TURNERS FALLS — At this year’s Pocumtuck Homelands Festival, attendees can make crafts, purchase Native American food and books as well as have pre-colonial artifacts examined by experts.
The fourth annual event runs from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Aug. 5 at the Unity Park waterfront area in Turners Falls.
Staff from the Mashantucket-Pequot museum will be at the event, where they will be available to look at local artifacts from the public, like musket balls, arrowheads and pottery. This is the same organization working on the National Park Service Battlefield study grant in the Gill and Montague area.
The event, which is free and open to the public, also includes performers, story tellers, vendors and primitive skills demonstrations. It is hosted by the Nolumbeka Project, a non-tribal organization that promotes education of Native American culture in the area.
Diane Dix, one of the organizers for the event, said they are excited to see the event growing in its fourth year. She said they are at maximum capacity for vendors this year.
She said the festival was based in part off the continuing efforts to exchange ideas, promised in the town of Montague’s Reconciliation Ceremony with local Native American tribes in 2004.
“What’s especially gratifying was that it was a leap of faith for us to do something like this,” she said.
Performers include: Hawk Henries, a Nipmuc flute player and flute maker, the Kingfisher Singers and Dancers, storyteller Larry “Spotted Crow” Mann, the Medicine Mammals Singers, and Mixashawn Rozie, who uses instrumental virtuosity and stories to illuminate the indigenous and African roots of “American” music.
There will also be three drum circles: Chief Don Stevens and the Nulhegan-Coosuk Band of the Abenaki Singers, the Black Hawk Singers, and the Visioning B.E.A.R. Circle Intertribal Coalition Singers.
Dix said the event isn’t a pow wow, but a festival celebrating Native American culture.
“It’s been really good, we’re able to bring the indigenous people back, at least for one day,” she said.
She said the festival is helpful because it can help the incorrect education a lot of people received about Native Americans growing up.
“The more we learn and the more we realize how wonderful that culture is,” Dix said. “It’s going to be a really full day, a wonderful day.”
Visit turnersfallsriverculture.org or nolumbekaproject.blogspot.com for more information on the festival, including the full schedule of events.
Reach Miranda Davis at 413-772-0261, ext. 280 or mdavis@recorder.com.