Hi, I'm Anne Eilers, Acting Chairman for the National Endowment for the Arts. Thank you for joining us as we travel across the country to meet our 2020 NEA National Heritage Fellows. These fellows have earned our nation's highest honor for folk and traditional arts. Over the past 12 months, our nation has faced extraordinary challenges. But the arts provide a unique opportunity to celebrate life, experience joy, and are a powerful antidote against bigotry, hate, and division. This is especially true for the folk and traditional arts. The art forms our fellows represent are invitations into diverse communities and perspectives. The art allows us to celebrate traditions, hear stories, and learn about values, customs, and histories that might be different from our own. In the process, we learn there are many versions of American life, and each one extraordinary and each one critical to the strength and vibrancy of our nation. Thank you. Enjoy the show. Every year since 1982, the National Endowment for the Arts presents the nation's highest honor for the folk and traditional arts. A small group of individuals working to uphold their cultural traditions. Together, they tell us the story of who we are and what we aspire to. My name is Queen Noor. I'm a storyteller, past president of the National Association of Black Storytellers, and a folklorist based at the Perkins Center for the Arts in Morristown, New Jersey. And I am filled with exquisite joy to introduce to you our nation's foremost traditional artists, the 2020 NEA National Heritage Fellows. Wayne Meneghizik-Valyan in Lac du Flambeau, Wisconsin. John Morris in Ivydale, West Virginia. Onik Dikshun in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Hugo Morales in Fresno, California. Suni Paz in Henderson, Nevada. Zachariah and Naomi Drouffe in Castro Valley, California. Karen Ann Hoffman in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. Los Matachines in Laredo, Texas. And William Bell in the ATL. And now, it is my honor to take you on a journey to visit with each of them. Our first fellow has lived on L'Occitane Flambeau Reservation his entire life. The birchbark canoe. Nobody knows how long it's been around in our culture. Because it goes back to our creation stories. The front is called Negan Jiman, which means the future. And the stern is Ishquayong Jiman, which means the past. Ripples of water, that's the past. I always try to paddle into the future because in my life I've seen change. I came from Chief Sharpenstone, a chief that settled at the Flambeau. My native name is Minogeek, Good Sky. At one time, every family had knowledge how to build a birch bark canoe. They were as common as people driving their cars today. After 1900, the knowledge really started to deplete quickly. In the 20s, we only had maybe four canoe builders here in a place where we have all these lakes. By 1950, we had one, and he passed away in the 60s. There was a lot of cultural loss in our community. I was about 14 years old and I got exposed at that time by a canoe builder, a Redcliffe elder. Him and other people planted the seed in my head. Lacta Flamow doesn't have a canoe builder. Canoe building is the apex of Anishinaabe crafts. There are pressures and tolerances. There are curves and slopes in the birch bark canoe that aren't on the protractor. They can only be achieved by feel and sight. When I first started, I was teased by my friends. They went as far as calling me little Jummer boy and Indian chief and all kinds of stuff. To the point where I almost gave up on it. But my elders, they said, keep going. Don't give up. All of a sudden, I produced the birch bark canoe. It was very crude, but it floated. And I was proud of it. It always makes this look easier than what it really is. The knowledge you have to obtain to be a good builder, that takes a long time. In my early life, about every four years or something, I'd build one just to keep doing it, you know, because I enjoyed it. But about 18 years ago, a disease started to consume the birch trees. the birch trees started dying in our reserve. My elder, I said, look, we're losing our birch trees. He looked at me and he said, he said, no, we're not losing our birch trees. Our birch trees are losing us. That's when I started really concentrating on making sure canoe culture doesn't die. I have all these apprentices that want to be canoe builders now. In my life, I produced one canoe builder. My apprentice, Lawrence Mann, is a canoe builder. He has the knowledge. So if anything I did in my life, I'm the most proud of that. When I'm building canoes, I feel at peace. Wayne helped me find my purpose. Our culture is living. It has a spirit. It's up to us to keep that spirit alive. The new building is a vehicle to help our people maintain which is the good path of life. move forward with the knowledge that's how the Anishinaabe persevered through the toughest times, through our teachings it's a feeling of something that's way greater than myself I'm just a small part of it but I'm blessed to be part of it For decades, Clay County, West Virginia's musical traditions have had a devoted advocate and its lifetime resident, fiddle and banjo player, John Marlin. It's history. It's just as important as a history book. If somebody went through a life struggle or some happiness, the result was a penalty. I grew up on the farm that we're on now outside of Ivydale, West Virginia. Music has been a part of my life ever since I can remember. My brother and I had a lot of music around, a lot of singing. My dad liked the old country, Jimmie Rogers singing. My mother could play the guitar, and Mother Mabel Carter was passionate. In the spring of 65, my brother and I, we done a show over at Normantown High School. I was a little bit of a kid, but I was a little bit of a kid. as the Morris brothers. And that's where we started. Just country boys up, played a little bit of music. My brother got drafted in 68, started a bit or more. We had him a big go-away party. All kinds of old-time music people showed up. We decided we'd just try to have a regular thing out there. We wanted to have old people come play music and the young people come join in with them. My dad said one time, he counted license plates from 35 states out here, from 69 to 73. There was people coming and playing. There was nothing but old-time music. It's a story behind every tomb. It's a moral tradition. The next generation, they come around, says something for the durability of old time. It has the ability to pull you in. Oh, I didn't get it two times. Don't worry about it. I learned about John at my high school when they showed a video about old time music. I think it's amazing to have a living legend living in our county that I can go to and I can learn from. It makes me feel happy to listen to this stuff. It probably makes other people happy too, they just might not have heard it yet. Music, it fills a gap in your life. Old fiddle players, they were giving people. Once somebody showed some manners, they were more than happy just to pour it out to you. There are lessons that you learn about life and about how to treat people and all that goes with you. I just carried the bucket. They put the water in it. Onik Dinkjan was 75 years old the first time he visited Armenia. Nonetheless, he shaped his life around his Armenian identity, performing in the endangered Diyarbakir dialect. This might sound biased, but there really has been nobody like him in the Armenian-American community. My father cannot be any more recognized. Everybody knows Onnik. I've been called the Frank Sinatra of the Armenians, yes. I was born south of Paris. My father died when I was not quite one years old, and my mother died when I was about five and a half or so. I'm an orphan. Armenians today are scattered all over the world. Why there are so many Armenians in diaspora is simply because they were massacred. My parents, they were from Dikranagir. Today it's called Diyarbakir in Turkey. When the genocide started, they escaped. Each one of the Armenians has some story as to how did they escape. My godparents, Nushan and Ogida, adopted us. Since all of our Armenian friends were from Diyarbakir, whenever we had company, they would sing some of the songs that they grew up with, and they all had that very dialect from our village. Music became part of that that stayed in my mind. I'm one of the last ones that speaks in that very dialect. There aren't that many left. Let's see if you recognize where this one is from. You're playing Oud. And I'm playing Oud. And you're playing the Dumbbell. That's right. Oh my. Is that one right? No wonder it sounds good. After that many years, look at this. Sometimes an instrument either fades and what have you, but this one is still alive. It sings. He has inspired, at this point, four generations of young Armenian musicians. He was and remains my foundation in music. Living in France, we used to go to church every Sunday. The Armenian liturgy, the choir, it's like going to the opera. Each one of them were professional, all getting paid. The choir master was like a staunch, you could not sing off key, you could not miss a beat. I would sneak in on the side and just listen. Before we left for America, my father asked the choir master, will it be okay for my son, meaning me, to have a little solo? I'm 91 and a half years old. I remember that very day when he pointed to me at that solo part. And my whole system, my whole heart, my whole history thing, was a nice. And when it was over, he did like this. Once I came to America, they were all, except, please come, join the choir. You don't have to be professional. And that's how it started. You don't plan this thing, it just grows on you. And there you are looking over the city. Yeah. There was no reason, there was no reason for people to emigrate if there was no genocide. Unfortunately, the whole thing is starting all over again between Armenia and Azerbaijan now. Same old story. There is no future of the Dikshana Gertsi dialect. The dialect will die like every other dialect, simply because of the times. However, as the keeper of the Diyarbakir dialect, I am very happy and proud to physically perform in that very dialect. Every concert, every function, everything was a... Our next honoree, Hugo Morales, is the 2020 Best Lomax Hawes Awardee, which recognizes an individual who has made major contributions to the excellence, vitality, and public appreciation of the folk and traditional arts. This is Radio Bilingue, a community radio for the San Joaquin Valley. We are here for the first time broadcasting. Today we are playing music from many regions of Mexico and parts of Latin America, attempting to identify the roots of the Mexican and Chicano people here in the valley. We began with one radio station. We didn't have a particular strategic plan or anything like that, or a business plan. We just did it. I was born in Cuyotepehe, Oaxaca, a very small village in the Mishtecabaja. I'm a Mishteko. When I was nine years old, we came to the United States. And we came to live in a prune farm of 100 acres. And they had a small labor camp. And that's where I grew up. When I was 12, I had tuberculosis. I was put in a sanitarium, locked up in a room. That was very, very different because I had never left my family before. But very instructional in that I was able to read a lot. There was nothing else to do. I discovered about how different my world was compared to the mainstream in the lack of information about not just Mexicans, but poor people in general. I read about Yale and Ivy League schools, so I said, oh, that's where I want to go. I was the only Mexican-American in my class at Harvard College. Everybody there is very bright, but they were ignorant on a lot of different things, like poverty. Every summer, all through Harvard College and Harvard Law School, I worked in the fields. At Harvard, that's where my first radio production began. I chose to do a show for the Latino community. For the essential workers, radio is the vehicle to reach and capture their voices. Music can really touch people's souls and hearts and emotions, and people will tune in because of the music. I decided my goal was to build a radio service for farm workers. This is KSJV Fresno. KSJV here in Fresno, Radio Bilingue. We could choose any day to go on the air, and we chose July 4th. We wanted to impress the mainstream and ourselves that we were the guides of our own destiny. Rata Bilingue is Chicano radio, it's Tejano radio, it's Mariachi radio. genres of music that we as Latino get attached to. We tune in because we identify with it. But also the value of radio bilingue is just reliable news to be a trusted messenger. Now we have 24 radio stations. That's a lot of stations. We're one of the largest public radio networks in the United States. So wherever there's Latinos, we will get calls. Sometimes I tune in and when I hear that music and I say, wow, what? I have a role in this? I met Hugo when I started here as a volunteer and I've been a part of it since 1995. His legacy will be what he built. He could have gone somewhere else, but he decided to stay here in the Central Valley to empower the CERB community. the farm workers. From the beginning, we would train young people, not only celebrating traditional cultures, but also integrating our youth. It's a reflection of our traditions, but also a reflection of our aspirations. That's the future of Rati Bilingue. Frequently heard on Radio Bilingue is our next fellow, Suni Paz. Hugo Morales describes her as an original thought. She represents independence and love, the dreams and thoughts of millions of Latinos and Latinas. This is my charanguito. It's so old. They had the ears, they kept the ears of the little armadillo. They come from the Quechua culture, where my name comes from. I was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, since I was a little one. We were always, always listening to music. First, I was totally in love with opera and the bel canto. And then... All of a sudden, I heard Atahualpa Yupanqui folklore. When I heard Atahualpa Yupanqui, my life changed like a tortilla. Atahualpa opened me to people and situations. I discovered all the world there. Farm workers, the children that cross the Andes, country people. I didn't know anything about that world. I changed my name to Sunni Paz. And it means lasting peace. I always have a message, a purpose, always. In New York, I joined the farm workers. I opened every time Cesar Chavez came to New York with songs about the struggle. The name they gave them, it was Nueva Cancion because it had a message. I don't call them Nueva Cancion. I call them songs of conscience. There is an urgency I find when I write a song, and it has to come out. Every feeling of my heart can be expressed through a song. Before I began writing for adults, I wrote for children, and I taught for many years. That's how I learned that you can teach anything in your life with songs. It's so cute. So cute. When I was singing for the school, I had a kid that never, never spoke, who one day told me, I wrote a song. He never spoke, you know. I thought that I was invisible for him. He never talked with anybody either. And he tells me, I wrote a song. My life is I wrote about everything I lived through and I saw my brothers and sisters live through. Music is vital because it brings whatever message you have to everyone. I just said what I wanted to say. When I received this award, I was flabbergasted. I am very, very grateful to the traditions that arrived to me. Life without music is to me is no life. No life at all. Umbutu is a key Swahili word that means I am because we are. This is a guiding principle of our next duo, Zachariah and Naomi Ju. When you dance, the audience must see the rhythm in your body. They must see the rhythm. The drummer's role is to make the dancer absorb what they hear. Keep the rhythm going. If you can walk, you can dance. If you can talk, you can sing. That's it. We are all African people within the diaspora. Dance in African culture is a representation of the people in a particular region. We bring the different cultures together. I'm from Senegal. I've been in the United States since 1965. I came here and I named my company Jamono Kura, which means those who bring the message. We are messengers. I grew up in Monrovia, Liberia. I came to the United States for school. In San Diego, California, I was performing with another company. The director of the company said, oh, I have the right person who can come and do choreography for us. And he invited Zach. He knew right away that that was the girl for me. And of course, I was like, oh, you know, no. I teach a class and with that class, both of us become one. In our work, we have always been a team. We use our thoughts, what she's thinking and what I'm thinking, and then we work together. It's very important. Before Jamina Okoro was formed, as far as African dance, it really wasn't in the Bay Area. They were on the East Coast, like New York. It wasn't that known. We made it known. They are my mother and father, but they've taking on all these children. So even me and my brothers and my sisters, we grew up with everyone calling them Mama and Papa. I have been dancing with Mama Naomi since high school, almost 30 years. To know traditional dance from Mama Naomi and Papa Zach is really a foundation that will never go away. It's part of who I am ancestrally, and it's my connection. Dance introduces me to and reminds me of myself. Today, everywhere you go throughout the United States, people are doing African dance. It makes me feel very joyful. At some point, if a tradition to live, you must pass it on. you can't separate yourself from your tradition. Each new generation is a revolt against the preceding one. The tradition is already there. You just have to keep on building it. Every time, whether we go small, whether we go big, I pull libation for the ancestors. We walk in the footsteps of giants. We never forget the ancestors. African tradition is not just about the small narrow, and it's not just about a dance company. We are thinking about the community. And when we come together, we make magic happen. When most think of Native beading in America, they think of flat, intricate designs. But Holden Ashoni's raised beadwork is uniquely sculptural. Our next fellow, Karen Ann Hoffman, has been working since the 90s in this tradition. Beading is like breathing. It's like being a musician or any other kind of a painter. It's not something you do, it's who you are. Connects me with the past and it propels me into the future. All with a little bit of thread, the steel needle and chunk of glass. I find the magic in time travel happens at the beading table. My family's history in Wisconsin dates back to that 1820 removal. We came during the second wave of Oneida migration. We're part of the Haudenosaunee, part of the Six Nations. Haudenosaunee, we exist in the past, the present, and the future, and so does our art. I did not choose beadwork, beadwork chose me. My early days centered around attending workshops given by Samuel Thomas and his mom, Lorna Hill. Lorna explained to me that the work I was getting involved in was not going to stand for just me. It was going to stand for all the beaters who ever were and all the beaters yet to come. A hallmark of Iroquois or Haudenosaunee raised beadwork is that it is just that, raised. We pile our beads on top of the substrate so that it's dimensional, so that it's embossed, so that it rises above the surface. This is Flame Urn. Flamin'represents the council fire that was lit at the beginning of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Each of the five sides is unique, just as each of the five nations are independent and sovereign. I'm taking old forms, old shapes, old designs, richly and deeply understanding their connection to our heritage and our culture, but moving them, pushing them, asking them to do more than they've ever done before. I have spent my adult life in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. The piece that I'm working on now is meant to provide rest to those Indians buried and abandoned in a mass native grave on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Stevensburg. This will become the Menasembe, the memorial piece that's intended to honor the ancestors beneath our feet. so that when this otter transforms from his current state, his head will come over as a flap, and the inside of his tail will be beaded and decorated with these ornaments. Those Indians died from a scarlet fever outbreak in the early 1860s. because of the lines of demarcation that happened during an epidemic, because of how epidemics differently impact people of color and people of low income. Those choruses resonate still today. Our job is to take difficult and complex situations and meld them and resolve them into a thing of meaning. My grandparents met at Indian government school. They were assimilated. They lost all of their traditions and their cultures, their language, anything that had to do with being Native. When I came to Karen Ann's table, kitchen table, and learned the raised beadwork, it made me feel connected. And it made me feel like, here's where I belong. Every really good piece of raised beadwork that I've ever seen is marked with an encirclement of beads that surrounds the central design. Each one of those beads stands for a particular Iroquois person. But like that ring of beads, if you pluck out any one bead, the entire design is negatively impacted. where an integral part of everything that has happened is happening and will happen. Raise Beadwork matters in the world today because we matter in the world today. Our next honoree is not one individual, but a group. Los Matachines de la Santa Cruz de la Ladriera is a sacred dance troupe in Laredo, Texas, whose members are descendants of the original mining families that started the group over 100 years ago. How can you measure faith? There's no way to measure faith. Make sure that you dance really good. In the Matachines, they dance, something to offer back for all the blessings we had for the whole year. My brothers, Javier, Reynaldo, and myself have been keeping this tradition alive because we learned from very good people, my father and my uncle Pedro. The Matachines is like a church built to a church. There are other groups of Matachines here in Laredo, but our group has roots. Los Matachines de la Santa Cruz originated in the state of San Luis Potosi, Mexico. They started migrating to the United States in 1930. They landed in Dolores, Texas. The families that are now are descendants from the ones that started in Dolores, Texas. It's tradition, it's part of our heritage. We can have gatherings of 200 people. We already celebrate our 75th year. It's exciting and the people love it. The Matacheras de la Gallera perform twice a year. One of them is May 3rd, Dia de la Santa Cruz, and December 12th, which is for Virgen de Guadalupe. Some of the parts for the fiesta involve music, art, and dance. People here love the fiesta. They love the tradition. The people here contribute with donations, cooking the food, setting up tables. All the relatives, cousins, and they show up from out of town, some from out of state. A lot of it's family and friends. My husband, José, was in charge of helping the Matachines bring their Nahuillas. He put them on the Matachines because he wanted them to be well presented when they went to the procession to the church. We take pride in our Nahuilla. We write our name on it. Some people put a cross. Some people put a Virgen de Guadalupe. So, in Ahuia, it's like a representation of yourself, and everybody's different. My dad used to dance matachines when he was young, and he became the captain and the leader until he had a heart attack. He couldn't dance anymore. My brother said, why don't we be the capitanes? Dad did it for so long. We need to be the capitanes. We need to lead. When I dance, it's like I'm communicating with God. I'm thinking all the things, you know, all the years when I first started. God willing, you know, I'll stay a member till the day I pass on like my dad. It's not about entertaining people. It's about dedicating that day, the Holy Cross. Why the dance? It's different for everybody. For me, it would be faith. I dedicate it to my family. What I do as a Matachi, it's important. When somebody dies, somebody is going to pick up that torch. When somebody is unable to dance, they're going to find a little niche that they're going to fit in into this big organization of Matachins. Our last stop is with William Bell, an architect of the Memphis sound. His songs have been performed by Albert King, Otis Redding, The Birds, Cream, and so many others. I can't imagine life without arts. You have to have something that will give you that strength to pick yourself up. That's what keeps us going. That's what keeps us alive. My desire to go into music was growing up in church. Sang in church, there was the church choir. And in Memphis we heard everything on the radio from country to gospel to jazz to blues and rhythm and blues. I was a daydreamer. I just submerged myself into listening to music. Stax Records gave all of us neighborhood kids an opportunity. We were integrated when segregation was rampant in Memphis. A little bit of church, a little bit of blues, a little bit of country. It just created that unreal energy there at Stax. I've had music covered by artists in every genre of music, from country to rock to pop to hip-hop. My songs, they are about both good times and bad times. I like doing ballads because I'm more or less a serious-minded person. People remember ballads. People get married because of ballads. People fall out of love because of a ballad. They fall in love. I will have a song in my head for sometimes months before I really sit down to a piano or something and try to work up the melodic line for it. It's kind of a release valve for me when I sit down to write. Because I got to tell him, okay, these are the chords. If you listen to any William Bell song, all of his songs stem from his life. It's gonna be alright. Gonna be alright? It works today, it's going to work tomorrow. It has just got that substance to it. Impromptu song. You have an obligation as an artist to give 110%. We wouldn't be the artists without the people that work behind us. And I never, one, forget that. At 77 years of age, I won my first Grammy. I was the first single male act signed to Stax, gave them their first record back in the day. And then to come along now and re-sign with them, and to win a Grammy for them, it was just like going full circle. I love working with younger kids, teaching them the ropes, just like different people at Stax took us under their wings. I do it with the Stacks kids in Memphis to this day. We try to give all of the aspects of it so that they will know that there is no such thing as the quote-unquote overnight success. You have to work hard at it. From generation to generation, it's the same story. Times change, but the outlook on life remains the same. You don't miss your ride. You will run right. Yeah. Wow! We have come to the end of our spectacular journey. Thank you for joining us. And now, come on, William Bell. Take us home. La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. Yeah. I was born in Memphis in a different world. Now the time has come and gone. I was just a little boy when I heard them singing, change is gonna come. So, and let me know there's a promise of a brand new day. Then I left my home, started out on my own. And this is where I live. This is where I live. This is where I live. All my love, all my time, all my money, every dime. This is where I live. One of the things that makes the National Heritage Fellowships different is that these are not applications, these are nominations. Your role in the place where you live and practice your art has been noticed by your neighbors, the people that you have taught and inspired. Essentially, your role in the building of a national fabric. Where is the ghost? Hell no! I wrote me a song and it took me all around the world. Now I spend all my time playing music, making rhymes, and this is where I live. This is where I live. This is where I give all my soul, all my time, all I believe in is God. You'll be where I am. I believe in you. i've been around the world now i'm heading home you'll be waiting when i walk in got a one-way ticket on the red-eye express man it's good to be home again this is where i need you this is where i need you This is where I live. All hell is blue, all the ice cold, all the money that I take is in my hand. This is where I live. This is where I live. This is where I live. This is where I live. All my jobs, all my stuff, all the money that I take is in my hand. This is where I live.