Posted: January 30, 2008
The Spirit Survives: The Boarding School Experience, Then and Now
Winter Tales
Dovie Thomason
Saturday, February 9th
Concert for the Public
Knight Auditorium, 2 pm
The Spurlock Museum is thrilled to host Lakota and Kiowa Apache storyteller Dovie Thomason for her moving and educational one-woman concert "The Spirit Survives: The Boarding School Experience, Then and Now" on Saturday, February 9, at 2 PM. Admission is $5, and the public is welcome.
For decades the First Nations of North America suffered the loss of their children to government boarding schools. While living in these institutions, children were forcibly "re-educated" in programs intended to speed their assimilation and "civilization," at the cost of culture and identity. Thomason introduces her listeners to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania and its profound and broad-reaching impact on Indian and non-Indian people since its inception in 1879 and far beyond its closing in 1918. She shades this history with personal memoir, biography of indigenous activists and culture keepers of the 19th and 20th centuries, and knowledge of the impact of the boarding schools on Indian people today. Her story explores the inner resources that enabled the spirit and identities of Native peoples to survive. At the same time, Dovie raises provocative questions for all contemporary Americans: Why does the story of the boarding school experience matter to America in the 21st century? Can we learn from this? What must be done so that we can move into the future as wiser human beings? With honor, compassion and imagination, Dovie helps her audience become comfortable with discomforting knowledge and questions as she invites listeners to join her in a journey of respect and reconciliation.
Dovie Thomason is Lakota and Kiowa Apache, a former high school teacher and college professor, and a professional storyteller. Her passion for sharing her heritage grew from her experiences in elementary school with a history teacher whose lesson taught that Indians are extinct. Dovie’s desire to give people a clearer understanding of the misunderstood, often invisible cultures of the First Nations of North America has led to her telling the old stories of her people at powwows and Indian centers around the continent and as far away as Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London. She has been a featured teller on National Public Radio, on public television networks, and at countless festivals in the US and abroad, including multiple appearances at the annual National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee.
The concert is sponsored in part by the Illinois Arts Council and an endowment from Reginald and Gladys Laubin.