Meet Indigenous artists, chefs, musicians, dancers, athletes and more from across the Western Hemisphere. This year’s Smithsonian Folklife Festival “Indigenous Voices of the Americas: Celebrating the National Museum of the American Indian” will highlight living traditions of Indigenous peoples and honor contemporary and traditional creative expressions, celebrations and community connections.
The festival will take place Wednesday, June 26, to Monday, July 1, on the National Mall between Third and Seventh streets. All events are free, and the festival will be open daily from 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. On select evenings, live music on the festival’s Four Directions Stage will run until 7 p.m.
Over six days packed with programming, the festival will feature more than 290 participants from 60 Indigenous communities from across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina and Brazil.
Highlights of the sports program will include skateboarders performing along Jefferson Drive and offering lessons to any young visitors with their own helmets and protective gear, skateboarders including Di’orr Greenwood who turns skateboard decks into works of art, lacrosse players from Onondaga Nation who will teach visitors about the sport and explain its origins, and Arctic games demonstrated by Yup’ik and Inuit athletes.
And don’t miss all the Indigenous-inspired cuisine both on the Mall, and inside the museum at the Mitsitam Native Foods Cafe.