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Sacred Breath May 2020 author Sara Marie Ortiz -
Sacred Breath Nov 2019 artists Tommy Pico and Lummi Island Blackhawk Singers -
Sacred Breath May 2019 artists Elissa Washuta and Sondra Segundo -
Sacred Breath Feb 2017 artists Raven Heavy Runner, Ernestine Hayes, and Elissa Washuta -
Sacred Breath Nov 2016 artists Roger Fernandes, Payton Bordley, Sasha LaPointe -
The Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington hosts an annual literary and storytelling series. Sacred Breath features Indigenous writers and storytellers at wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ - Intellectual House on the University of Washington Seattle campus. Storytelling offers a spiritual connection, a sharing of sacred breath. Literature, similarly, preserves human experience and ideals. Both forms are durable and transmit power that teaches us how to live. Both storytelling and reading aloud can impact audiences through the power of presence, allowing for the experience of the transfer of sacred breath as audiences are immersed in the experience of being inside stories and works of literature.
Save the Date - Next Sacred Breath event May 7th 2020!
Our next event will be Thursday, May 7th 6:30-8:30pm featuring local author and poet Sara Marie Ortiz! Sara is an Acoma Pueblo poet, a performing artist, a filmmaker, and an indigenous peoples activist. She earned a BFA at the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles. Her poems have been published in journals such as Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review, New Poets of the American West, and the anthology Sing: Indigenous Poetry of the Americas (2011). She is the author of the collection of poems Red Milk (volume 1, 2013). Ortiz has received a Truman Capote literary fellowship, a Brigham Young Morning Star Creative Writing Award, and an American Indian Graduate Center Fellowship. The daughter of poet Simon J. Ortiz, she is currently working on a documentary about her father’s life and legacy. She works as an education administrator in Burien, Washington.
Read about Sacred Breath in the A&S Perspectives newsletter.
These events are free and open to the public, but registration is required, as space is limited. wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ – Intellectual House is located at 4249 Whitman Court, Seattle, WA.
Sacred Breath is sponsored by the Department of American Indian Studies, the Intellectual House Academic Programming Committee, the Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies, the Banks Center for Educational Justice, and the Squaxin Island Tribe.