Creative Wonder!

Discover. Explore. Create.

Calling all dragonflies and everyone else:

Celebrate
the human voice in all the arts.

Discover & be inspired
by a deeper understanding of our region and its beauty, vitality, and uniqueness.

Create
your own poetry and art in free workshops for all ages.

Save the date, March 11, 2023, for the 7th Native Voices Poetry Festival.

This year Dorothy Ramon Learning Center is honored to partner with the new Idyllwild Arts Native American Arts Center to present the Native Voices Festival, expanded with even more free family fun for you.

Bring your creativity and enjoy free performances, cultural displays, and activities at Dorothy Ramon Learning Center, 127 N. San Gorgonio Ave., Banning, from 10 am to 4 pm on March 11, 2023. Especially popular are the Festival’s writing and art workshops for all ages.

In case you’re wondering what poetry we’re talking about, the Festival celebrates Native voices in all the arts, traditional and nontraditional. We celebrate in languages from our own Native American homelands in Southern California, and in the universal language of music and other arts. And as part of that, we discover and explore, and are inspired by, our relationships with our native landscapes.

The late Tongva Elder Barbara Drake, a Dorothy Ramon Learning Center Dragonfly Award winner, opened our first Festival in 2015 with traditional stories and cultural memories about yucca and other native plants.

Then she invited the huge crowd, everyone, to get up from all the seats in our Gathering Hall, and to come on over to her exhibit table, where they enjoyed some sweet candy she’d made with native mesquite and chia. Her joy and welcoming spirit of community set the tone for that Festival and all the Festivals that have followed. This year, too.

Poet Alex Avila composed this video after our first Native Voices Poetry Festival:

Here we see our beloved late Barbara Drake, Dorothy Ramon Learning Center President Ernest Siva, Elder Kim Marcus, area poets and writers including Casandra Lopez, Gordon Johnson, Ruth Nolan, and our Festival co-chair Juan Delgado (also a Dorothy Ramon Learning Center board member), the Dragonfly Wind Flute Ensemble, and young Festival participants in 2015. Fiddle music by Bill Bell.

In ensuing years we’ve added many more Native Voices! The joy continues in 2023. Watch for exciting details in upcoming News from Dorothy Ramon Learning Center newsletters. And mark your calendar for March 11, 2023.

Fourth Sunday Concert

Before the pandemic, our cross-cultural Fourth Sunday concert series was a popular monthly event, as well as a monthly fund-raiser for our 501c3 nonprofit Learning Center. So … now we’re having fun again, every Fourth Sunday, with wide-ranging genres of music for you to enjoy in the wonderful acoustics of Dorothy Ramon Learning Center’s San Manuel Gathering Hall.

Our February 26, 2023, concert features the foot-stompin’ music of the Foothill Ramblers, starting at 3 p.m., 127 N. San Gorgonio Ave., Banning. Your $10 will help Dorothy Ramon Learning Center save and share Southern California’s Native American cultures, languages, history, and traditional arts.

And thanks, as always, for reading, sharing, and subscribing to our free online newsletter, News from Dorothy Ramon Learning Center, from Center leaders Ernest and June Siva, and Editor Pat Murkland. We value your ideas: Please EMAIL. January 25, 2023.