Penobscots Grant to Fund Songwriting Workshop
Contact: Carla Fearon, (207) 817-7355, Laura Lindenfeld, (207) 581-3850, John Bear Mitchell, (207) 581-1417; George Manlove, (207) 581-3756
ORONO–Dozens of Penobscot Nation children will have a chance to become songwriters as a result of a special cultural project taking place in April through a collaboration of the Penobscot Nation Boys and Girls Club and the University of Maine’s Project Opportunity and the Wabanaki Center.
California singer-songwriter and educator David Nachmanoff will spend the third week in April on Indian Island working with children, members of the Penobscot community and tribal elders, sharing cultural stories and crafting lyrics and themes for songs for an original compact disk.
Nachmanoff’s visit to the island community is being sponsored through a $4,425 Maine Community Foundation grant to Boy’s and Girls Club Director Carla Fearon. John Bear Mitchell, associate director of the UMaine Wabanaki Center, and Laura Lindenfeld, director of UMaine’s Project Opportunity, assisted with the grant application.
The workshop will give the youth of the Penobscot Nation an opportunity to reflect upon and discuss with tribal elders their cultural heritage, language, history and Native identity. They’ll then put thoughts to words and write songs to be recorded and performed publicly at the end of the week-long workshop, according to Mitchell and Lindenfeld.
It will be Nachmanoff’s second visit to Indian Island. Nachmanoff conducted a song-writing workshop with Bangor area Jewish children last summer and spent an afternoon with Penobscot children at the invitation of Mitchell and Lindenfeld. The product of that session was a single song, “It’s Just for Fun,” a tune about Penobscot canoe racing. A group of boys on the island came up with the words and Nachmanoff, a soft-rock and folk artist, composed the music, recorded the song and sent the children a CD.
“It was absolutely amazing,” Lindenfeld recalls. “The kids loved the song.”
Adults liked the song, as well, according to Fearon. Those who heard it sung by the children and Nachmanoff “thought it was really good,” she says.
Mitchell says that as part of his community outreach efforts at the Wabanaki Center, he was anxious to engage Nachmanoff for a full week to bring together Penobscots of all ages to think about and appreciate their heritage and identify.
Mitchell is confident the young people will embrace the project, particularly because it is educational, yet outside the restrictive confines of school. Plus, many of the children already have met Nachmanoff. Children who didn’t participate in writing the canoeing song are especially anxious to become involved now, he says.
The resulting CD will become a part of tribal archives, according to Mitchell. The songs can be performed at future community events, including drum circles, public performances and school programs. Children also will be encouraged to translate the songs into their native language and represent the songs through other forms of artistic expression such as painting or short stories.
Collaborating with elders will tighten generational bonds within the Penobscot community and create a venue for elders to pass on their knowledge of tribal history, language and culture. At the end of the week, children involved with writing the songs with Nachmanoff will perform them in concert.
The event also will be memorialized on film, as Lindenfeld and Mark Kelley, assistant professor of broadcast journalism in the UMaine Department of Communication and Journalism, have received a separate micro-grant to enable a team of journalism students to produce a television news program about the songwriting workshop. Among the themes of the CMJ451 class is learning the importance of giving voice to community groups that have been under-represented or misrepresented in the news media.
Nachmanoff studied music and philosophy at Columbia and Oxford universities and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, Davis, in 1997. He retired from academia, however, to dedicate himself to music. His musical performance and recording style has been compared to “somewhere between the easy-going charm of Arlo Guthrie and the raw energy of Bruce Springsteen.” He has recorded five CDs and spent part of last summer touring the United Kingdom as backup for and musical accompanist for Scottish singer-songwriter Al Stewart (“Time Passages” and “Year of the Cat”).
Information about the project can be obtained by calling the Penobscot Nation Boys and Girls Club at (207) 817-7355, Project Opportunity at (207) 581-3850 or the Wabanaki Center at (207) 581-1417