e-culture: Open House, Meet Our Neighbors, Mormon Pioneers, Upcoming Adventures
July 18, 2005


IN THIS ISSUE

Open House, July 31
In Our Neighborhood
Mormon Pioneer Day
Our Summer Vacation
Educational Adventures
Upcoming Houston Events


Houston Institute for Culture Open House
Sunday, July 31, 2:00 - 6:00pm

5555 Morningside, Suite 204
Houston, Texas 77005
http://www.cultural-crossroads.com

In May, Houston Institute for Culture established an office and visitor space in the Rice Village. The facility offers resources, such as meeting space and ticket sales for forums and arts events, for non-profit organizations in Houston. The space in also used for Houston Institute for Culture activities, including educational activities for camp participants, media interviews, meetings, and distribution of free film passes.

Planned activities for the space include:

-An educational exhibit during the Day of the Dead which will honor a Mexican American labor activist and also raise awareness of violence against women in the Lower Rio Grande Valley

-A collection of food, health care items, and clothing and shoe donations for Mexican maquiladora workers living in colonias on the Texas-Mexico border, which will be delivered during medical missions and the Christmas in the Colonias project.

-Ongoing educational activities for the Camp Dos Cabezas participants

-A reading of short stories based on her family by Loida Ruiz

-An educational exhibit to promote awareness of Sikh Americans

-Film reviews, committee meetings, and more


OPEN HOUSE

We will hold an open house on July 31 from 2:00 to 6:00pm at our new location in the Rice Village. On display will be projects and demonstrations of Digital Storytelling and Oral Histories; Recording Capabilities and Media Archives; Educational Programs and Topical Forums; Mexico Border Issues; Camp Dos Cabezas; as well as information for volunteers and community organizations that might benefit from this resource.


PRESENTATION

There will be a presentation of educational travel programs and other Houston Institute for Culture activities, including research and charity work on the US-Mexico border, and scenes from Camp Dos Cabezas at 6:30pm on the evening of the Open House, July 31.

Everyone is welcome to attend. We are located in the Rice Village just upstairs from Brian O'Neill's [www.brianoneills.com] and next door to the Gingerman.

Refreshments will be provided.
http://www.cultural-crossroads.com

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In Our Neighborhood

The Council for Environmental Education is one of our interesting new neighbors in the Rice Village. In fact, they too are located at 5555 Morningside, just a couple of doors down from us, in Suite 212.

CEE has organized programs and services that promote responsible stewardship of natural resources for over 34 years.

The Council for Environmental Education administers Project WILD, Project WILD Aquatic and WET in the City at the national level. Responding to a national need to reach more underserved students with environmental education opportunities, CEE developed the WET in the City program, a K-12 water education initiative that brings water education to urban educators through community-based network.

WET in the City [www.wetcity.org] is a national urban environmental education program of CEE that focuses on water resources. The program provides an opportunity for young people to participate in engaging, hands-on activities that creatively explore the science of water, its cultural context, and the complex issues surrounding its management and stewardship. The program is delivered at the local level, city by city, and targets urban educators with relevant, localized water education through a network of city partners.

Project WILD [www.projectwild.org] is one of the most widely-used conservation and environmental education programs among educators of students in kindergarten through high school. It is based on the premise that young people and educators have a vital interest in learning about our natural world. A national network of State Wildlife Agency Sponsors ensures that Project WILD is available nationwide -- training educators in the many facets of the program. Emphasizing wildlife because of its intrinsic value, Project WILD addresses the need for human beings to develop as responsible citizens of our planet.

CEE's programs are considered benchmark environmental education programs in the United States, cumulatively reaching more than 50,000 educators per year through comprehensive workshops.

In 1991, President George Bush presented CEE's program, Project WILD, with the President's Environment and Conservation Challenge Award for excellence in developing innovative solutions to the nation's environmental challenges. CEE has since been recognized by the National Environmental Education and Training Foundation in Washington, D.C. with the 1997 National Environmental Education Achievement award for leadership in conservation education. CEE is currently one of 10 partners selected nationally to participate in the EPA's Office of Environmental Education supported "Environmental Education and Training Partnership."

To learn more about the Council for Environmental Education, phone 713-520-1936, or send an email to: info@c-e-e.org

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Mormon Pioneer Day

Each year on July 24, Utah celebrates Pioneer Day more vigorously across the state with dances, parades and fireworks than most of the nation on the Forth of July. Considered Utah's State Holiday, Pioneer Day, also called the Days of '47 celebration, commemorates the Mormon exiles' arrival in the Salt Lake Valley, where it is reported that Brigham Young proclaimed on July 24, 1847, "This is the place."

Mormons cite miracles that ensured their survival in the face of tremendous hardship. Quilts that were placed in front of oxen on snow-covered mountain passes, which allowed their passage, are considered sacred, while sea gulls are revered for exterminating swarms of crickets that threatened the Mormon pioneers' last food stocks. [We have frequently traveled to sites that reveal the desperation of the pioneers, such as the Hole-in-the-Rock Trail, where Mormons cut a gap through two thousand feet of rock to descend their wagons to the Colorado River in search of a supply route to New Mexico and to establish a new Mormon colony nearer the territory in San Juan County, Utah.]

First commemorated in 1849, Pioneer Day is one of the largest regional celebrations in the United States. The celebration was interrupted in 1857 as the Great Salt Lake Valley was occupied by the U.S. military. The Latter-day Saints remained nonviolent during the ordeal of the Utah War.

In 1880, Mormons commemorated the anniversary of Joseph Smith's founding of their church 50 years earlier in New York State, though they chose the date of their arrival in Utah over the actual April date.

While many Mormons protested legal challenges to polygamy by draping the tabernacle with black cloth in 1886, most celebrated Utah statehood enthusiastically by 1897, on the fiftieth anniversary of their arrival in Utah.

The Mormon population has undergone a number of ideological changes over the years, regarding polygamy, church membership status and mining of land, but Pioneer Day, or Mormon Pioneer Day as some still call it, remains a strong tradition in communities throughout the region, and is celebrated by many non Mormons as well, who are joining the state's booming population.

Through history, folklore and community organizing, the Utah pioneer legacy is preserved. Picnics and parades honor their enduring spirit on July 24.


We present a history of the Mormon Trail by Michelle Ong:
http://www.houstonculture.org/greatplains/mormon.html

Read about other Trails to the West by Michelle Ong:
http://www.houstonculture.org/greatplains/trails.html


For those interested in the historic Mormon state of Deseret and the modern Navajo Nation, we will offer an educational adventure to the Four Corners region in August.

Lake Powell/Gallup Intertribal Ceremonial
August 6 - 14, 2005
(During the Fiesta de San Lorenzo)

We will also travel to the region in December for a Southwest Christmas and again for Fiesta de San Lorenzo next August. See Educational Adventures below, or email us at info@houstonculture.org to learn more.

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Our Summer Vacation

What we did on our summer vacation... Well, we weren't just hanging around great festivals in the nation's capitol. We also made plans and scouted sites for many future educational adventures.

We attended the nation's premiere public cultural education event, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which offered as one of three themes, an immersion into the culture of Oman, a nation of rugged mountains and deserts on the Indian Ocean. This marks the first time a Middle East nation has been featured, though several were represented at the Smithsonianıs Silk Road festival in 2002.

The festival is a great venue for cultural exchange and experience. We observed other festival participants share their interests. We saw several Navajos from the Forest Service exhibit closely observe the technique of the Omani weavers, and a group of Omani women sitting in a circle on the ground cautiously enjoying Mexican food from the Food Culture USA exhibit.

In addition to several music ensembles and exhibit curators, we met two independent young Omani women who seemed delighted to share their culture. Sumayyah is taking intensive English courses at George Mason University as she prepares to study health education in the U.S. She volunteered for the Smithsonian to help translate and conduct demonstrations under festival tents. Though she was very busy demonstrating henna and Omani fashion, she generously gave us a lot of time to tell us more about Omani customs than the regular workshop schedules allowed.

See a photo of Sumayyah fashionably dressed:
http://www.houstonculture.org/folklife/oman1.jpg

Like many of the festival participants traveling abroad for the first time, Nagod arrived at the festival straight from Oman, where she is leaving behind her nomadic desert lifestyle for a job in a bank (and she revealed that she bought her husband a taxi so he too could work in the city). Unlike Sumayyah, who usually wears a simple black headscarf, Nagod wears a burqa with cutouts above her eyes not typical of most that Americans are familiar with. She was embarrassed and at times agitated by the excessive curiosity of festival goers, who were mostly American, but many had come from other countries. She politely dismissed the excessive attention and went on demonstrating traditions from her former Bedouin nomadic lifestyle. As a woman who is accustomed to wearing her wealth as jewelry and maintaining a heard of goats, now using computer skills while working at a bank, she is experiencing very dramatic changes. Several of the Omanis were curious about her. While Nagod wore a burqa, mostly she said to protect herself from sun and blowing sand in the desert, other Omani women who still practice customs traditional to the desert, though not usually wearing burqas, found her most interesting for her job at the bank.

See a photo of Nagod in everyday wear:
http://www.houstonculture.org/folklife/oman2.jpg


We were excited to attend performances by great Latin and Afro-Caribbean artists featured during the Smithsonian's second-year Nuestra Musica, Latino music initiative, including a great encore performance by the New York City Puerto Rican percussion ensemble Los Pleneros de la 21. [Note: We will feature artists who have performed at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the KTRU, 91.7fm World Music Show on Monday, July 25, 7:00 to 9:00pm.]

We also visited the new Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, where we viewed exhibits about Native American creation stories and the impact of encounters with other cultures. We were treated to performances by Marla Nauni, a Comanche singer who left a corporate job in Tulsa to return to southwestern Oklahoma to preserve Comanche heritage, and The Comanche Hymn Singers, who perform Christian songs in their native language, a tradition that emerged in the early Twentieth Century as government policies eliminated many traditional practices of Native peoples.

We will offer two cultural education trips to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in 2006, including tours of the National Museum of the American Indian and other Smithsonian units. We will attend Washington DC's Caribbean Carnival on the first weekend of our visit in late June.

We may additionally add a tour of Native and Women's Rights issues and Underground Railroad sites of Central New York in 2006.

Stay tuned to part 2 of our summer vacation - Central New York and the Mohawk Valley - to learn more.



Those traveling in the area may want to attend a special conference:

Resources and Reform: Women's Rights, Anti-Slavery and Nineteenth Century New York

A scholars and educators colloquium commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of Women's Rights National Historical Park

Presented by the National Women's Hall of Fame and Women's Rights National Historical Park

Thursday, July 21 and Friday, July 22, 2005
Village of Seneca Falls, New York

Registration is $20

Program details available from the National Women's Hall of Fame
315-568-8060
http://www.greatwomen.org

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Educational Adventures

We have planned the following trips for the remainder of 2005 and 2006. Please contact us if you would like to learn more. We will have an informal presentation about our travel and related programs on Sunday, July 31. The program will offer a survey of many great travel destinations for people who like to travel on their own or with a group like ours.

Travel Forum - Sunday, July 31, 6:30pm
To learn more about Houston Institute for Culture Educational Travel Programs, please attend a special presentation on Sunday, July 31 at 6:30pm., 5555 Morningside, Suite 204 (in the Rice Village). The presentation will survey Houston Institute for Culture programs, including travel, Camp Dos Cabezas, and more. Please RSVP at 713-521-3686. Refreshments will be provided.

2005-06 Travel Series Schedule
El dia de los muertos (The Day of the Dead)
Sunday, October 30 - Saturday, November 5, 2005
Tucson, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora, Mexico

Mexico's Copper Canyon
Friday, November 18 - Sunday, November 27, 2005
Batopilas, Chihuahua, Mexico

A Southwest Christmas
Friday, December 23 - Thursday, December 29, 2005
Santa Fe, New Mexico

Camp Dos Cabezas
Saturday, March 11 - Sunday, March 19, 2006
Saturday, May 27 - Sunday, June 4, 2006
Cochise County, Arizona.
A Volunteer Meeting will take place on Tuesday, September 20, 2005. Send an email to info@houstonculture.org for more information.

Smithsonian Folklife Festival
Friday, June 30 - Wednesday, July 5, 2006
Wednesday, July 5 - Monday, July 10, 2006
Washington, DC

The Land of Enchantment
Saturday, August 5 - Sunday, August 13, 2006
Gallup, New Mexico

El dia de los muertos (The Day of the Dead)
Monday, October 30 - Sunday, November 5, 2005
Taxco, Mexico

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Upcoming Houston Events

Exhibit: Sugihara: Japanese Righteous Gentile
On display through August 28

Chiune Sugihara was the Japanese ambassador to Lithuania during WWII, and was responsible for saving the lives of thousands of Jews from the Nazis by issuing them exit visas. His story is told with rare documents and artifacts.

Holocaust Museum Houston
5401 Caroline Street
Houston, Texas, 77004
713-942-8000
http://www.hmh.org

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Dr. Philip Kreyenbroek: "The Zoroastrian World View and its Echoes in Christianity and Islam"
Tuesday, July 26, 7:30pm

The Rothko Chapel will present guest lecturer Dr. Philip Kreyenbroek, head of Iranian studies at the University of Goettingen in Germany, and leading specialist on the Kurds and the Yezidis of Turkey and northern Iraq. His lecture will address the Zoroastrian World View and its Echoes in Christianity and Islam.

Rothko Chapel
1409 Sul Ross
Houston, Texas 77006
713-524-9839
http://www.rothkochapel.org

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Town Hall Meeting for Concerned Citizens and Activists
Thursday, July 28, 7:30pm

The Houston Global Awareness Collective is putting out a call to all activists and concerned citizens to attend a town hall meeting at 7:30pm at the Shape Family Community Center, located at 3815 Live Oak. There will be activities and discussions focused on corporate media, militarization, and people power. This event is free and open to the public, although donations are always appreciated.

Shape Family Community Center
3815 Live Oak
Houston, Texas
Presented by Houston Global Awareness Collective
832-607-0375
http://www.houstonglobalawareness.org

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Criminal Justice and Prison Issues Forum
Sunday, July 31, 2:00 - 4:00pm

A Criminal Justice and Prison Issues Forum will be held in Stafford, from 2:00 to 4:00pm at the Thoreau Unitarian Universalist Congregation, which is located at 3945 Greenbriar in Stafford. Panelists will include Dean Becker, Host, Producer, and Director, Cultural Baggage and the 4:20 Drug War News on KPFT 90.1 FM; Wanda Redding, Program Administrator, Texas Department of Criminal Justice; Paul Kieniewicz, Death Penalty Coordinator, Amnesty International - Houston; and Mary V. Alexander, Texas Inmates Families Association. The moderator will be Dr. John Speer, Co-founder and Teacher, Thoreau UU Creative Writing Workshop Inside the Prison. The general public is invited and light refreshments will be served. Childcare is available with advance reservation. To reserve childcare, leave voice mail for Brenda or Karma at 281-277-8882 by July 29; please provide parent's name and names/ages of children. For directions, go to or phone.

Thoreau Unitarian Universalist Congregation
3945 Greenbriar
Stafford, Texas
281-277-8882
http://www.tuuc.org

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Bayou City Barter Fair
Saturday, August 6, 1:00 - 4:00pm

The Barter Fair provides an opportunity to trade objects and services without using common currency and gives us a chance to think in a new way about the way we place value on objects and services within our community. Bring a table, shelf, rug or blanket to display your goods or a sign that describes your service(s). Bring food to share, if you wish. To get to the Live Oak Friends Meeting House, take Ella exit off North 610 Loop, go one block south on Ella, left on 26th and the Meeting House will be on the right. For more information, please contact Andrea Harrell at 832-868-6676.

http://www.simplicity.tripod.com

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Department of Peace Campaign Workshop in Austin
Saturday, August 13 - Sunday, August 14

Lynn McMullen, national coordinator of the Department of Peace Campaign, will be present to update people on the campaign and help attendees develop their local campaigns. The fee of $25 per person includes Saturday night dinner and Sunday continental breakfast. On-site lodging is $35-$50 per room. The workshop runs from noon to noon at the Global Relationships Center in Spicewood in the Texas Hill Country. To register or for more information, call 512-264-3333. Locally, contact Kathy Kidd, 713-443-9938, or email kathykidd@earthlink.net.

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Globalization Forum presents Dr. Kris Petersen
Wednesday, August 17, 7:30pm

Dr. Kris Petersen, U. Michigan, recent Rice graduate, will talk about her ongoing research in Nigeria. She has found that the human costs of the U.S. forcing proprietary drugs, partly due to intellectual property insistence of the W.T.O., means that health services can even be "wiped out." The Globalization Forum is held at 7:30pm at 2160 Rice Blvd in the rear garage apartment (four doors west of Greenbriar). For more information, contact Joan Denkler at 713-467-2996.

Mary Knoll House, Olive Branch Room
2160 Rice Blvd.
Houston, Texas 77005



Stay tuned to the calendar for more upcoming events.
http://www.houstonculture.org/events


Thank you for supporting great educational and cultural activities.

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A  n  n @houstonculture.org

Ann Wang, Editor

Contributors:
Mark Lacy
Michelle Ong


Houston Institute for Culture
5555 Morningside #204
Houston, Texas 77005

http://www.cultural-crossroads.com