IndigenousWays Festival finds its groove
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May 3—Although the IndigenousWays Festival is only in its third year, it appears to have found its groove.
In 2022, the festival was spread across five weekends — one each month from May through September. That was too heavy a workload for the small nonprofit that organizes it, according to Elena Higgins, co-founder and executive director. In 2023, the festival was condensed to three weekends and featured A-list performers such as flute player and creator Robert Mirabal, who was featured on the 2006 Grammy-winning album Sacred Ground: A Tribute to Mother Earth, and Joy Harjo, the first Indigenous person to serve as U.S. poet laureate.
The dates of this year's festival are Friday, May 3, as well as June 8 and August 16. Diversity is at the event's core, and the performances celebrate Indigenous, LGBTQIA2S+, and deaf and hard-of-hearing people. The performers kicking off the first day of the festival are Tha 'Yoties, a four-piece Arizona reggae-rock band whose members have Tewa, Hopi, Diné, Dakota, Lithuanian, and Scottish/English lineages. Joining Tha 'Yoties is brother-sister rock duo Sihasin, who also performed at the first IndigenousWays Festival, as well as country family band WesternBoy and Sierra Woosley, an activist who is blind and deaf.
Higgins (Maori/Samoan) is a vocalist, percussionist, and guitarist in the band Indigie Femme, alongside Tash Terry (Navajo/French/Irish). The instrumental folk duo has released nine albums and toured extensively, making valuable contacts along the way. That networking has proved invaluable when it comes to booking acts for the IndigenousWays Festival.
"We're in our 18th year of performing and have traveled throughout the world, and we have met extraordinary people," Higgins says.
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IndigenousWays Festival
* Friday, May 3: Tha 'Yoties, Sihasin, WesternBoy, and Sierra Woosley
* June 8: Lesbian RELEVANT?Puerto Rican singer-songwriter Lourdes Pérez, comedian Mimi Gonzalez, and Chicano funk band Una Mas y La Cha Cha
* August 16: Pure Fé, founding member of Native American a cappella group Ulali; Native blues musician Wade Fernandez (Menominee); and Institute of American Indian Arts graduate Simona Rael, whose music and fashion design will be featured.
Railyard Park Performance Green
740 Cerrillos Road
Free
The festival's roots can be traced to both the onset of the pandemic and the Navajo Nation, she says. Higgins and Terry were producing smaller-scale music festivals both on the reservation and at the Institute of American Indian Art, which both attended. In the first week of April 2020, they transformed the festivals into an online series. Some audiences became comfortable attending virtually, Higgins says.
"We wondered what we could do in 2021," she says. "We were hearing that a lot of elders didn't want to come out. There are so many beautiful parks in Santa Fe, so we decided we'll do this IndigenousWays Festival series."
The point was to allow for in-person social distancing, a term likely to make any pandemic veteran wince. It's worth noting that the festival isn't the nonprofit's only offering; its Wisdom Circle discussions are at 6 p.m. on the third Wednesday of each month, at various locations as well as on Zoom.
IndigenousWays' focus on including the hard-of-hearing can be traced to Terry's childhood.
"Tash is a nationally certified ASL interpreter," Higgins says. "She has an amazing story of meeting deaf Navajo when she was 11, living on the Navajo reservation, and she was really inspired to go down that route. Hence, her passion for why it's important to have ASL interpreters on stage and also the presence of our deaf and hard-of-hearing community members.
"Indigie Femme, when we travel around the world doing festival circuits, is generally the only Indigenous performance in the festival. A huge part of this is not only creating a platform where Native American and Indigenous performers can really be front and center, but for our future generations."
On that front, Woosley is a 14-year-old student at the New Mexico School for the Deaf who's an advocate for climate change and compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Festival planners get no time to rest, Higgins says.
"We're already in the motion of next year's festivals, particularly with the headliners we would like," she says. "It's an ongoing thing."
