Image provided by: The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs; Warm Springs, OR
About Spilyay tymoo. (Warm Springs, Or.) 1976-current | View Entire Issue (March 3, 2005)
Page 8 Spilyqy Tymoo, Wairn Springs, Oregon March 3, 2005 Village: may include library (Continued from page 1) "The coin would be used to raise public awareness, support around artist's village," she said. Santos, in her proposal, cites a feasibility study of the Jefferson and Wheeler county library systems that "concluded that relationship with the Warm Springs Confederated Tribes needs to be defined and is criti cal to improve library services on the reservation." Santos has met with Ruth Metz, who administered the fea sibility study, on the possibility of tendering a partnership be tween the Confederated Tribes and the Jefferson County Li brary District within the Oregon Collaboration Project. The Or egon Collaboration Project came out of a national venture called "Preserving Our Memory, Lan guage, and Lifeways," designed to initiate and assist in bringing tribal and state resources to gether. "The development of a li brary at the Artists' Village will greatly enrich early childhood, youth, young adult and adult learning opportunities of all those who reside within Warm Springs," Santos said in the pro posal. She said it "may be pos sible" to obtain a three-year Fed eral Development Grant if her group can establish a working relationship between itself and Jefferson County and state li-, brary officials. "We have great potential for a library system because you're going to need a library system if you're going to have a col laboration with colleges," Santos said. Santos said she aspires for the artists' village complex to be built as ecologically sound as possible, using natural materials and solar and wind power. "Most likely the artist's vil lage, the priority would be sus tainable buildings and green building," she said "We want to go the same route because the community would want that If they'd want that for the gorge casino, then we'd most likely want that for here. That's im portant, so that way the build ing would be toxic-free, use less energy, utilizing the resources that we do have." "We feel (if) the communi ties in the Southwest could de sign cliff dwellings, and they're known for their architecture. The time is now for us to de velop our own architecture as well as materials." The healing arts program would address what Santos sees as a place where traditional medicine could be introduced. "There were some ideas within the healing arts program that would include having a place where people could come for information, a health re source library as well as having a place where we could grow some of our traditional medi cine to be used as part of our system," Santos said. An initial part of the artist's village concept is a Multi-Disciplinary Artist Survey that she plans to distribute to every resi dence on the Warm Springs Reservation, including both Warm Springs tribal members and non-members. She said she has proposed a working draft, and that the survey would be used to "come to a common sense of what an artist's village would focus on." The survey has been in draft form since last October, when Santos' written proposal was first distributed to tribal officials and media outlets. It includes questions on demographics, what features and services per spective artists might want in an artists' village, and, specifically, which artistic disciplines the pro spective artists might be in volved, be it traditional tribal arts, theater, visual fine arts or healing arts. "I hear there's a lot of talent among tribal people, and we need to see what we have," she said. The demographic informa tion, she said, would be used in any possible grant-writing pro posals, and possibly to identify non-tribal members who might be expert at certain artistic fields in which tribal members are not currently involved. "If we have 10 tribal mem bers who are fabric artists, it helps us identify our resources as a tribe," she said. "If some one from the Umatilla tribe liv ing on the reservation has a de gree in filmmaking, that person would be a resource for us in teaching, to convert knowledge to us." Santos said she hopes to have the survey ready to distribute by June. Santos and local artist Pat Courtney-Gold, a nationally re- Youth (Continued from page 3) The groups' leaders started the time off by leading their group in singing the Good News Club theme song, which ex presses the good' news the chil dren have come to hear. Moore then asked them to recite John 3:16, the verse in the New Testament stating that God's love for the world was such that He offered his son Jesus Christ and allowed man to have fellowship and "everlast ing life" if they believe in Christ That verse is one of the verses of the "Wordless Book," a book that helps describe the gospel message with no words, but a color represented on each page. Gold is the first color, repre senting God's plan for mankind as stated in John 3:16. Black is the next color, representing mankind's inherent sinful nature and separation from God, in Romans 3:23, and its conse quences, death, in Romans 6:23. Red is the next color, represent ing the blood of Jesus Christ, shed to pay for mankind's sin and thus bridge the gap between man and God in I Corinthians 15:3b-4. White represents man being "clean," having been for given of his sins through Jesus' sacrifice, in IJohn 1:12. The last page, green, represents growth, the ability to learn more about Christ and take on His charac teristics, in 2 Peter 3:18. Moore said those six verses are important "life verses" that " together explain the basics of the Christian faith, ones the chil dren can remember for their own edification and when they have occasion to communicate the message to others. "Most of the kids have learned the first three verses," Moore said of the boys. "We try to teach with repetition and with games." Another teaching tool has been teaching the children to learn the verses by using hand signals, like sign language, to put action into the words, she said, "so we're not just teaching the words, but the meaning." On the other side of the room, Grant asked the girls, "What is faith?" While she has been a Good News Club teacher for 25 years, her roots in Warm Springs and with its people run even deeper. ; "When I was 12 years old, I got on a bus at Sandy and got off at Madras, and it was 20 degrees below zero, and I tried to walk, but I ran because it was so cold, just to see the Native people," she said. She said she went to See's Store in Warm Springs and looked around and talked to Natives she met at the store. She got a ride back to Madras with a Native family from Warm Springs, and started walking around Madras. In 1946, she said, Madras had no more than 500 people and had two board sidewalks. And the Cascade Mountains, she said, had no air pollution. "When I got on the bus to go back to Sandy, I knew I wanted to live where you see the mountains and be close to the Indians," he said. Even though she said she didn't know it at the time, it was God who sent her east of the Cascades that day and led her to move to Madras. Grant led a 4-H outdoorsman class that taught students things like how to build a fire and camp in the woods before she got involved in Good News Club and Sunday school. She attends church at Simnasho Community Church. Grant said she was challenged to become a teacher three months after she had decided to receive Christ and went through the training to become a Good News Club teacher. "I was trying to learn how to be a class room teacher," she said. "I had always been an out doors teacher. "They told me, "We always need good new teachers.'" She taught in a Good News Club in Madras when she started in 1974, and then began teach ing in Warm Springs about 25 years ago, she said. Using Elizabeth Delarosa as a volunteer, Grant asked Delarosa to play the part of a young ruler in the story in Chap ter 4 of the Book of John in the New Testament about the ruler's brother who fell ill. After asking her servants, the ruler found Jesus on the street and asked him to heal the brother. In the story, the brother is healed because of the ruler's faith in asking Jesus for help, find ing that the brother was restored at the very moment he asked for Jesus' help. The object of the story is that "faith" is simply belief. The passage in the Bible is only nine verses long, which Grant said doesn't provide as much text to work with to cre ate a dramatic scene as others, but she said the point is involv ing the children in the lesson. "It's a known statistic among educators that if you're taught something only audibly, you re tain only 10 percent of it," she said. "If you're taught that les son audibly and visually, your retention is up to 50 percent, and if you're taught the lesson audibly, visually, and hands-on, you retain 80 percent of it. And if they can replay things, like with feedback, you can get an even higher retention rate. "Next week, I'll question them on what they learned and see if they retain it." The Biblical teaching is what's called a growth lesson, intended to help students who have al ready expressed belief in Christ to learn more about the faith. At the end of the lesson, the children receive a snack. When the hour has passed, the groups are led back to the school in time to pick up the group of kindergarten through second grade children, where the teach ers go through basically the same program as for the older children. Just as in any classroom, Good News Club teachers and leaders try to maintain a level of quiet and discipline in the classroom. "A lot of my back ground (as a teacher) has been irreplaceable as far as classroom management," Moore said. Currently, Moore said there are Good News Clubs at each elementary school in the 509-J School District and one will be started at Buff Elementary School, which opens next year. nowncd Native artist from Warm Springs, developed a rap port with the Oregon College of Art and Craft in Portland that allowed gifted art students the opportunity to study and hone their craft in a scholastic setting. Last summer, she said, the college selected young artists from Warm Springs to spend a week at the college and sit in on a number of offered classes. "We had a wonderful time working with Apolonia and ev eryone at Warm Springs," col lege president Bonnie Laing Malcomson said. "The people at museum have been really great." Santos graduated from the Oregon College of Art and Craft and has a bachelor's de gree in fine arts. Laing Malcomson said Santos and Courtney-Gold paid her a visit and the three talked about ways to get teenagers involved in art, to help offer them a creative outlet and help provide art edu cation at a time when school arts programs are being cut and when equipment, such as pot tery wheels and kilns, has be come too expensive to make readily available to students. The upshot was a program that sent six Warm Springs teens to the college for five days and six nights. "It worked and I think they got a lot out of the program," Laing-Malcomson said. One of the things counselors from the college tried to impress upon the students was the fact there are careers in the arts if the students avail themselves to them. "They can make a living by doing something they love," she said. "So part of the program is to help kids from Warm Springs see that there are a num ber of avenues after high school, something that they might just love." A program is in place this summer for 16 Native Ameri can students, eight from Warm Springs and eight from the Port land area, called Journeys in Creativity, Explorations in Na tive Art and Culture June 17 22. ;! The famous Portland adver tising firm of WiedenKennedy funded an arts camp including youths from the reservation at Camp Caldera near Sisters last summer. "Both the college and camp had excellent visual arts, theater, music," Santos said. "It's the first time youths had gone off the reservation to receive this kind of support." The tribes' youth is particu larly a focus of Santos' efforts. "Our idea is to work towards their future and give them early exposure so they might aspire to go to college," she said, "to just let them have a good posi tive experience. "I feel that they just need to be children." Santos said she sees a com mitment from the College of Art and Craft, in that its presi dent Bonnie Laing-Malcomson bought a house near the college to house Native American stu dents. "It's future as well as current," Santos said. "The college, by buying land and housing for our students in Warm Springs is a good faith plan." "We had the opportunity to purchase a house that abuts the campus, so we really restored one of them to become dorms for students during the school year," Laing-Malcomson said. The house will be used for resi dence programs in the sum mer. Laing-Malcomson said work ing with Native artists is appeal ing to her because art is already an inherent part of their cul ture. "In Native culture, there is already an understanding that art is central to their culture," she said. "It's a way to express who people really are, and that's a thing that's not so with non native culture." The public meetings in April will focus on how an artist's vil lage might have an impact on Warm Springs' youth. "In many ways, it depends on the youth to take the project into the future," she said. Santos also plans to initiate an art marketing feasibility study to explore both national and in ternational markets for tribal art, and to help tribal artists "explore their artistic capabilities and di versify their art portfolios to meet market needs." The study though has been put on hold, she said, until re sponse from the survey has been tabulated and the artist vil lage established. "It's not really necessary right now, but it will be once we ac complish first and second phases," she said. "We haven't gotten to that point." 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