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Sharing their Myaamia culture

Myaamia students to participate at Smithsonian Folklife Festival in D.C. this July

By Miami University

June 18^th, 2025

'an honor and an amazing opportunity '

Kaleb McMullen ’25 is looking forward to playing Myaamia lacrosse on the long, grassy National Mall during the Smithsonian Folklife Festival July 2-7 in Washington, D.C.

“I think it is such an honor and an amazing opportunity to do that, culturally and historically,” said McMullen, who majored in Media and Communications with a specialization in Film Production.

Kaleb McMullen '25 plays against with Michael Sekulich '25 during lacrosse practice in Oxford (photo by Scott Kissell).

Sharing knowledge in four cultural areas

The Myaamia Center, the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma's research and educational development arm based at Miami University, has been invited to take part in this year’s festival, which honors contemporary living cultural traditions and celebrates those who practice and sustain them. Only four tribes have been invited to participate.

McMullen is among seven Miami University students or recent graduates — all citizens of the Miami Tribe — who will share their knowledge in four cultural areas: lacrosse, the myaamia language, ribbonwork, and gardening.

Staff from the Myaamia Center with expertise in those areas also will be going to D.C. The students will assist them and run some of the programming, said Kara Strass, director of Miami Tribe Relations.

Strass called it a wonderful opportunity for the Miami students to have this experience at this point in their learning.

“For them to get to have this internship, to be spending weeks really deeply engaging with this cultural knowledge, is something that essentially is like years' worth of what people were doing through individual workshops or through personal learning.”

Sharing their Myaamia culture

Recovering lost touchstones

For nearly 25 years, the Myaamia Center has been leading groundbreaking work in language and cultural revitalization within the sovereign tribal nation. The Tribe citizens have been recovering lost cultural touchstones such as ribbonwork, the Tribe’s art form that uses ribbon to create distinctive geometric patterns that past generations had incorporated into clothing, moccasins, and other belongings.

Those touchstones declined, along with the language, following the forced relocation in 1846 from Ohio to Kansas and finally Oklahoma — with mandated boarding schools, established to coerce Native Americans to learn European culture and language and abandon their own.

By the middle of the 20th century, the last Tribe member to speak myaamia conversationally had died.

Today the Myaamia Center is able to create learning opportunities for students because the Tribe now has experts in the community who have become the teachers. Many of them are Miami graduates.

“I think that’s a good example of how revitalization is working in our community,” Strass said. “Things that took decades previously, we can teach to the next generation potentially in years, maybe even months.”

Sharing their Myaamia culture

Sharing their Myaamia culture

Sharing their Myaamia culture

peekitahaminki 'stickball/lacrosse'

The unique opportunity to play lacrosse on the National Mall comes six years after nearly 60 Myaamia people came together to play a game of peekitahaminki ‘stickball/lacrosse.’ It was the first time in more than 200 years that each player was holding a wooden lacrosse stick made by a member of their Myaamia community.

The students recently traveled to Fort Wayne, Indiana, to make their own lacrosse sticks under the guidance of Doug Peconge, who will join them at the festival.

Each lacrosse stick is made of hickory and cut down to shape, then steamed to bend at the top where laces are added to hold the ball. The students added their own decorative burn markings onto the wood to identify their sticks.

Kenzi Morter, a rising senior majoring in Organizational Leadership and Management with a minor in Marketing, goes by the nickname Ant. Her stick features wood-burned artwork of ants on one side, representing each member of her family.

The other side carries a ribbonwork pattern similar to one she is using for the traditional moccasin game she is making. “That will become a family heirloom. I will pass it to my siblings and my kids, so we can play traditional games together.”

Like Morter, many of the students discover much more about their Myaamia heritage after they come to Miami through the Myaamia Heritage Award Program, which provides a tuition waiver and a four-year undergraduate college experience for Miami Tribe students.

Morter enjoys being part of the tribal community and learning more about her Myaamia heritage.

“I love it. It makes me feel like I’m a part of something.”

Kenzi Morter, whose nickname is — Kenzi Morter, whose nickname is "Ant," shows the ants artwork burned into the lacrosse stick she made (photo by Scott Kissell).

Sharing their Myaamia culture

Sharing their Myaamia culture

the myaamia language and garden

The Miami Tribe of Oklahoma received a prestigious national award in 2023 in recognition of the cultural heritage and language program that has led to the first generation in 100 years learning to speak the Myaamia language.

Myaamia staff and students will introduce festival-goers to their language. Taking a lead role will be Elliot Baldwin, who will graduate in December with a bachelor’s degree in Psychology.

“I’ve been working on the dictionary with my brother (Jarrid Baldwin) for the past year, so going to D.C. is going to be a good chance for me, on a more professional level, discuss the language and how it works as well as other aspects.”

Baldwin grew up immersed in the Myaamia culture. His father is Daryl Baldwin, executive director of the Myaamia Center credited with getting the revitalization underway in 2001; his mother, Karen Baldwin, makes commencement stoles adorned with ribbonwork for Myaamia graduates each year.

Elliot and his sister, Jessie, will serve as program coordinators for the camps for children ages 6-9, and he’ll also be in charge of lacrosse and teaching the language at the Myaamia youth camps in Indiana and Oklahoma.

George Ironstrack, assistant director of the Myaamia Center and director of the education office, said this summer’s internship (supported with a $40,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation) and the festival will be valuable experiences for these young leaders.

“To be able to spend time in our language, in our culture, with each other in a way the busy nature of the semester doesn’t allow for, it’s one of the things that is so amazing this summer," he said.

“We won’t know for five, maybe even 10 years later, the positive impact of the seeds we’re planting during this time with them, but it’s going to be exciting to watch the outcomes in the long-term for some young people to get this degree of time with their language, their culture, and each other," Ironstrack said as he, Strass, and the students gathered at kitahkinaani 'our garden' outside Boyd Hall on Miami’s Western campus, where milkweed, peppermint, sassafras, and other native plants are grown.

Mia Hankenson '25, who majored in Kinesiology, studies a native plant in the garden (photo by Scott Kissell).

Sharing their Myaamia culture

Sharing their Myaamia culture

Reviving ribbonwork

There will be plenty of demonstrations on ribbonwork at the festival. “We’ll have our own tents where people can come to engage with that,” Strass said.

During a recent workshop for the interns, McMullen was working on creating a ribbonwork pattern for his new moccasins.

“It is very empowering. I’ve gone to a lot of the museums and seen traditional ribbonwork, some of those really old patterns,” he said. “Being able to take that after it’s been lost by the community for a while and to be part of the process of bringing that back is a very amazing experience.”

Karen Baldwin, who joined Strass in leading the recent workshop, is excited to see the students demonstrate making ribbonwork.

“I think it’s a really great experience for them to hone their skills and represent the community in that way,” she said, calling it extremely rewarding to see so many now learning it.

“I can remember when there was a handful of adults and now there are students, young people, in there doing it,” she said outside a conference room in Bonham House.

Sharing their Myaamia culture

Sharing their Myaamia culture

Footnotes

Written by Margo Rutledge Kissell, photos by Scott Kissell of University Communications and Marketing at Miami University.

FootNotes

Written by Margo Rutledge Kissell, photos by Scott Kissell of University Communications and Marketing at Miami University.

© 2026 Miami University

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