This year's Smithsonian Folklife Festival featured 'Indigenous Voices of the Americas' and was full of surprises — like Bolivian women skateboarding in traditional garb — bowler hats and poofy skirts.
Little girls are lined up to learn to balance on a board on a half-pipe ramp. The teachers are young women from Bolivia, in their teens and 20s, wearing traditional garb as a tribute to female strength. Their outfits do not seem as if they are ideal for skateboarding: Each skateboarder wears a beribboned bowler hat and a poofy skirt. Among the eager disciples is Poppy Moore. She's only 2, she’s from Virginia and she’s brought her own helmet for her very first skateboarding experience..
“We want a lot of young girls and boys to join in on skateboarding and at the same time, to recognize their cultural identity,” she adds. “It’s a way of life, and I relearned that from watching,” says the 28-year-old. He was impressed that, even though the Bolivian skaters don’t speak English, they were able to share “the foundation” of skateboarding with folks so they “can go on and express themselves in their own ways with their skateboard.”“It doesn’t matter how many times you fall,” says María Belén Fajardo Fernández. “The important thing is that you stand up and continue trying.
There were conflicts, Tambura says. And the Amondawa people were exposed to diseases they’d never encountered. His grandfather who wrote the song he sang is proud that Tambura sings it but was a bit worried when Tambura took off for Washington, D.C., to head to the festival in faraway Washington, D.C. “He doesn’t like his family to go away. He likes his grandson to be there with him.” A universal grandfatherly trait.
Master weavers from Peru wear their creations as they demonstrate the art of weaving at the Folklife Festival.Part of the weaving contingent at the Folklife Festival, she inspects the big bubbling cauldrons of water where color is extracted from native plants – and crushed beetles. Their labor is more than a vocation. “Our lives, our history gets poured into what we make,” says Hendrickson.
The xylophone-like instrument originated in Africa and crossed the ocean as enslaved peoples were brought to the Americas.
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