UPDATE:
Scheduled for May 15, 2023, 6 pm at 127 N. San Gorgonio Ave., Banning.
Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez at the Learning Center’s Native Voices Poetry Festival (Carlos Puma Photo)
Chumash Man
“‘Shoo-mash,’ he says
and when he says it
I think of ancient sea lion hunts
and salt spray windswept
across my face
They tell him
His people are dead
‘Terminated’
It’s official
U.S. rubber-stamped official
Chumash: Terminated
a People who died
they say
a case for anthropologists
Ah, but this old one
This old one whose face is
ancient prayers come to rest
this old one knows
who he is
‘Shoo-mash,’ he says
and somewhere sea lions still gather
along the California coast
and salt spray
rises
rainbow mist
above the constant breaking
of the waves.”
This poem by Elder Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez (Chumash/O’odham (Tohono and Akimal)), is in a 2016 anthology with works by 31 Native poets published by Scarlet Tanager Books: Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California. (© 2016 by editors Kurt Schweigman and Lucille Lang Day.)
Elder Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez (Chumash/O’odham (Tohono and Akimal)) sharing poems, stories, and cultural memories at Dorothy Ramon Learning Center’s 2016 Native Voices Poetry Festival. (Carlos Puma Photo)
Although at age 82, Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez is a nationally acclaimed and published Native American writer whose works appear in many anthologies, she never has had a book with her own collection of poems — until now.
“A Light to Do Shellwork By” is being published by Scarlet Tanager Books.
UPDATE: THIS EVENT WILL BE RESCHEDULED.
You’re invited to a special October 17, 2022, Dragonfly Lecture at Dorothy Ramon Learning Center by the poet, storyteller, culture bearer, longtime university teacher, activist, advocate, and leader of the Wishtoyo Foundation Chumash Women’s Elders Council, Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez.
She’ll share her poems, her stories, her cultural memories, and her advocacy for Native languages, cultures, and sacred sites. Two poems, “The Fat of the Land,” and “Cahuilla Bird Songs,” come from her memories of spending much time as a child at Morongo Reservation, “where we always went,” she said. '“It feels like home to me.”
Although she’s now retired after teaching nearly three decades at California State University, Long Beach, she said that her students taught her that including a “question-answer” session always is important for all participants.
Details: 6 p.m. Oct. 17, 2022 DECEMBER 5, 2022
Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez, Dragonfly Lecture: “A Light to Do Shellwork By”
Dorothy Ramon Learning Center’s San Manuel Gathering Hall,
127 N. San Gorgonio Ave., Banning, CA
CO-SPONSORED BY IDYLLWILD ARTS!
Your $10 will help the Center save and share Southern California’s Native American cultures, languages, history, and traditional arts.
At Dorothy Ramon Learning Center’s 2016 Native Voices Poetry Festival. (Carlos Puma Photo)
The poet said that the book’s title work, A Light to Do Shellwork By, comes from the day her father died.
“The light was coming through the window,” she remembered, and as her poem tells,
“My father turns his head to acknowledge the sun
The light the light
he says
and the light within
It’s a good light to do shellwork by”
The poet says her father’s final words focused on “the mystery of the light” — the continuity of light, the knowledge, that shines and emanates from plants, animals, all. His final statement about doing his artistic shellwork was about creating something beautiful within the light.
It’s about a dynamic process, she said, “how we need each other’s stories because the light is refracted from those stories and we learn from each other.”
Read more:
The Voice of Rustling Leaves: “The ‘real world,’ the world we see out there, the world we interact with, is shaped by the language we use to explain it,” Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez says. “The worlds in which different cultures and societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.
“This is why we must reawaken our Indigenous languages. We must pray, sing, speak in our Indigenous languages. By doing so, we help to create a greater reality for all of humanity. As we perceive the world, so shall we act.”
More than Words: More on language as the living representation of a culture.
Thank you!
Other events:
Through Their Eyes: Art Selections from Dorothy Ramon Learning Center, continuing on display through December 12, 2022, at the Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art at Cal State San Bernardino. Information HERE.
News from Dorothy Ramon Learning Center welcomes your EMAIL. Thanks from Ernest and June Siva and Editor Pat Murkland, September 14, 2022. Updated on Oct. 12, 2022. Subscribe to News from Dorothy Ramon Learning Center. It’s free.