Our e-Newsletter, From All Directions–Issue #100!
I’ve been busy getting ready to send out our e-Newsletter, From All Directions. It’s our 100th issue and it’s going to 5819 readers around the world. Our first issue went out January 25, 2001. I didn’t keep track then of the number of readers but I’m sure it was under 500. I do remember how nervous I was about that first issue. We didn’t know what to expect. Would people be interested only in traditional music and dance? Only American Indian performers? It has been an absolute delight over the years to watch our readership grow and to realize there is almost a hunger for information about the depth and breadth of what Indigenous artists and performers are doing, as opposed to what “everybody knows” they are doing.
From All Directions has been resolutely Indigenous and international from the beginning. Looking at that first issue, it covered so much, even then:
- an introduction to who we were
- Transjoik, a contemporary and still wonderful Sami band
- Refusilo, a band from Argentina
- Beatriz Piche Malen, a stunning Mapuche singer from Argentina
- plans for an Arctic peoples festival–ten years later, we still haven’t been able to make that happen, but we haven’t given up, either!
- and we were already getting the word out–there’s a notice that of an upcoming interview with Gordon Bronitsky in The Mongol Messenger, the oldest English-language publication in Mongolia, due to our work touring the Fernando Cellicion Traditional Zuni Dancers to Mongolia, which we finally achieved–three years later in 2004!
Over the years, our format has been much improved (and here a shoutout is due to the person responsible for our website and the format of our e-newsletter, our webmaster Sheldon Liebman–bravo!). Our readership has grown and blossomed too.
That first issue included a statement as valid now as it was then, a statement that has guided our work since we began in 1994:
“One foundation of our work has been our strong belief that indigenous people choose the message, whether the message is an art work, a traditional dance group, or whatever; our job is not to tinker with the message–our job is to turn up the volume, bringing them to the attention of venues and museums and institutions around the world”