Indigenous Performance Productions

Help us manifest our new storytelling project:  "The Fox and the Butterfly", a project featuring storytelling from Indigenous Youth.

We are seeking your support to help fund the residency to develop this project including:  five months of storytelling workshops for self-identified Indigenous youth at Olympia and Capitol High Schools culminating in a live storytelling (reading) event featuring these young people in an Indigenous celebration with film premieres, food and Native arts vendors hosted by the Washington Center for the Performing Arts on May 23rd.   

What is "The Fox and the Butterfly"?

Native communities have a rich history of oral storytelling.  "The Fox and the Butterfly" carries this fire by providing during/after school workshops on storytelling at Olympia and Capitol High School for five months.  Each month, high school students will be offered culturally grounded during or after school workshops in poetry, traditional storytelling, theater/playwriting, personal storytelling and creative writing.  

Teaching artists are:

Dylan Elwood (Turtle Mountain Chippewa), teaching artist, is Literary Arts Manager of of Red Eagle Soaring Native Youth Theatre, located in Seattle, Washington, for sixteen years. He has acted in and co-written 40+ productions and engaged with the Seattle Native community, culminating in the premiere of his production Killer Whale and the Black Rush at ACT Theatre among others.

Rena Priest (Lummi), is the author of Positively Uncivilized (Raven Chronicles Press, 2025); Northwest Know-How: Beaches (Sasquatch Books, 2022); Sublime Subliminal (Floating Bridge Press, 2018); and Patriarchy Blues (Moonpath Press, 2017), which received an American Book Award. Priest is the recipient of an Allied Arts Foundation Professional Poets Award and fellowships from Indigenous Nations Poets and the Vadon Foundation.  Priest was appointed Washington State poet laureate in 2021 and is the 2022 Maxine Cushing Gray Distinguished Writing Fellow. She currently resides near her tribal community in Bellingham, Washington, where she was born and raised. In 2022, Priest received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. 

Filming "The Aunties"	Film Crew
Filming "The Aunties"	The Aunties school Show