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Two presentations celebrating Native American Heritage Month are planned Saturday, Nov. 9 in the Cannon Beach Library.
Both presentations, at 10:30 a.m. and 2 p.m., will be livestreamed; the link will be on the library’s website, cannonbeachlibrary.org.
The library is among the sites throughout Cannon Beach involved in The Gathering, which features free demonstrations, performances and discussions from Nov. 8 to 10. The Gathering is sponsored by the Tolovana Arts Colony.
At 10:30 a.m. Nov. 9, the library will host Drew Viles, PhD, of the Siletz Nation, and Rachel Cushman, secretary/treasurer of the Chinook Nation. They will discuss the traditional use of fire to steward natural resources in a presentation titled, “Natives Work: Cultural Fire and Indigenous Naming on the Pacific Coast.”
Viles is a traditional basket weaver and storyteller who focuses on gay-yu, Siletz cradle baskets; weaving cedar bark hats; and telling the traditional stories of the Siletz people. A literature and communications instructor at Lane Community College, Viles learned from elders how to weave traditional baskets and carve canoe paddles as well as how to gather and process natural materials.Cushman is a direct descendant of Clatsop Chief Wasilta (Washington), a primary negotiator and signer of the 1851 Tansy Point treaties. She is a PhD student at the University of Oregon, where she is a member of the inaugural cohort in the Indigenous, race, and ethnic studies program.
At 2 p.m., the library will host author Cliff Taylor, an enrolled member of the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska. He will discuss his book, The Memory of Souls, a memoir of the sun dance and his walk/life with the little people who became his spirit guides.“It is the story of Cliff Taylor stumbling into his people’s ways and then finding community and home, of him shedding the bindings of trauma and getting his soul back; it is the story of a young Ponca walking with the little people on a journey of cultural recovery/regeneration and remembrance,” according to his website.
His essays and poems have been published both online with lastrealindians.com, where he is a regular contributor, and in print with The Yellow Medicine Review, Jelly Bucket, Oakwood Magazine, and Hipfish Monthly.
His most recent book, Notes of An Indigenous Futurist, released in September, is a collection of stories “unfiltered, beadwork-and-Bigfoot saturated, an ecstatic remembering of a fortysomething Ponca’s life. Along the meandering trails tightly woven by his dream-like stories, Taylor takes readers to intimate, sometimes extraordinary, arenas of being a Ponca,” according to the book’s cover description. Originally from Nebraska, Taylor lives on the Oregon coast.
Taylor’s visit is sponsored by the library’s NW Authors Series Committee, which hosts authors from September through May.
