Iowa Arts Council, Folklife Program

Des Moines, Iowa

Mission

The mission of the Iowa Arts Council is to enrich the quality of life for Iowans through support of the arts. The Iowa Arts Council's Folklife Program assists in documenting, preserving, and promoting the living traditional culture of all our state's residents.

Iowa Culture and Language Conference, Folklife Stream

An interdisciplinary collaboration providing folk and traditional arts content for educators, service providers, and others working with Iowa’s refugee and immigrant communities.

Community Context

Newcomers to Iowa (post-1975) are from Sudan, Iraq, Mexico, Russia, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Colombia, Guatemala, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Burundi.

In 1870, the Iowa Board of Immigration published Iowa: A Home for Immigrants , a booklet that issued an invitation to folks in the Eastern United States and throughout Europe to settle in Iowa. American Indians inhabited Iowa well before the 19 th century; French traders came through in the 1700s. In the mid-nineteenth century, settlers from New England and of European heritage arrived in Iowa, as did the steamship and railroad. Those industrial innovations, as well as the later network of Iowa roads, made it possible to ship the state's agricultural produce around the country and the world. Workers from Ireland came to the area in the 1860s to work on the railroad; they were soon followed by Germans, Danes, and Norwegians from the 1860s-1920s. Italians and Greeks arrived in the 1890s to work in railroad shops.

The twentieth century with its global wars brought further waves of immigrants to Iowa and to Waterloo and Cedar Falls. Polish and Russian Jews fleeing religious persecution found refuge in the region at the turn of the century, while African Americans started coming after 1912. Croatians and Bulgarians arrived and settled from 1900-1920, and large groups of African Americans came for jobs in the 1930s. After the war in Southeast Asia ended, Vietnamese and Lao came in the 1970s and 1980s. Thanks to the efforts of then-Governor Robert Ray and then-US Ambassador to Cambodia, Ken Quinn, Iowa volunteered to resettle the Tai Dam people, many of whom worked for the Americans in Laos during the Vietnam War. Today, over 95% of Tai Dam outside of SE Asia live in Iowa. Iowa became the only US state along with nine NGOs to receive US Dept of State funding for refugee resettlement. As a result, in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, Russians, Bosnians, Iraqis, Somalis, Afghanis, Burundis, and ethnic groups from south Sudan have found jobs and homes in Iowa. Immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Colombia also came to Iowa during this time. Both refugees and immigrants have worked in Iowa’s (meat) packing plant industry.

Iowa today bears witness to the population and consequent cultural shifts that happen periodically in the United States. Within the past five years, Latinos have become the largest minority group in the state, with African Americans a close second. In the twentieth century and now in the twenty-first, Iowa has continued to welcome tens of thousands of immigrants—some political refugees from war-torn lands and others “unofficial” economic refugees—looking, as did most of our ancestors, for safe and better lives for themselves and their children.

Clearly, not all instances of cultures coming together are positive ones. Issues of illegal immigrants, English language learning, funding enough teachers and social workers, or different traditions of disciplining children and sometimes spouses are all potential areas of conflict. Different religious beliefs, food prohibitions, notions about time, the importance of family and community versus the pressures of the workplace, and attitudes about modern medical procedures versus traditional remedies are all issues that have been faced before. In addition to day-to-day help, newcomers also encounter prejudice, hate, and, to their ways of thinking, irrational laws and rules that just make no sense. Storm Lake, Marshalltown, and Postville as well as Dubuque, Des Moines, Perry, West Liberty, and Waterloo, among many Iowa towns and cities, have been targeted by outside media for their difficulties—and rarely for their successes. Fear of the unknown is common to old and new residents. If we use these differences or conflicts as opportunities to learn, however, we often find that these new or different ways of doing things enrich rather than diminish our lives.

Iowa Culture and Language Conference, Folklife Stream

Since 1998, the Iowa Arts Council Folklife Program has presented a stream of five or more panels, workshops (hands-on vs. talking h ead), demonstrations, and/or performances at the Iowa Culture and Language Conference (formerly, the state ESL conference). Panel and workshop topics have ranged from adolescent rites of passage, (multi)-cultural issues around death and dying, stringed instruments from many cultures, grant writing workshops, and ethnographic writing, to salsa dance workshops, Lao traditional storytelling, festival planning, and Iowa folklife education curricula. Performances have included Tai Dam and folklorico dance as well as traditional music from Mexico, Panama, Colombia, Bosnia, and Sudan (all performers currently reside in Iowa). Demonstrations ranged from Bosnian pita to Iraqi flatbread making, from Hmong batik to Nuer hairbraiding, and from Iraqi o’ud design to Asian Indian mehendi or henna decoration.

Planning and collaborations for the annual conference come from that year’s or the previous year’s folklife fieldwork with Iowa’s new refugees and immigrants, as well as those whose communities have been here for several generations. Ideas come from other types of programming during the year—for museums, schools, folklife festivals, radio interviews, for example—and from collaborations with colleagues in other fields and disciplines, from agriculture to classical and modern dance.

All presentations involve folk and traditional artists and/or tradition bearers who speak about, demonstrate, and/or perform at the conference. Colleagues in the academy, classroom teachers, social and healthcare workers, and those from cultural not-for-profits have also presented on various topics, including ethnographic writing, using folk tales to teach writing, healthcare and culture, multicultural and Folk Arts in Education (FAIE) programs.

In all cases, artists are paid for their presentations and travel expenses. Collaboration and planning occur in the year previous to each conference year, with communication among panelists taking place via email, phone calls, and face-to-face meetings.

Prior to and during the early years of presenting a folklife stream at the Iowa Culture and Language Conference, the Iowa Arts Council Folklife Program also produced Folk Arts in Education presentations for the State Historical Society’s Heritage Expo annual conference. The latter morphed into the Iowa Folklife Institute, whose last incarnation was a national collaboration with City Lore and CARTS, or Cultural Arts Resources for Teachers and Students, a web-based resource. Iowa Folklife Institutes took place as free-standing training conferences for educators and traditional artists, in cooperation with local presenting arts organizations such as the Des Moines Playhouse, Waterloo Center for the Arts, and the Grout Museum District, and regional folklife festivals. Statewide budget cuts, which led to staff cuts, as well as decreasing attendance at stand-alone Iowa Folklife Institutes led to a decision to focus on the collaboration with the Iowa Culture and Language Conference. This collaboration allows for the greatest outreach to educators and provides for the most efficient use of decreasing funds for FAIE training activities.

Over the years, this collaboration has led to many others with individuals and organizations. We’ve developed long and short-term projects as a result, and created a wonderful network and infrastructure for supporting folk and traditional artists and their communities, as well as for creating new outreach and inreach opportunities and projects.

This project has focused on presenting and inquiring into the folk and traditional culture of refugees, immigrants, and their communities—for educators, social workers, and cultural workers who attend the Iowa Culture and Language Conference. It has provided exposure for all the artists involved, which has resulted in other paid performances, demonstrations, and talks. Most of all, it has provided a great venue for the Iowa Arts Council Folklife Program to be a “folk and traditional arts content provider” to other individuals and groups who support refugees and immigrants.

Read sample Iowa Culture and Language Conference Folklife Stream session descriptions from past conferences.

Learn more

Many of the presentations for folklife stream presentations are online on the Iowa Arts Council’s website:

Iowa Roots:

www.iowaartscouncil.org/programs/folk-and-traditional-arts/iowa-roots/index.shtml

Cultural Express:

www.iowaartscouncil.org/funding/cultural-express/index.shtml

Iowa Folk life:

www.uni.edu/iowaonline/folklife/intro/index.htm

CARTS (Cultural Arts Resources for Teachers and Students): www.carts.org

The Center for the Study of Upper Mid-West Cultures at the University of Wisconsin, Madison: http://csumc.wisc.edu /

See also several publications on fieldwork and writing by Bonnie Sunstein: http://english.uiowa.edu/faculty/sunstein/index.html

Contact

Rachelle H. Saltzman, Ph.D.

515.242.6195

Riki.saltzman(at)iowa.gov

www.iowaartscouncil.org

Photos, top to bottom

Young members of the Lao Natasinh Dancers waiting to perform.

Mendhi: Shelly Sarin applies henna to create an intricate design.

Bosnian Dance: K.U.D. Kolo of Waterloo, Iowa performs a Bosnian folk dance.

Lao Natasinh Dancer: Chinda demonstrating a dance pose.

Photos by Rachelle H. Saltzman, courtesy of the Iowa Arts Council Folklife Program

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