The Myaamia Center headquartered at Miami University is heading to Washington D.C. in July to participate in the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall. The Miami Tribe of Oklahoma is one of four Tribal nations invited to be featured in the Native Language Reclamation in the U.S. program.
"It's really cool to be recognized as a community who [festival organizers] think is representative of communities who are doing language and cultural revitalization work," Kara Strass, director of Tribe Relations for the Myaamia Center, tells WVXU. "It's also a little bit overwhelming to think that we're going to be engaging with, I think they say, there's over a million people who usually come through the festival."
Twelve people, including seven students, are participating with the Myaamia Center. This year's focus is "Youth and Future of Culture." Strass says that's a key reason the center was invited.
"[The organizers] knew that we're doing a lot of our revitalization work with our youth, and specifically, they knew that we work with college age students, which was kind of their main focus for the festival."
The center will present on four key areas: lacrosse, language, ribbonwork, and ecological perspectives and gardening. The link between how the Tribe uses lacrosse to teach language to young people was a key driver in why they were asked to participate, Strass says.
"They know that lacrosse is a really big part of our language revitalization and cultural revitalization practice, so they asked if we could do lacrosse, but then they asked us to come up with a couple of other things as well, and each of those are areas that are big focuses for us in revitalization," she adds.
Strass says the festival will also be a good experience for the students selected to participate because, for once, they'll be the teachers rather than the learners.
"This is a unique opportunity in which some of them applied and were accepted to be what we're calling ambassadors on behalf of our community. To see them grow and be the ones who are actually going to be doing a lot of this engagement with the general public is really, really fun to see."
The festival says the other three presenting Tribal groups include the Alutiiq/Sugpiaq of Kodiak, Alaska; the Hālau I Ka Leo Ola O Nā Mamo (School of the Living Voice of the Descendants), a hula school from Hawaiʻi; and Ionkwahronkha’onhátie’ (We are becoming fluent), a grassroots Mohawk organization.
The festival runs July 2-7, 2025. It's billed as the largest annual cultural event in the U.S. capital.
Miami University, which takes its name from the Tribe, and the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma partnered in 2001 to launch what would become the Myaamia Center. The purpose (initially — it quickly grew into a much larger cultural revitalization) was to "awaken" or bring back the Miami language. The effort has grown into a full-blown research, education, and outreach initiative supporting Myaamia language, culture, knowledge, and values.
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