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