Four days of events are planned to commemorate Indigenous Peoples Day. Urban Native Collective in Northside is hosting its annual Indigenous Peoples Day Convergence Oct. 10-13.
"It's really quite important for people to come out and view the artwork, understand contemporary Native identity as it juxtaposes with what they have historically learned or historically (understood) of Native people, and just really sort of sit with and understand and broaden their knowledge about what the Native experience is, especially the contemporary Native experience," says Briana Mazzolini-Blanchard, executive director of Urban Native Collective.
Events include contemporary Indigenous artwork exhibits, food, dance presentations, a speaker series, a community feast, and new this year, traditional CHamoru weaving workshops led by an artist from Guam's CHamoru community.
Mazzolini-Blanchard says people often are surprised when she tells them how many Native peoples live in the area — around 98,000 people as of her 2024 estimate.
"It's really an opportunity for non-Natives to grasp the concept of just how many Native people are here in our region; how alive our culture is, and that it's living and breathing and moving and changing," she explains. "It isn't something on a museum wall in a history museum, but a very real living experience, living identity."
The four-day celebration concludes Monday with a community potluck feast in Hoffner Park, which will include a performance by the Copper Face United Powwow Troupe.
The group, which was founded in 2021, will perform throughout the weekend at multiple events.
Copper Face United is described as a "Traditional Southern Style Singing and Drumming troupe" with members hailing from North Carolina and Oklahoma, representing a handful of nations, including Apache, Shinnacock, Lumbee, Otoe, Sac and Fox, and Nanticoke.
A pair of art exhibits debut Oct. 10 at the Contemporary Arts Center and the 21c Museum Hotel. They're titled Ancestral Visions, Future Dreams. The artwork is created by eight adults and six young people.
"We've been doing this contemporary exhibition for years, and we also will bring artists into town, and they will be speaking at a speaker series, which will be on Saturday morning at the Aronoff (in) the Jarson-Kaplan Theater," says Mazzolini-Blanchard.
The exhibits are curated by Leonard D. Harmon, a visual artist, traditional dancer, and filmmaker from the Lenape and Nanticoke nations.
“Our ancestors carried visions for us and for the future they imagined. Ancestral Visions, Future Dreams asks what that future actually looks like today," he says. "This year’s Convergence brings elder artists whose work carries deep knowledge together with younger artists whose responses point to the future. I wanted the exhibition to move beyond painting, to include textiles, basketry, and natural materials, because ancestral visions live through many forms of creation and continue to guide the art we make now.”
The Urban Native Collective aims to preserve and represent the culture and heritage of Native Americans, as well as the broad range of Indigenous communities in the Tri-State. That includes First Nations from Canada, Alaska and Pacific islanders, and the many Indigenous descendants from Mexico and Central and South America.
"We are an incredibly inter-tribal community," she explains. "We carry our traditions, and we hold really strong to those. Through our cultural programming at the Urban Native Collective, we are able to offer ... ways for our urban Native community to connect to their traditions, but we all bring different traditions to the table. We, as Native people, are not a monolith."
The city of Cincinnati officially began recognizing the second Monday in October as Indigenous Peoples Day in 2018. The region occupies the traditional homelands of the Shawnee and Myaamia nations. Hamilton County, which doesn't formally recognize a paid holiday on the second Monday in October, passed a resolution in 2021 honoring Indigenous Peoples Day.
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