Almost immediately after a successful 2022 festival that gathered Native authors to celebrate Native writing, participant and Montana Poet Laureate Chris La Tray said people began asking if something similar would happen again.
That hunger for another event on the heels of the James Welch Native Lit Festival was the impetus behind IndigiPalooza, a two-day Indigenous arts and storytelling event.
The event, which takes place Aug. 1-2 at the Missoula Public Library, will bring together more than a dozen Indigenous artists, musicians, writers and creators for panel discussions, live music, an art market and a traditional foods cooking demonstration. All events are free and open to the public.
“We never get this kind of a platform for just Native people to be talking about our work among other Native people,” La Tray said.
A citizen of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians, La Tray said when he travels the country for book events, conferences and literary festivals, he is often the only Native person in the room.
“That can be exhausting,” he told Montana Free Press in a recent interview. “Native people need opportunities for us to be gathered among ourselves.”
Blackfeet artist John Pepion, who will appear on a panel at the event, said it’s important for people to hear from Indigenous artists.
“We’re out here telling the world, ‘Look, here we are. This is what we’ve been through, and this is where we’re going,’” he said. “It’s better to [do that] as a collective.”
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Joy Harjo, citizen of the Muscogee Nation and the first Native American U.S. Poet Laureate, will kick off the event Friday, Aug. 1, with a poetry reading and discussion.
When La Tray and his co-organizers began planning the event about a year ago, he said he immediately thought of Harjo.
“The ground that she’s broken for other people, she’s one of our most cherished elders,” said La Tray. “Whether it’s in our community or just as an Indigenous person helping to keep us visible.”
The IndigiPalooza schedule features several panel discussions, including one where writers will discuss the importance of Indigenous storytelling.
A panel of three writers at IndigiPalooza will discuss the importance of Indigenous storytelling. Another panel of four community leaders will talk about their experiences sharing Native language and culture with the public. One session will focus on entrepreneurship, examining how Indigenous artists make a living, and another will explore poetry and oral tradition. Native musicians Foreshadow (Salish and Blackfeet) and Supaman (Apsáalooke) will perform an evening hip-hop show.
“It’s entirely modern,” La Tray said. “If you go to a powwow, there’s this traditional dancing and a lot of this traditional stuff. I feel like there’s plenty of opportunity to see that, but what can happen, too, is that people can get this idea that that’s all we are. But we are modern participants in the world as it is today. … We can still be Native without being shoved into this box that people like to keep us in, like everything stopped in the 1880s.”
La Tray organized the event with Selya Avila, community engagement specialist at the Missoula Public Library, and Anna East, founding director of Chickadee Community Services, a nonprofit that supports Indigenous education. IndigiPalooza, they said, was almost entirely grassroots-funded, with the majority of money coming from individual donors.
“The tradition of Indigenous storytelling goes back millennia,” East said. “And right now, in the time of Lily Gladstone and Reservation Dogs and Indigenous fashion and a return to Indigenous approaches to nutrition and food sovereignty, all of those are important parts of the culture that everybody can learn from.”
Bringing people together for storytelling, Avila said, builds power and sparks joy.
“It reminds us that we’re not just talking about history or identity in abstract terms — we’re talking about people, communities, creativity, and futures,” she said. “That’s what makes [IndigiPalooza] valuable. It’s living, breathing and grounded in community. And really it’s just going to be so much fun!”
For more information on IndigiPalooza, visit ipfestmt.com.
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