Elizabeth Woody

November marks the return of Native American Heritage Month, and Central Oregon Community College is hosting a variety of music, poetry and comedy events in Bend and Madras to celebrate local Indigenous culture.

The first event takes place at 6 p.m. Saturday at Pinckney Performing Arts Center on COCC’s Bend’s campus and will feature a poetry reading by Elizabeth Woody, who in 2016 became Oregon’s first Native American poet laureate.

Woody is a member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Navajo, Wasco and Yakama tribes, serves as executive director of The Museum at Warm Springs and will participate in an audience Q&A Saturday.

COCC Native American Program Coordinator Jeremiah Rector said, “We’re at a point … of showing our strength and resiliency in general. We’re thriving members of communities, and each and every one of us has different talents. We’re using those talents and incorporating them … to celebrate each individual’s culture.”

He brings up Grammy Award-winning flute player James Edmund Greeley, who will perform at 2 p.m. Tuesday afternoon in a Pinckney Center program with rapper Blue Flamez, aka Scott Kalama, a member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and a 2022 Native American Music Awards nominee.

“James is not only Warm Springs, he’s Hopi, too, so he brings those two aspects of that culture in,” Rector said. “He personifies that with his flute playing. The talent that he has there, just how great he is at it — you know, I’d heard him on video and CDs and stuff — but when I heard him in person? Completely different. Amazing just how he wields that flute.”

Greeley told this reporter that flute gurus such as R. Carlos Nakai, of Navajo-Ute heritage, were instrumental in his picking up the flute himself.

“I probably got into his music somewhere around ‘95 or so,” he said. “I started college and was inspired by his music to do my homework because rock music, hip-hop music or pop music wasn’t cutting it for getting some homework done.”

Later on, he came across a flute that had been gifted to his father.

“He liked Johnny Cash till his last breath, but I’d never known him to play an instrument,” Greeley said. “He could do ‘Hot Cross Buns’ on the piano … but it was nothing to make him quit his day job.”

Greeley said there was no one around to teach him how to play the flute, nor any Youtube, so he set out on his own. On his third day of teaching himself to play, he’d figured out the primary scale.

By the late 1990s, he was traveling frequently to the East Coast to play at Indian Health Service headquarters in Maryland and the National Museum of the American Indian in New York. In 2017, he won a Native American Music Award and in 2022, as a collaborator on jazz artist Esperanza Spalding’s Grammy-winning “Songwrights Apothecary Lab” album.

“That’s a five-time Grammy winner who picked me to be on her album,” he said. “And then I became a Grammy winner with her album.”

On the tune “Formwela 2,” he played his personal eagle and deer bone whistles that he “carved up to bring on some timeless energy that she fell in love with,” Greeley said. “She was jumping in circles in the sound room during our recording session.”

COCC’s Native American Heritage Month programming concludes with comedian Gilbert Brown’s 6:30 p.m. set Nov. 17 on COCC’s Madras campus. Also known aa Naughty Rez Dog, Gilbert is a member of the Modoc, Klamath, Paiute and Warm Springs tribes.

All of the events are free and open to the public.

For his program Tuesday in Bend, Greeley said he hopes that the public will turn up to listen with open hearts and open minds, he said.

Rector of COCC concurred.

“Just come, have fun, enjoy and learn,” he said. “The folks that are coming, they’re good people. They’re entertainers, but at the same time, they’re educators, so come and enjoy.”