POUNDMAKER FIRST NATION — Every year since 2018, Miyawata Culture, Sarasa Performance Lab and the Poundmaker Museum has hosted the Poundmaker Performance Festival on the shores of Poundmaker Lake and at the Poundmaker Museum.
Local and international performers present at the Sarasa Culture space, a unique venue built on Indigenous architectural principles. The organizers frame their festival as an experiment in language, performance and ceremony within an Indigenous community, in Indigenous spaces and venues.
Indigenous performance is viewed as an artistic genre open to all people and which transcends current colonial identity categories.
“Performance defined by colonial identity categories limits the growth of Indigenous performance,” states the director of the festival, Poundmaker band member Floyd Favel, who along with Polish Odissi dancer Dr. Sabina Sweta Sen Podstawska, has worked together to create one of the most unique festivals in the Indigenous world.
This year, the festival hosted Maori dancer Charles Koroneho and Syilx performer Mariel Belanger as resident artists who took part in the creation of the performance Sweet Cherry Wine, written by Floyd Favel.
Other invited artists were; Janelle Pewapsconias, Dale Mac, Victoria Wanihadie, Jeanette Kotowich, Kalli Van Stone, Alexandra Nordstrom, Miguel Fenrich and Cheyenna Sapp.
The festival also included the annual Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL) workshop, where participants came from across the country. PISL is an ancient language system that offers a way of teaching Indigenous languages using Indigenous systems.
“Universities, which are colonial institutions, have taken over Indigenous language learning, whereas PISL puts language learning back into the hands of the community, and its measurable results far exceeds existing Indigenous language learning methods. It is all a process of decolonization” offers Floyd Favel.
Each year PISL expert Dr. Lanny Real Bird from the Crow Nation of Montana, is invited to teach. Real Bird is one of the very few PISL language experts in North America.
