Winter Tales: The Spirit Survives: The Boarding School Experience, Then and Now

• Event Date: Saturday, February 9, 2008
• Time: 2:00 pm (CST)
• Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL
• Cost: $5.00

• Performance
• Family-Friendly tag

Join Lakota/Kiowa Apache storyteller Dovie Thomason as she explores a tragic chapter in our nation’s history. For decades the First Nations of North America suffered the loss of their children to government boarding schools, where they 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 and 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, Thomason helps her audience become “comfortable with discomfort,” 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 contact with an elementary school teacher who taught her history class 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 and 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.