What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/991544
WALTER ECHO-HAWK Keynote Speaker Born in 1948 at the Pawnee (Okla.) Indian Hospital, Walter Echo-Hawk saw more of the world than many youngsters by the time he graduated from high school. His father was in the Air Force, he explains, and the family spent three of his teenage years in Puerto Rico. But he still wanted to come back to his native lands — and did, attending Oklahoma State University just a few miles from his childhood home before heading to New Mexico for law school. Why law? "My folks wanted to see some change take place in our tribal community in the late '60s and really encouraged me to go to law school," he says. "There were very few American Indians in law school — you could probably have counted them on your fingers and toes." In a career filled with "very diverse" work representing Indian tribes and Native people, Echo-Hawk has been a front-row witness to what he calls "a very great social movement" not unlike the fights for civil rights and women's rights. "We have regained a lot of our cultural rights and heritage and pride," he says. "A lot of challenges do remain, but we have come a long way" since he completed law school in 1973. "The centerpiece for the Native social movement is self-determination — the basic human right of determining our own destiny. Black America sought equality under the law, and that's a goal for Native America as well, but it has been the central aspiration to retain our culture and languages and self-government, our ways of life, to be able to enjoy our world views and value systems and to retain our cultural integrity — which is a pretty basic, ordinary human goal in most peoples and cultures around the world." Echo-Hawk will speak at 7 p.m. June 15 at Record in downtown Bentonville. MARY KATHRYN NAGLE Playwright Mary Kathryn Nagle celebrates a rare combination of talents. Born in Oklahoma City and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, she is both an attorney — working for tribal sovereignty — and a successful playwright. She is visiting Northwest Arkansas this month for TheatreSquared's Arkansas New Play Festival and will present her play, "Crossing Mnisose," as part of the MONAH symposium. The play, as described by T2 artistic director Bob Ford, follows Sacajawea's journey as she guided the U.S. Corps of Discovery up the Mnisose (or what Europeans named the "Missouri River"). "But that's not all," he says. "In 2017, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers granted an easement to allow a pipeline to cross the very 40 WHAT'S UP! JUNE 10-16, 2018 COVER STORY MONAH Continued From Page 3 Nagle Echo-Hawk