Above: Honored Elders recognized at the Indigenous Wisdom Celebration smiling as they hold certificates of recognition for their life’s work preserving their tribes’ traditions and homelands.[left to right: Audrey Osborne, Honorable Ron Goode, Jennifer Malone]. Photo by Roman Rain Tree.
In honor of National Native American Heritage Month this November, California Humanities encourages everyone to celebrate the stories, culture, and traditions of Indigenous Californians. This goal is core to the work of many projects that we support, including Indigenous Wisdom: Celebrating Our Central Valley Indigenous Elders in Fresno. With funding from a Humanities for All Quick Grant, this project organized a community event last summer to showcase the life and work of three Central Valley Indigenous elders and their work in environmental stewardship and Native language preservation.
Project Director Ginny Barnes is a First Year Student Success Librarian at California State University, Fresno, where they support new and incoming students in their navigation through the complex world of research and higher education. Below, Ginny recounts the need for this event and the profound impact it had on the local community.
In collaboration with our Neum Native American Student Association and Fresno State American Indian Studies, the Fresno State Library hosted a community dinner and film screening in August 2024 honoring three Indigenous elders in the Central Valley: the Honorable Ron Goode, Jennifer Malone, and Audrey Osborne. Local, Native Community Organizer, Roman Rain Tree, initiated the idea for this project because of the need for more celebration within the local Native community and opportunities for Native youth and elders to connect and share knowledge. Our audience included our Fresno State Native community (students, faculty, and staff), our Fresno State leadership (the President, Cabinet, Deans), and the surrounding Native community including organizations such as Fresno American Indian Health Project. Following the film screening, we held an honoring ceremony for the elders with drumming led by another local Native elder, Delaine Bill. We concluded a Q&A with the elders and drumming to send us off in a good way.
Our project succeeded in providing engaging humanities-based learning opportunities for people in our community and meeting our goals: Through their films and discussion, the honored elders demonstrated how California Indigenous knowledge and science is endangered through the continued lack of Federal Acknowledgement. We provided a space for connection among Native youth at Fresno State and elders in the community, as well as the larger Central Valley Native community, and were able to strengthen community bonds through art, shared experience, and storytelling.
documents the successful advocacy of Audrey Osborne in her efforts to protect Jesse Morrow Mountain—part of the traditional homeland of the Choinumni tribe who named it Wa-Ha-Lish—from
a proposed aggregate mining operation. Photo by Roman Rain Tree.
Though the Indigenous Wisdom Celebration project was a one-day event, it reflected the culmination of over a year of intentional planning and discussion with our community. The most rewarding part of my experience has been building a relationship with the Neum Native American Student Association. The club’s practice of centering the health and wellbeing of every person within their collaborations is something I now try to make part of all my partnerships. Not only did we host a successful event, we established a strong foundation of respect and friendship from which future events and initiatives can flourish between our library and Neum.
One example of the thoughtful design that resulted from this kind of teamwork included truly honoring elders in every sense of the word. As our event brought the wider Native community and many elderly guests to our Fresno State campus, we made efforts to think through every accommodation possible to make this an accessible and welcoming occasion. This included detailed parking directions and signage, maps to the event venues, and volunteers directing and escorting guests from the moment they drove onto campus until they stepped into their cars. We were able to provide golf cart escort service for guests with mobility limitations and reserved soft seating at the screening for elderly guests. The films, drumming, and honoring ceremony for the elders triggered memories and conversation, and the community was so grateful for this healing and learning event.
“Our library is grateful to be in the traditional homelands of the Yokuts and Mono peoples,” said project director Ginny Barnes. “With this effort, we are eager to move beyond symbolic gestures and deepen our allyship for Indigenous justice. Working with the Native community at Fresno State and in the local area to plan these programs, I am looking forward to the conversations that will spark and keep Indigenous knowledge and traditions alive.”
– Ginny Barnes ahead of the project start in 2023
