Radical Imagining: Changing the Story with Stories of Change
In 2014, the Symposium was renewed after a five-year hiatus, bringing faculty members Molly Sturges, Luis Alberto Urrea, Alan Weisman, and Winona LaDuke. The theme for the week was “Radical Imagining: Changing the Story with Stories of Change.”
Every day we’re subjected to a chorus of despair and hopelessness. Scientists relegated to the sidelines warn of an escalating environmental disaster while our economic and industrial leaders bring us ever deeper into debt. Trust in government and in mass-media are both at all-time lows, and a young generation is coming of age in uncertain times.
And yet . . .
And yet every day, in towns and cities large and small, people are transforming their communities and improving the lives of those around them. From solar-powered pickle-makers to collaborative community makerspaces, from alternative energy cooperatives to after-school writing programs, from native activists to artist collectives to prisoner advocates, from local investment networks to organic farm associations, people are rejecting despondency in favor of action and change.
We gather for the 30th Anniversary of the first Sitka Symposium to investigate the transformative changes that creative individuals have brought and can bring to their communities in the spirit of collaboration and resilience. The week’s discussions will be guided by a guest faculty of four authors and artists who live their craft and use it to catalyze the hopeful and positive movements they are part of. They’ll be joined throughout the week by other writers, artists, community builders, and creative practitioners.
Marking the return of the Sitka Symposium after a five year hiatus, the events of the week will re-affirm our belief in the power of stories and the written word. They will also highlight the importance of moving from idea to action. We welcome a wide range experience and perspectives and invite you to join us.
Winona LaDuke is an Anishinaabekwe (Ojibwe) enrolled member of the Mississippi Band Anishinaabeg who lives and works on the White Earth Reservations, and is the mother of three children. She is also the Executive Director of Honor the Earth, where she works on a national level to advocate, raise public support, and create funding for frontline native environmental groups.
A graduate of Harvard and Antioch Universities, she has written extensively on Native American and environmental issues. Author of now six books, including The Militarization of Indian Country (2011), Recovering the Sacred: the Power of Naming and Claiming (2005), the non-fiction book All our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (1999, South End Press), and a novel – Last Standing Woman (1997, Voyager Press). She is a former board member of Greenpeace USA and serves, as co-chair of the Indigenous Women’s Network, a North American and Pacific indigenous women’s organization. In 1994, Winona was nominated by Time magazine as one of America’s fifty most promising leaders under forty years of age, and in 1998, Ms. Magazine named her Woman of the Year for her work with Honor the Earth.
Luis Alberto Urrea, 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for nonfiction and member of the Latino Literature Hall of Fame, is a prolific and acclaimed writer who uses his dual-culture life experiences to explore greater themes of love, loss and triumph. Born in Tijuana, Mexico to a Mexican father and an American mother, Urrea has published extensively in all the major genres. The critically acclaimed and best-selling author of 13 books, Urrea has won numerous awards for his poetry, fiction and essays. The Devil’s Highway, his 2004 non-fiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, won the Lannan Literary Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize.
Alan Weisman has written several books and won numerous international awards for his work in journalism and literature, including the critically acclaimedThe World Without Us, which describes a post-human scenario of the planet. His next book, Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? was released in September 2013 by Little, Brown and Co. Among his other works are Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World (1998), winner of the Social Inventions Award from the Global Ideas Bank, An Echo In My Blood (1999), La Frontera: The United States Border With Mexico, and We, Immortals (1979). His reports from around the world have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, Orion,Audubon, Mother Jones, Discover, Condé Nast Traveler, Resurgence, and several anthologies, including The Best American Science Writing 2006.
Molly Sturges is a composer, artistic director, performer and facilitator. She is best known for her work integrating intermedia performance, creative community dialogue, and social/environmental equity and healing.
Current projects includes co-founding artistic director and lead faculty on Lifesongs, a program of The Academy for the Love of Learning, (originally founded by Littleglobe The Santa Fe Opera), which involves creating original musical works with elders in hospice and nursing homes performed by youth, community and professional musicians; artistic director/creator of Common Ground: TOC, a multi-year community capacity and arts project with intergenerational participants from two Eastern Agency Navajo communities and from the rural village of Cuba, NM (commissioned by national and local consortium of funders and arts presenters); composer/creator of Salve, a music with women returning veterans (National Hispanic Cultural Center); and creator/co-composer/artistic director for COAL (www.coalmusical.com) a national arts and climate change project.
Past projects include working as guest artistic director with The Creative Center: Arts for People with Cancer, in NYC for a six-month project with women living with cancer; creator and director of Moment, a five-month intergenerational project with homeless older adults and students for The European Union Festival of Culture in Cork, Ireland, 2005; and Memorylines: Voces de Nuestras Jornadas, commissioned by The Santa Fe Opera and The Lensic Performing Arts Center, which brought people together, ages 8 to 87, across economic and cultural lines in Santa Fe to create an original new opera dealing with identity and immigration in Santa Fe.
Aside from being the co-founder and artistic director of the social-practice based artist collective Littleglobe, Sturges has been an artist in residence around the globe with a wide range of communities doing short-term creative arts projects involving arts and community engagement. Sturges is also a performing vocalist, recording artist, and leader of creative music ensembles. A recipient of numerous commissions and residencies, she has written and performed original music for a wide array of projects including music for dance companies, silent films, circuses and sound installations.
Sturges holds an MA in world music composition from Wesleyan University. She is a devoted improviser and student of experimental forms and approaches. She has lived and worked in Kenya, Senegal and speaks several languages. Sturges has worked extensively as an artist-in-residence, guest speaker and facilitator both abroad and in the United States. In 2008 Sturges was awarded the United States Artist Fellowship in Music (unitedstatesartists.org). Since 2012 Sturges has been developing and conducting HOMESONG events, spontaneous community choirs with groups from 10 to 300 involving poets, storytellers, civic dialogue transcriptions and a plethora of other community-sourced materials.
Sturges is a Professor of Practice in the Art & Ecology program at The University of New Mexico and is on the faculty of The Academy for the Love of Learning. Sturges was been an national advisor for Rockwood Leadership’s new arts and culture initiative and for Opportunity Agenda’s Creating Change and is a guest speaker and workshop leader at conferences and gatherings about the intersections of the arts, sustainability and social justice issues.
In addition to music and collaborative art making, Sturges has been a devoted student and teacher of meditation for over twenty- five years.