Head to the Skirball for a day-long, intergenerational celebration of indigenous and Jewish languages and cultures featuring insightful panel discussions, activities and games, and poetry, music, and performance.

Family Art Studio

• Unearth and Explore: Soapstone Amulets
  11:30 am and 1:30 pm
  Teaching artist Lazaro Arvizu will discuss and display steatite stonework of the Gabrielino/Tongva people during a lesson on Native California lifeways. Then, carve and decorate a soapstone amulet that you can wear home.
   
• Chachaanke': A Traditional Tongva Game
  All day
  Decorate game pieces, learn how to play, and learn a song in the Tongva language.

Magnin Auditorium

Panel discussions

• A conversation with artist B.A. Van Sise and scholar Ilan Stavans
  12:30–1:30 pm

• Verses of Fire: Language and poetry as a mechanism of identity and survival
  3:00–4:00 pm
  Preserving indigenous languages and Jewish languages through poetry.

  Original sources for poetry are from Cherokee, Ladino, Mojave, Muskogee, Nahuatl, and Yiddish languages.

• Pochoville: Musings by columnist Gustavo Arellano and scholar Ilan Stavans
  4:30–5:30 pm
  Explore how language is an instrument of survival—no language is static, it transforms through immigration and over generations. Why do languages disappear or transform?

Taper Courtyard

• World champion hoop dancer Terry L. Goedel and his family bring Yakama and Tulalip stories to life through the art, sport, and ceremony of hoop dance. 
• N8tive Hoop showcases the rich traditions of indigenous peoples during this exciting multigenerational performance.
• Learn more about community organizations that help support indigenous communities as well as endangered languages.

B.A. Van Sise is a photographic artist and linguist focused on the intersection between language and visual arts. Van Sise’s artwork has been featured in exhibitions at the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ; Woody Guthrie Center, Tulsa, OK; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA; Los Angeles Center of Photography; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. His short nonfiction and poetry have appeared in such publications as Poets & Writers, Rattle, the North American Review, and the Los Angeles Review. He is fluent or conversational in English, Ladino, Italian, French, German, and Russian.

Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, the publisher of Restless Books.

Gustavo Arellano is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, covering Southern California everything and a bunch of the West and beyond. He previously worked at OC Weekly, where he was an investigative reporter for fifteen years and editor for six, wrote a column called ¡Ask a Mexican!, and is the author of “Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America.” He’s the child of two Mexican immigrants, one of whom came to this country in the trunk of a Chevy.