The McKissick Museum’s mission statement is “telling the story of Southern life: community, culture and the environment.” The museum accomplishes this by honing in on different Southeastern traditional cultures and then showing how various parts of the stories intersect.
FOLKFabulous, a family-friendly event that featured performances and speeches from all walks of modern Native-American life, marked the beginning of this year’s McKissick focus on Southeastern Native-American culture.
“We wanted people to understand that being native is all-inclusive — it’s not just the idea that I think a lot of people have about what a Native person looks like,” said Ja-Nae Epps, Operations Manager at McKissick Museum.
The event featured four community leaders from the Wassamasaw, Santee, Cheraw and Nottoway tribes, who spoke on the modern life of Native Americans and how the Natives can define themselves going forward.
To further that goal, the event featured Native Americans from all walks of life and of various professions, such as pottery, beadwork and stone carving. Dancers came and brought young children dressed in costumes. They were uncertain and clearly still learning, but their parents wanted them to practice.
“These are normal people, young people, being active participants in celebrating their heritage,” Epps said .
The “Traditions, Change and Celebration: Native Artists of the Southeast” exhibit will run until July 25, 2015 Traditional art forms will be displayed, notable because they weren’t always considered art.
“[The exhibit] deals with traditional garb, regalia, pieces of individual culture that have become artwork,” Epps said.
Running parallel to the former is “Taking Root: The Summer Brothers and the History of Pomaria Nursery,” an exhibition on the Pomaria Nursery, a botanical laboratory that adapted a wide range of trees and plants to the southern climate.
The fruits of the Summer family’s labor are all around, shown in a map in McKissick that loosely shows where each type of tree and plant ended up.
The exhibit is about interaction with the concrete results of science, which is no mistake.
“One of our other specialties is helping researchers share what they do with the general public,” Epps said. “If you’re a researcher, it’s not just about publishing it … We help them put that same information out to the general public, not just to other scientists.”
The museum has been called a “learning laboratory” by various administrators, and for good reason — McKissick strives to make natural science and native cultures accessible and understandable to the student body at large.
They’ve done this through events like FOLKFabulous, and in April McKissick will host jazz musician Pura Fé for a concert to further show the reality of modern Native-American living.
FOLKFabulous may be the first event of the semester, but it’s just the beginning.