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Keith Bear, Mandan/Hidatsa, said of the new president: "He’s not a black man. He’s not a white man. He’s brown. So he, too, is a rainbow of what we have in this country.”Reznet Photo by Victor Merina

The 'Other' Musical Celebration for Obama

By Victor Merina

WASHINGTON — On a day when much of the nation's attention was centered on the Lincoln Memorial and the music of a star-studded celebrity lineup, Keith Bear stood on the other end of the National Mall playing his wooden flute and telling stories about his Mandan/Hidatsa heritage.

Gayle Ross, a Texas-born storyteller, also took her turn on the makeshift stage of the National Museum of the American Indian shaking her cow horn rattler to punctuate her Cherokee tales of meadowlarks and quails and human lessons born from animal sagas.

And on the museum's ground floor, in the closing performance of a day-long roster of multicultural artists, the Yaaw Tei Yi Dance Group spun and sang and soared through their traditional Tlingit/Haida songs and dances to reflect the various clans of their Native Alaska.

This was the other musical and cultural festival that entertained, enthralled and inspired an audience on Sunday that had gathered in the nation's capital to celebrate the inauguration of Barack Obama as the nation's 44th president and to enjoy an open-air concert that brought together some of the biggest names in music and arts in one of the country's most historic venues.

At Lincoln Memorial, Hundreds of Thousands

At the Lincoln Memorial, Obama and his family joined hundreds of thousands of people who had arrived by cars, buses, subways and on foot to revel in the artistry of Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce, Garth Brooks and John Legend.

Two miles down the sprawling mall was the pocket-sized gathering of 60 or so people at the American Indian museum listening to the lilting flute music and soothing words of the 54-year-old Bear. He had traveled from North Dakota's Fort Berthold Reservation to share his stories before he, too, would join the throngs who will stand in the winter cold to watch Obama take office on Tuesday.

On this day, in between song and story, Bear told his audience that the new president with his multiracial heritage underscores a changing America and its significance for Natives and other Americans.

"He's not a black man. He's not a white man. He's brown," Bear said of the new president. "So he, too, is a rainbow of what we have in this country."

Ross, 57, a descendant of John Ross, the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation during and after the Trail of Tears, also spoke of the historical meaning of what will take place when Obama is sworn into office. She did so as she gazed at the steps of the U.S. Capitol, which could be seen outside the museum window where she sang her songs and told her stories to an audience of young and old.

Black Eagle, Obama's Indian Name

For Indian Country, she said, that special link to the new president can be seen in the adoption ceremony last summer that brought Obama into the Crow family with a new name — Black Eagle — and a reminder of how Natives are the roots of the nation and share a stake with all Americans in the country's future.

Ross said the new president is someone "who will take the oath of office who also has an Indian family and an Indian name, and so we all have a lot of hope for this administration."

Even with the smattering of political and personal messages, most of the weekend's "Out of Many — a Multicultural Festival" at the Smithsonian's American Indian museum, which ends Monday, has been devoted to an array of song, music, dance and storytelling.

On Sunday, the Native artists were joined in various performance spaces at the museum by Chinese lion dancers, African poets, Cambodian dancers, Salvadoran musicians, Hawaiian dancers as well as singers playing mariachi music, bluegrass, Irish music and a style labeled Jewish-American jazz and fusion.

As with other storytellers brought together for the event, Bear and Ross told their tales at an ad hoc stage at the back of a resource center before stacks of books and Native artifacts. Their audience sat in folding chairs and rolling seats and at computer tables. Some stood as they listened.

'Our Common Ground'

"I think that stories are such an essential aspect of being human," Ross said later. "Storytelling is the oldest form, everything comes from it. ... Even our first dances were a way of telling stories."

Ross went on. "I think that they are wonderful ways that we celebrate the things we have. We affirm the ways that we're alike. We affirm our common ground with stories, but we also celebrate the ways that we're different."

Those contrasts, in a different sense, could have been in Sunday's two celebrations at opposite ends of the National Mall. The music and stories and words of optimism for a new presidential era wafted from one end of the mall — with hundreds of thousands of people jammed into the outdoors Lincoln Memorial site to the fewer than 100 who sat in the cozy warmth of the National Museum of the American Indian. But both mattered.

At day's end, when the final acts were finishing their performances to thunderous applause at the Lincoln Memorial, the Yaaw Tei Yi dancers were closing the day's music and words at the museum with their Tlingit/Haida songs and dances.

The 35 members, who derived their group's name from the legends of the Kiks.adi (Frog) Clan in Sitka, Alaska, had journeyed from their base in Juneau to share their heritage. And with their songs that explained, like musical maps, where their clans originated and how they lived, they also were there to tell their stories.

Victor Merina is reznet's senior correspondent and special projects editor. A former Los Angeles Times investigative reporter and finalist for the Pulitizer Prize, he also is a senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism. Merina is a visiting faculty member at The Poynter Institute, where he leads seminars on cross-cultural reporting and writing about race.