INTERNATIONALLY ACCLAIMED POET

JOY HARJO

Performing with Poetic Justice
Featuring Eddie Chung, Jimmie Funai, and Johnny Sandoval

Thursday, October 3, 2002, 7:00PM
Icon, 260 California Ave., Palo Alto

The artist will also appear at the symposium

INTERSECTIONS IN NATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES

Friday, October 4, 2002, 10:00am - 4:00pm
Terrace Room, English Department
Building 460, Room 426
Stanford University

10:00 Poetics and Performance
12:00 Lunch and informal conversation with artists and academics
1:30 "We Must Call a Meeting": Intersections of Community, Academia, Race, Gender, and the Humanities

Participants
Cherrie Moraga, playwright, poet, and academic, Stanford Univeristy
Kathy Wallace, American Indian Basketweaver, Educator, and Community Activist
Renya Ramirez, Professor of Anthropology/American Indian Studies at UC Santa Cruz
Victoria Bomberry, American Indian Studies at UC Davis
Harry Elam, Drama and African-American Performance at Stanford University
Joy Harjo, Poet and Professor of American Indian Studies at UCLA
Jimmie Funai, Hawaiian Guitarist
Johnny Sandoval, drums and percussion
Eddie Chung, bass, ukulele, voice, and Polynesian music educator

For more information, contact Mishuana Goeman or Douglas Kerr

Sponsored by Program in Modern Thought and Literature, American Indian, Alaskan Native, and Native Hawaiian Program, Women's Center, Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Mantis: A Journal in Poetry, Translation and Criticism, Workshop on Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Creative Writing Program, Chicano/a Studies, Professor Andrea Lunsford, English Department, Graduate Student Council, Stanford Native American Graduate Students, Stanford Writing Center, and Stanford Humanities Center.

Participant Bios

Victoria Bomberry is an enrolled member of the Muscogee Nation. She received her Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University in 2001. Currently, she is a UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Native American Studies Department at UC Davis. Her research topic is "Indigenous Radio: The Construction of the Ideal Woman in Bolivia" which examines radio novels produced by the Aymara organization Taller Historia Oral Andina (Andean Oral History Workshop) for a predominately women's audience.

Eddie Chung's been entertaining in Waikiki at major hotels for the past thirty years. He performs both island and contemporary musics, and some jazz. He traveled and performed extensively for Hawaiian Airlines throughout the U.S. and also did some promotional performing for United Airlines. Besides music Eddie is a champion outrigger canoe paddler. He has paddled all over the world, including the outrigger canoe sprint championships in Townsville, Austrailia in 2002, and has crossed the Moloka'i channel between O'ahu and Moloka'i (a distance of 41 miles) several times in champion crews. He has been on the frontlines teaching polynesian music at Roosevelt High School for the past thirty years. Currently, he performs at the Kahala Mandarin Hotel on weekends.

Harry J. Elam, Jr is the Robert and Ruth Halperin University Fellow for Undergraduate Education, Professor of Drama, Director of Graduate Studies in Drama, Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts and Director of the Committee on Black Performing Arts at Stanford University. He is author of Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka (University of Michigan Press), The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (forthcoming University of Michigan Press), coeditor of African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader (Oxford University Press) and co-editor of Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Drama (Penguin Press), The Fire This Time: African American Plays for the New Millennium (forthcoming TCG Press) and Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Black Performance and Popular Culture(forthcoming University of Michigan Press). His articles have appeared in American Drama, Modern Drama ,Theatre Journal, Text and Performance Quarterly as well as several critical anthologies. He is the incoming coeditor of Theatre Journal and on the editorial board of Modern Drama and Comparative Drama. He has directed both professionally and at academic institutions for over fifteen years. Next February he will direct Natural Man by Theodore Ward on campus

Celia Herrera Rodriguez (Tepehuan - Xicana) is a painter and performance artist currently teaching at UC Berkeley in the Chicano Studies program. Her work has appeared in many Bay Area exhibits as well as is in international exhibits. Her work is particularly displayed in exhibits centering on the themes of gender, sexuality, and women of color.Jimmy Funai has been a professional musican for over 25 years. He has performed with Bobby Vinton, Henry Kapono, Herbie Mann, Diahann Carroll, Gabe Baltazar and the Fifth Dimension, among many others. He may be Hawaii's most recorded guitarist. He's recorded with: Ohta San, Audy Kimura, Mackey Feary, Melveen Leed, Billy Kaui, the Surfers, Coutry Comfort, Iva Kinimaka and many, many more. He's taught guitar for over twenty years and has a number of former students who are professional guitarists.

Joy Harjo's poetry is renowned for it lyrical quality and rich metaphors. While her metaphors and play with language, ring of Native American's experience in the past and present day, her work expands to address the human condition. Her ability to deal with violence and brutality of being Native American, a woman of color, and a woman living in an increasingly exploitive economic world, speaks to many people globally. Her use of myth, politics, performance, and poetry to address and transform the human condition from fear, hatred, and despair to love, compassion, and healing is an exceptional example of the importance and poignancy of arts and literature. With an M.F.A. in creative writing from the university of Iowa, Harjo is currently teaching at U.C.L.A. She has held faculty positions in many prestigious universities while producing eight celebrated books of poetry. She has been a board member of several institutes that promote the arts and diversity, such as the Public Broadcasting Consortium and the NEA policy panel for literature, as well as starting community organizations like ATLA, which received an Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund Writer's Award. Other awards that Joy Harjo has received include: The Oklahoma Book Arts Award, The Delmore Schwartz Memorial fund Award, Joesphine Miles Poetry Award, Mountains and Plains Bookseller Award, and William Carlos Williams Award, as well as two fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts.

Cherríe Moraga is a poet, playwright and essayist, and the co-editor of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. She is the author of numerous plays including "Shadow of a Man" and "Watsonville: Some Place Not Here," (both won the Fund for New American Plays Award in 1991 and 1995, respectively) and "Heroes and Saints," which earned the Pen West Award for Drama in 1992. Her plays have been anthologized in numerous collections and are also published in a three-volume series of collected works published by West End Press of Albuquerque, New Mexico, including her most recent play, The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea. Her collected non-fiction writings include: The Last Generation (South End Press); a memoir, Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood (Firebrand Books); and, a new expanded edition of the now classic, Loving in the War Years, republished by South End Press in 2000. Ms. Moraga is also a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts' Theatre Playwrights' Fellowship and is the Artist-in-Residence in the Departments of Drama and Spanish & Portuguese at Stanford University.

Renya Ramirez is a member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, and is an assistant professor at UC Santa Cruz in American Studies. She teaches Native American Studies and has interests in gender, cultural citizenship, Native American women, anthropology, and oral history. She has published in Frontiers: the Journal of Women's Studies, American Indian Research and Culture Journal, and has a chapter in the book, "American Indians and the Urban Experience." She is also working on a manuscript entitled, "Borderlines" and Belonging: Native American Activists Rethink Culture, Community and Citizenship in San Jose, California.

Johnny Sandoval has been a Poetic Justice band member since 1998. He started out in Phoenix, Arizona and then went on to graduate from the Musician's Institute in Hollywood, California. He has toured the U.S. and internationally in Europe, Asia and the Bahamas with Sister Sledge, Arturo Sandoval, Greg Adams, and The Miracles (to name a few). He is currently doing studio work and performing extensively in both the LA and Phoenix areas.

Kathy Wallace (Karuk, Yurok, and a member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe) is an American Indian basket weaver, educator, and community activist whose work has received international recognition. She was born in 1947 in San Luis Obispo, California when her father was finishing college. He was the first from the Hoopa Tribe to graduate from a University. For 20 years she has taught various workshops on Northern California Native Culture and Basketry to other tribal members, children, adults, docents, boy scouts, organizations, museums and teachers throughout the state of California. Her workshops on Northern California Native Culture and Basketry have brought her to various universities and colleges as a guest lecture and she has given testimony for the United Nations on the detrimental use of pesticides in forests, and how it affects Native American basket weavers and gatherers. She is an Instructor of Basketry in the Fine Arts department of D. Q. University where she continues to present her work on basket weaving, environment, culture and community. Though she has been weaving for over 20 years and her work has been exhibited internationally, she still considers herself a student.

Links

Joy Harjo website at Storytellers: Native American Authors Online