For Stephanie Van Hoose, November 17 and 18 will be a dream realized.
“You're going to be washed in gratitude, bathed in the community,” she said.
That’s because REACH Indigenous Advocacy will hold its second annual REACH Fest at the Dayton Metro Library this Friday and Saturday.
REACH Fest is a Native American heritage festival featuring performers, vendors and speakers from over ten tribal nations, traveling from as far as Washington and New Mexico to share their heritage with Daytonians through dances, classes, art and food.
One activity featured at the festival includes a crochet table, in which children will learn how to crochet medallions using ribbon colors they choose to represent their family, similar to how some Native Americans wear medallions with the cardinal colors of their tribe.
With volunteers from Wright State’s Indigenous American Culture Student Association, the whole festival will be Indigenous-led and run.
REACH is an abbreviation for Representation/Reconciliation, Education/Equity, Advocacy/Allyship, Ceremony/Community, Healing/Health. Launched last year during the city’s inaugural Indigenous Peoples’ Day, the organization has already established itself in the Dayton community.
Van Hoose, a member of the Indigenous Mohawk, MBQ, T-MT is the founder. She’s been working in Indigenous advocacy in the Dayton area for over a decade.
REACH Fest will also bring an entire roster of community partners and local agencies such as Dayton Public Health, according to Van Hoose. She said this made putting this event on here especially important.
“Cultural education to the community is the tip of the iceberg,” Van Hoose said. “The agency work we do across Dayton and the Metro region is just as important as those cultural performances because those agencies, it's about who's across the table from you, if everybody in the community is represented.”
Lexie Shishoff, marketing manager for REACH and family friend of Van Hoose helped assemble this year’s line-up. She said everything was arranged intentionally, from the speech that will be given on Indigenous resilience, to the acknowledgements towards the guests at the end of each day.
The dances, too, will come with accompanying speeches.
“There's a lot of history and tradition that is carried with the dancers and throughout the dances. So to share that, we want people to learn about what they're doing, don't just watch them,” she said.
Van Hoose said this year’s theme is health. Premier Health will be offering health screenings at the event. Van Hoose also said she’s preparing six medicine tables with processed cedar branches, leaves and rings to distribute during the festival.
But cedar isn’t the only medicine that will be shared this weekend.
“Our ceremony is our songs," Van Hoose explained. "When you hear the drum, that's medicine. When you see the dancers, that's their medicine. When you hear the singing, that's medicine. That's medicine for everybody. It doesn't have to be my culture. It can be everyone's culture just to hear it, to enjoy it, to honor it.”
