Publications, Recordings & Videos

~ Publications ~

"Art for Life: The Therapeutic Power and Promise of the Arts"

• Produced by the North Dakota Council on the Arts in the hopes of encouraging individuals, organizations, and institutions to utilize art therapy or therapeutic art activities. This complimentary publication documents a pilot program and study with elders in a long-term care facility.
  Cover art for "Art for Life"

Faces of Identity, Hands of Skill: Folk Arts in North Dakota
By Troyd A. Geist

• This 40-page, full-color, book focuses on the traditions embodied in the lives of North Dakota folk artists representing twelve cultural groups: Mandan, Dakota Sioux, Sisseton Sioux, Lakota/Hidatsa, Metis, Banat German, Ukrainian, German-Russian, Armenian, Khmer, Kurdish, and Vietnamese. It attempts to illustrate the integrated nature of culture and to show how folk art brings a face to familial, religious, and cultural identity. The traditions of these folk artists have passed the test of time, surviving and reflecting immigration, "hard years," political and religious persecution, and wars.
• Price: $15.95 plus 6% tax, and $3.00 shipping/handling. E-mail comserv@nd.gov or call (701) 328-7590 to order.
• Cover art for Faces of Identity, Hands of Skill

From the Wellspring: Faith Soil, Tradition
Folk Arts from Ukrainian Culture in North Dakota
By Troyd A. Geist

• This 35-page, full-color book shares the rich cultural arts and traditions of Ukrainians in North Dakota. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Ukrainians came to North Dakota in search of land. While starting over in this new land, they held on to what was familiar to them: their identity, folk arts, and traditions. This book focuses on four traditions: embroidery, decorative ritual bread making and wheat-weaving, pysanky (decorated Easter eggs), and cymbaly (hammered dulcimer) making and playing. The book also has a natural dyes and symbolism section describing the colors and designs used on pysanky.
• Price: $15.95 plus 6% tax, and $3.00 shipping/handling. E-mail comserv@nd.gov or call (701) 328-7590 to order.
• Cover art for From the Wellspring

Iron Spirits
Editors: Nicholas Curchin Vrooman, Project Director, and Patrice Avon Marvin
Photographers: Jane Gudmundson, and Wayne Gudmundson
Designed by: Vern Goodin

• This 116-page book is about the tradition of blacksmith made iron grave crosses, the people who made them and the communities they served. It is a story of hard work and faith. The crosses are a profile and inspiring body of work by a small number of people and can be considered some of America's finest folk art. Through them we hope to understand and appreciate art and culture in a very fundamental way.
• Price: $10.95 plus 6% tax, and $3.00 shipping/handling. E-mail comserv@nd.gov or call (701) 328-7590 to order.
• Cover Art for Iron Spirits

Prairie Patterns: Folk Arts in North Dakota
By Christopher Martin

• This 126-page book contains biographical sketches of 32 North Dakota folk artists with color and black and white photographs of their work. These art forms are broken down into four categories: Celebration, Social Gathering, and Belief; Occupational Skills and Western Crafts; Sport, Hobby, and Play; and Ethnic and Tribal Decoration. In the first category, readers will find traditions including quilting and American Indian pipes; in the next, gun engraving and wheelwrighting. Sport, Hobby, and Play includes dogsled and snowshoe making as well as Scandinavian figure carving. Finally, Ethiopian coiled baskets and Ojibway birchbark baskets and beadwork are two features in Decoration.
• Price: $25.00 plus 6% tax, and $3.00 shipping/handling. E-mail comserv@nd.gov or call (701) 328-7590 to order.
• Cover art for Prairie Patterns

Sister Rosalia's Lace
By Christopher Martin

• This 16-page exhibit catalog features black and white photographs of bobbin lace by Sister Rosalia Haberl. Sister Rosalia, a Franciscan Sister from the Convent in Hankinson, ND, was born in 1897 in the small town of Schonsee in Bavaria. As a young girl, she attended the government-sponsored Royal Bobbin Lace School for three years. Bobbin lace has become a rare folk art, due primarily to the tremendous amount of time required to make a single piece. To make bobbin lace, fine linen thread wound around wooden bobbins is guided around pins stuck into a pattern. In 1988, Sister Rosalia was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship, the nation's highest honor for a traditional artist, form the National Endowment for the Arts.
• Price: $3.00 plus 6% tax, and $3.00 shipping/handling. E-mail comserv@nd.gov or call (701) 328-7590 to order.
• Cover art for Sister Rosalia's Lace

~ Recordings ~

All CD's are $15.95 plus 6% tax, and $3.00 shipping/handling. E-mail comserv@nd.gov or call (701) 328-7590 to order.

Spirit Woods
Traditional Stories and Songs of Forests and Trees

• The tree is an ancient, near universal symbol found in cultures across the world playing a central role in Germanic, Celtic, Norse, and American Plains Indian lore. To this day, revered trees like oak, ash,elm, cottonwood, evergreen, and others figure prominently in folk beliefs, stories, songs, and art. Told by award-winning storytellers, this collection of folk stories illustrates the cultural, artistic, educational, and spiritual place trees occupy.

Achikadidi
Traditional Ma'di Music of Southern Sudan and Northern Uganda

• Named after a famous waterfall in Ma'di territory in southern Sudan, this CD features traditional musicians and singers from a growing Ma'di refugee community in Fargo who continue to play music and sing as they make a new life. The CD's ten songs, performed in a call-and-response style, reflect Ma'di culture and history ranging from New Year celebrations to marriage traditions and from British and Arab colonial rule to the current civil war in Sudan. An enhanced CD component includes the traditional story The Friendship Between Hare, Lia, and Leopard, a video of the song Kalendo, as well as maps, song translations with associated cultural notes, and photographs designed to provide a broader context for Ma'di music and culture.

Un de' che cha pi: The Way We Are
By Mary Louise Defender Wilson

• The third spoken word CD by Mary Louise Defender Wilson produced by the NDCA, this CD features five traditional stories that deal with four issues in human nature that people struggle to keep in balance: food, violence and anger, group or gang tendencies, and sex. The previous two CDs - The Elders Speak (with Ojibway elder and storyteller Francis Cree) and My Relatives Say - were co-produced with Makoche Music of Bismarck. The new CD features several stories about Unktomi, or Spiderman, a trickster representing human nature before we became "civilized," according to Mary Louise. She states that the issues of food, anger, group tendencies, and sex are inherent in every human being and must be kept in balance if we are to live freely to be the "kind of civilized person we are meant to be."

Faerie Harp
By Debi Rogers and Sue Bicknell

• A delightful array of Celtic melodies and stories from the British isles are woven together in this aural tapestry. Faerie Harp conjures images of a land steeped in magical enchantment. With a strong sense of tradition, three ancient stories, instrumental tunes, and lush vocals sung in Irish, Welsh, and English blend with guitars, Gaelic harps, Highland bagpipes, and fiddle to transport you to Celtia.

At the Fiddler's Knee
By Dick and Lisa Barrett 

This compact disc features Dick Barrett, one of the best traditional fiddle players in the country, his talented wife Lisa, and two of their gifted apprentices, John Owen Lardinois, Jr. and Preston Schmidt. The deeply rooted music, presented here in 29 tracks, is intertwined with colorful  interviews that illustrate how the fiddle tradition and this master fiddler's life have shaped one another.

My Relatives Say
Traditional Dakotah Stories as Told by Mary Louise Defender Wilson
Limited quantities avaialable at the NDCA office, call (701) 328-7590).

• "They are wiser than us in many ways," says Mary Louise Defender Wilson. The lessons and character of humanity and how to live in a civilized way are taught through traditional stories and are exemplified by the animals, wind and stars observed around us. This audio and enhanced CD contains cultural content, photographs, and video clips of the animals and artwork spoken of in the stories.

Morning Star Whispered
Traditional Mandan and Hidatsa Stories and Flute Music by Keith Bear

• Keith Bear, whose name in the Nu E’ta (Mandan) language is O’Mashi! Ryu Tâ, meaning Northern Lights, is an award-winning Mandan and Hidatsa flute player, storyteller, and traditionalist of exceptional talent living in Drags Wolf Village on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation of northwestern North Dakota. He has performed nationally at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the Library of Congress-American Folklife Center, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the National Museum of the American Indian as well as internationally in Switzerland, Ireland, Wales, Germany, Austria, and Canada.
• This recording, produced by the North Dakota Council on the Arts, features Keith playing music on flutes he carved himself and telling stories involving the Morning Star and other astronomical bodies. The enhanced component provides cultural context to the stories told and ‘the stars’ [Sun, Moon, Mars, Venus, comets, etc.] referenced in the audio component through images of traditional art, text involving folk beliefs, an interactive map, audio interviews, and animation from NASA and the European Space Agency.
• This CD is $14.98 (plus $4.25 shipping & handling per order [not per CD]). To purchase this CD, contact Makoché Music at 208 N 4th St., Bismarck, ND 58501; telephone: 800.ND.SOUND; web site: www.makoche.com; or email: info@makoche.com.

The Elders Speak
Dakotah and Ojibway Stories of the Land. Told by Gourd Woman and Eagle Heart
Limited quantities avaialable at the NDCA office, call (701) 328-7590).

• With a simple offering and acceptance of tobacco, the "Old Ones" unfold ancient stories and make known a mystical and spiritual land. The storytellers speak of a land where the waters, buttes, stones, plants and animals reveal the lessons and origins of Humanity. These places and their stories are all around us and speak to us today. Gourd Woman and Eagle Heart, with kindly hearts and a genuine desire to preserve these rare stories for future generations, share them on this remarkable recording, available on cassette and enhanced CD. Great for children, adults, students, educators and those simply wanting to be entertained, this enhanced CD contains maps and photos of the landmark areas and folk arts described in their stories. This enhanced CD can be heard in any CD player.

~ Videos ~

Prairie Crosses, Prairie Voices: Iron Crosses of the Great Plains
Produced by Prairie Public Television, written by Dr. Timothy J. Kloberdanz

• "Prairie Crosses, Prairie Voices: Iron Crosses of the Great Plains"—a video documentary co-produced by Prairie Public Broadcasting and the North Dakota State University Libraries— follows the history of the traditional iron cemetery grave marker as the folk art migrated from Germany to the Russian Ukraine—and eventually to the Great Plains of North Dakota and Canada. The iron crosses—some intricate, some simple, but no two quite the same—are found in cemeteries and in agricultural fields across the region. Major funding for the documentary was provided by the North Dakota Humanities Council, North Dakota State University Libraries, the North Dakota Council on the Arts, which receives funding from the state legislature and the National Endowment for the Arts, and the members of Prairie Public Broadcasting.
• For more information, visit the Prairie Public Television Web site