2024 Smithsonian Folk Festival
Indigenous Voices of the Americas.
The 2024 Folk Festival is a platform that brings these long-lasting intricate voices to the National Mall, inviting other cultures to understand and appreciate their struggle to discover and illuminate the beauty in living. It's a celebration of diversity and a call for unity. This year the festival is being hosted in partnership between the Smithsonian museums Center for Folklife & Cultural Heritage and The National Museum of the American Indian.
Corn the “seed of seeds” and “mother that sustained life.”
The color red represented the Inca heroes and martyrs blood spilled during war. “Indigenous Peruvian.”
First Nation Peoples have inhabited the Americas for centuries, observing the sunrise and sunset of the Sun on a diverse landscape that provided and nourished working organisms for centuries with its abundance of natural resources. The Indigenous voices of the plethora of ancestors who prayed, held ceremonies, and lived in a commune with the land, trees, rocks, water, animals, and insects speak through the distant remembrance and presence of the ancestors.
Because of this lineage and heritage, the esoteric creation of customs, traditions, beliefs, and habits have allowed Indigenous culture to flourish and navigate the human condition through the adversity and complexities life offers through the beautiful struggle. The beautiful struggle is the struggle people go through in their personal lives to achieve success in whatever they seek to accomplish.
As a dedicated exhibit worker for a third year at the Center for Folklife & Cultural Heritage, I am thrilled to participate in the partnership between CFCH and the Native American Museum. Our collaborative efforts involve the creation of Native American benches and the installation of the festival's infrastructure. Carpentry is a part of every folk festival and is an oral tradition that directly involves the environment in terms of wood consumption. Instead of cutting down trees, if the focus could move towards fallen trees, tree stumps, and used wood repurposing, future sustainability could be obtained for this craft and the ecosystem. I am also responsible for maintaining the operations functionality during festival activities and assisting with the breakdown to close out the 2024 Folklife Festival.
