Discover Storied Objects from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival: The 80s

As described by folklorist Peggy Yocom, William Richard’s delicate fan towers are “mind-tricking sculptures” that conjure birds in flight or dancers’ swirling skirts. 

This carving consists of two fans perched on a vertical shaft that includes two round “balls-in-cages.”

After working several years in logging camps outside Phillips, Maine, Richard married and helped raise five children. He provided for his family by working as a logger and whittling small pieces for sale on the side. In the early 1930s, he learned to make the fan towers through an unusual apprenticeship:

“It was 1933, during the Depression, and to make ends meet, Richard, like many area woodsmen and farmers, made and sold beer and wine to add to the $1 a cord they got for chopping wood. For his efforts, he was arrested by Sheriff Leavitt and slapped into the Franklin County Jail. 

There he met fellow French woodsman Raymond Bolduc who taught Richard how to make the fan towers, a traditional art form known especially in Finland, Sweden, and Russia. The fans were once made throughout the boundary area of the United States and Canada by woodsmen in winter logging camps…”

—Peggy Yocom, folklorist

The story of the victory of Lord Rāma—who rescues his kidnapped wife Sita from the ten-headed demon king Rāvana—is reenacted each year throughout India during the ten-day Hindu celebration of Dassehra. At the 1985 Festival, the drama unfolded in the center of Mela! An Indian Fair.

A melā is a combination bazaar, street fair, and cultural festival that people travel far and wide to attend. At the composite melā in Washington, D.C., visitors were immersed in the sights, sounds, smells, and rituals of regional India. 

An outdoor “Learning Center” housed a performing space and workshop area devoted to ritual activities. There, Jamil Ahmed, Bal Mukand, Gopal Singh, and others from Uttar Pradesh worked to create the towering effigies of Rāvana and his allies, son Meghanada and brother Kumbhakarna. 

Visitors watched them carefully split and tie together the bamboo sticks that formed the structure of the flamboyant characters. 

On the evening of July 5, the epic confrontation between Rāma and Rāvana took place on the National Mall. At the drama’s climax, Rāma shoots a blazing arrow into the demon king, who explodes into flames. 

It is a noisy conflagration—all three effigies are packed with firecrackers. In the end, good triumphs over evil, and the audience is cleansed in the process.

Matachines dancer María Teresa González explains how she embroidered her dance skirt...

“Each person chooses what he or she likes, something that has special meaning to them. I chose to use the small carrizo (river cane). I use them as beads and to form a cross. It’s a kind of prayer.”

The troupe followed a decorated cross down the Mall, forming dance patterns in time to the persistent rhythms of the accordion and drum. The ringing bells and clanging of the reeds on the nagüillas accentuated the sounds.

Each dancer also shook a gourd rattle. The cadence of the music and energetic stepping drew visitors from across the Festival who eagerly followed the procession.


—Olivia Cadaval, curator

Can an artifact that includes a Styrofoam penguin, a blown glass ship, watch parts, and a plastic-coated wire flower be called “folk art”? 

Yes, when it represents the work skills and innovative interpretation of participants from the Massachusetts program of the 1988 Folklife Festival joining forces to create a bocce tournament award.

As a newly minted Festival program curator, I had to overcome a huge learning curve in figuring out how to represent a whole state with approximately one hundred people on the National Mall. 

Including Italians was a must; they make up the second largest ethnic group in the state. And where Italians live, so do bocce courts and players. The game is easy to learn, and building a court, while daunting, was not impossible on the Mall. 

When the Festival opened, it quickly became a center of attention for participants and visitors alike. A friendly competition arose between staff and participants, and a tournament was born.

For me, the award is a metaphor for the Massachusetts program itself, and my fond memories of the first program I curated. 

The participants who crafted the award brought their occupational skills together to craft something whimsical but with amazing depth: old, new, ingenious, playful, and heartfelt.

It also reflects the skills they had honed over many years of work in a way they never had before, with fellow Massachusetts residents they had just met. 

The award tells a story of cooperation, pride, respect, friendship, and humor. 

A curator could not have asked for a better artifact as a reminder of her first Festival. 


—Betty Belanus, program curator

Sometimes called the fastest sport on two feet, lacrosse is played today on all continents by men and women on high school, college, and professional teams. Many players and fans may not know that lacrosse originated as a Native American game associated with traditional rituals.

When Europeans first made contact with indigenous North Americans, they observed lacrosse played in many different styles. 

Among the Huron people in the early seventeenth century in what is now southern Ontario, different clans—Bear, Deer, Hawk, Porcupine, and Wolf—competed against each other, with sometimes sixty men playing all day. 

Painter George Catlin’s field notes and drawings of the Choctaw playing lacrosse in the 1830s in what is now eastern Oklahoma described hundreds of players on a field half a mile long.

The foremost scholar of Native American lacrosse was Thomas Vennum Jr., (1934-2017), author of American Indian Lacrosse: Little Brother of War (1994) and Lacrosse Legends of the First Americans (2007).

Before retiring in 2001, Vennum served as senior ethnomusicologist at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, where he worked on a variety of projects—films, recordings, and Folklife Festival programs.

Today’s sticks are typically made from lightweight metals, such as aluminum, scandium, and titanium, but this stick...

Folkways Records was acquired by the Smithsonian in 1987. In 1988, it transformed into Smithsonian Folkways and continues to carry on the work that Folkways began forty years earlier, documenting the world in sound. 

Some recordings have been made at the Festival; many have been made later with musicians featured during the Festival.

By the summer of 1989, the new Smithsonian Folkways record label was in full operation. It became the second major program of the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (then called the Smithsonian Office of Folklife Programs), joining the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. That year’s Festival included a program on the Caribbean region.

It made sense to try to tie the label and Festival together.