Pangea—Cultivate Our Cultures
Saturday, November 14
An Online Event
This fall Pangea — Cultivate Our Cultures moves online, as we reformat our 2020 celebration into a community video project that we'll share across our digital media on Saturday, November 14. We want you to take part by submitting a short video highlighting a piece of your cultural heritage, and the process is pretty simple:
1) Record a 5-10 minute video of an original performance like a song, dance, cooking or art demo, or story that represents you or your family's cultural heritage.
2) Submit the video and complete a short questionnaire online by 11:59PM on Saturday, October 31, 2020.
After reviewing your submissions, we'll compile a digital collage or video series that we'll share on Saturday, November 14, at 10:00AM across our digital media (web, eNewsletter, Facebook).
Your video must include a brief introduction in which you state the following: 1) your name; 2) the culture, region, or ethnic group that you are representing; and 3) a short description of your performance, including a brief explanation or history. In other words, how is this performance significant to the members of the culture, region, or ethnic group that you represent?
The following two paragraphs would serve as a clear, descriptive introduction to a cooking demonstration:
Hello, my name is Finnish Descendant and I’m going to show you how to make pasty (or pastie), a Finnish-American lunch staple that was first introduced to Michigan and Minnesota by Cornish iron, copper, and coal miners in the mid-19th century. The name and recipes were adopted by new waves of immigrant miners from nations like Finland, Sweden, Serbia, and Italy who had grown up with similar food traditions in Europe, like the Finnish piirakka and kalakukko or the Italian calzone.
The pasty is a savory pastry, turnover, or pie filled with meat, gravy, potatoes, onions, carrots, and other savory ingredients like peas, rutabagas, beans, or mushrooms. Because pasty is portable and easily reheated like a sandwich, it was well-suited for remote, outdoor work like mining and lumberjacking. When miners, lumberjacks, and their friends and family moved from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Minnesota’s Arrowhead Region — to regions like the Finnish Triangle in central Minnesota, as my great-great-grandparents did — they brought the recipe with them. My grandma taught me how to bake pasty when I was a child and I’m making it today because it helps illustrate the history of Finnish immigrants in Minnesota.
Pangea has always been a celebration of diversity, community, and mutual respect. Please use your video to highlight a custom or tradition that’s important to you or your family and friends. Treat it as though you are introducing your friends, neighbors, and coworkers to an interesting piece of your family’s history. Where did you come from and what did you bring with you?
We ask that videos do not contain false statements, foul language, cultural appropriation, hate speech, derogatory remarks, nudity, violence, or religious/political recruitment or proselytizing. We want to produce something that can be shared with everyone in our community.
If you’re using your cellphone, please turn your camera horizontally to record your video with a wide shot. You might also want to ask a friend or family member to help you record. We prefer that you submit your videos as .mv4, .mp4, or MPEG-4 files, but we will try to accommodate whatever format you have. There is no application fee or cost to participate — we just want you to participate!
Pangea is a community partnership directed by the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County, Cultural Diversity Resources, Lutheran Social Services of North Dakota, and the New American Consortium for Wellness and Empowerment.
Pangea 2020 is funded in part by a grant from the Lake Region Arts Council through a Minnesota State Legislative appropriation. The exhibition is also sponsored by The Arts Partnership and FM Area Foundation.
If you have any questions, please contact HCSCC operations director Emily Kulzer at (218) 299-5511, ext 6737, or emily.kulzer@hcsmuseum.org.
About Pangea
For 26 years Pangea, our fall multicultural festival, has shined a light on the amazing diversity of our communities in this stretch of the Red River Valley. In recent years it’s taken shape at the Hjemkomst Center on the second or third Saturday in November, and it’s clearly become one of the museum’s — and the community’s — most popular events. A group of local chefs, musicians, artists, and merchants share the unique traditions that they and their families have brought to Fargo-Moorhead and Cass and Clay counties. Our museum and auditorium become an international market where the flavors of chai and samosas mix with the smells of aebelskiver and lumpia and the sounds of mariachi and indigenous drumming. Entertainers take the Pangea stage in Heritage Hall and demonstrate some unique song, dance, or performance that contributes to the tremendous body of art and cultural heritage in our community, some of which many of us might not otherwise see or hear.
As we frequently say, Pangea really is a global experience under one roof — and this colorful, musical, spicy Saturday afternoon is made more fascinating by the fact that it’s still completely local. Pangea has been a big, bright, and joyous reminder that our histories, even our local histories, are global. The roots of Clay County, Minnesota, stretch from the Bering Sea and New England and Norway and Mexico and Bavaria and Somalia and Egypt and Vietnam and so much of everything in between.
