Rickard-Hill - Raised Beadwork
Growing up in a family of beadworkers, Rosemary Rickard-Hill seemed to be destined to become internationally recognized her skills as a fine beadworker. She will demonstrate raised beadwork.

Please see our website www.ganondagan.org/NADMF.html for more details.

-kim

Native American Dance & Music Festival 7/25 - 7/26

This summer is flying by and the Native American Dance & Music Festival is just around the corner! It is Saturday and Sunday July 25th & 26th 10am - 6pm.

One of the most popular questions to show up in the Friends of Ganondagan email inbox this time of the year regards our scheduling of events at the festival. We have just put both our full festival program and schedule on-line and made them down-loadable for you. Just visit our Festival event page to download either document.

For those looking for "staycations" or low-cost, local summer fun in Western NY State and the Finger Lakes Region or for our out-of-the-area visitors, be sure to check out our festival. It is a full-day of events and programming for very low admission prices. We even have a very low cost family admission rate - $20 for 2 adults and up to 6 children. Where else can you and your family get so much entertainment for so little? (See our Festival event page for full list of admission prices.) Our festival features free children's activities, storytellers, guided trail walks, tours through the bark longhouse, dancing, musicians, artist demonstrations, a celebrity chef demonstration, a family drum jam, and more all for your low admission price.

By the way, this is a wonderful time for all of you who have driven by the site and wondered "just what is Ganondagan?" to explore all the site has to offer. We know there are many of you because this is something we hear from visitors quite often.

Please come. We know you will enjoy yourself at our festival!


-kim

The Dance & Music Festival & More!

The Native American Dance & Music Festival is just around the corner! This year it is 10am - 6pm on July 25 & 26th and we have a webpage for the event. Be sure to keep your eyes on that page for updates and detailed information about the artists and performers that will be attending this year's festival. The final changes are being made to the schedule - be sure to look for that soon to be on the event page too!

If you haven't stopped by the Friends of Ganondagan Gift Shop yet this year, be sure to do so. (See the Gift Shop page for hours.) This year the Gift Shop has tried to focus on items produced by the Friends of Ganondagan and other unique locally produced items as well as a re-focus on items of or about the Six Nations (Iroquois). There are things in the Gift Shop that you will find no place else and the really exciting part is that there are more items being produced and will be available throughout the 2009 season.

The Friends of Ganondagan website continues to grow and change. New content and pages are being regularly added throughout the site. During June, two slideshows were added to the Gallery pages. Be sure to check them out!

Finally, if you haven't been to the site in a while, be sure to come out. All the plants have breathed a sigh of relief with the coming of the recent rain. The Three Sisters Garden, a demonstration vegetable garden of traditional Native varieties, is doing well. The corn and beans are up and the squashes are blooming. The Creator's Garden is green and growing and will soon have new labels for all the medicine plants in it. Be sure to look for those. And the abundance offered by the wild plants is visible all about the site - the wild strawberries have just finished fruiting, the juneberries (see the picture to the right) are large and ripe, and soon to be followed by the black raspberries. Come visit us, walk the trails, and enjoy the natural beauty!

-kim

1794 brought to life

For the past year I have been working on a unique project with historic artist Robert Grffing. He approached me over a year ago concerning the project. He wanted to know if I could help him with a large scale representation of the 1794 Treaty. I encouraged him and was excited about helping bring the event to life. Foremost in my mind was to include the descendants of the people who were in attandance 314 years ago be a big part of the project.

The 1794 Canandaigua Treaty is the lasting agreement between the young United States and the ancient Haudenosaunee which continues to be commemorated each November 11th in the city of Canandaigua.

To this point there has never been an attempt at a faithful recreation of that historic event. It was my responsibility to research the treaty and many of the visual clues which we might use to structure a high quality recreation of what the treaty might have looked like. Tonia and I set up casting calls at Salamanca and Onondaga and solicited participants online as well. In the end, we had just under 30 Haudenosaunee people attend the photo shoot at the Seneca-Iroquois museum this weekend. Here are some glimpses into what will become a very impressive piece in the next two years.




"Niaweh" (thanks) to: The Seneca-Iroquois Museum staff, Jare, Robert, Tonia, Ward, James, Kobuck, Crowder, Don, and ALL the participant models.

Day Trip to the Rockwell Museum

On August 29th the Friends of Ganondagan will be holding a day trip to the Rockwell Museum of Western Art in Corning, NY for an exclusive tour of the museum and its special exhibition of Sewing the Seeds: 200 Years of Iroquois Glass Beadwork.

In this tour, we will be joined by Iroquoian Beadwork Specialist, Dolores Elliott, who will share her expertise on the history, creation and importance of beadwork in the Iroquois culture. We are also privileged to be joined by G. Peter Jemison, Ganondagan's Site Manager and renowned Seneca Artist, who will give a guided tour of the Native American Art throughout the museum.

You don't want to miss this unique opportunity so please see our Rockwell Trip web page for full excursion details as well as registration information today!

-kim

Savor the Summer Series

If you enjoyed the True Tale or Beavers at Ganondagan or think you would have, be sure to check out the rest of the events in our Savor the Summer Series.

We have full listings in our on-line event calender or our new Savor the Summer Series flyer. You may print and distribute the flyer or display it where you have permission to do so.

If you haven't done so yet, make sure to let us know what you think about our programs this year. We're pretty excited about them and we hope you are too!

-kim