PORT ANGELES — With her song, 15-year-old Leelah Smith wowed her crowd.
Leelah, a student of the Klallam language at Port Angeles High School, sang “Amazing Grace” — alternating verses in English and Klallam — during the Peninsula College Longhouse’s first-ever Native Cultural Fair on Thursday.
The Lower Elwha Klallam tribal member will travel next month to New York City to perform in three cathedrals with the Port Angeles High choir, so she wanted to get in as much practice as possible.
In her second year studying the Klallam language, Leelah translated the hymn’s words into her ancestors’ tongue, while her Klallam teacher, Jamie Valadez, helped her set them in rhythm.
“I love my culture,” said the teen.
Tribal culture
Around her, tribal culture filled the hall on the college campus at 1502 E. Lauridsen Blvd.: exhibits about Tse-whit-zen, the Klallam village discovered beneath what is now Marine Drive; the Elwha River, dammed in 1910 and set free in 2014; displays about the Makah nation and its whaling tradition and about the tribal Canoe Journeys every summer.
Also at the longhouse was a matching game for Klallam vocabulary words, the words Smith’s elders were once officially forbidden to speak.
Port Angeles High School’s Valadez and Dan Lieberman, who teaches at the North Olympic Peninsula Skills Center, worked with their students and college officials to produce the fair.
This gathering reaches out to and welcomes high schoolers, said Ami Magisos, the college’s tribal liaison.
‘Honored’
“We’re so honored to have this collaboration” with the high school and the skills center, she added.
And so everyone mingled: teenagers from Port Angeles and Forks, tribal officials, college students and teachers. Cellphones rang. The Klallam Drum Group played with gusto.
The cultural fair also had a table full of “Success Story” fliers.
These showed young men and women from Forks and Port Angeles who, having taken the skills center’s “Natural Resources Options” courses, went on to college and jobs in forestry, fishing and conservation.
After the fair, Lower Elwha Klallam Tribal Chairwoman Frances Charles and members Suzie Bennett and Arlene Wheeler presented a Studium Generale program in the college’s Little Theater.
In it, they spoke about the cultural belongings of the Elwha people that have been brought home to the Elwha Klallam Heritage Center.
New blanket
Another highlight of Thursday’s Native Cultural Fair came with the Elwha tribe’s unveiling of something new and symbolic for the longhouse: a black, white and red button blanket sewn by tribal members with help from students at Port Angeles High.
College President Luke Robins stepped forward to offer his gratitude.
Thank you, he said, “for all the hard work and all the love” that went into the gift.
The longhouse, Robins added, is a place “to come and learn more about each other . . . to celebrate not only our differences but our common humanity.”
________
Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
