SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) – Rehfeld’s Art Gallery is featuring young Native American artists and hosting panel discussions on Native American topics for the All My Relatives Festival this weekend.
The second annual festival will have live music, arts and crafts, but will also include two panel discussions on Saturday about Native women and the impact of boarding schools on the Native community.
The first panel, “Music is Medicine,” will be presented by Kelly Jackson at 11:30 a.m. in The Underground by Reheld’s.
“It’s kind of like a performance more than a panel really. It focuses on the role of women in indigenous communities and this idea of missing and murdered women,” Levitt Executive Director Nancy Halverson said.
The other panel, which starts at 1 p.m., will detail Native American resiliency in a post-boarding school world. Allison Renville is moderating the discussion with panelists Tamara St. John, a South Dakota Representative, and Amy Sazue, who is a member of the Rapid City Indian Boarding School Lands Project.
Rehfelds also has multiple pieces of artwork from young Native American artists on display for the festival. The nonprofit organization Journey to Hope worked with Native youth housed at the Minnehaha County Juvenile Center.
“Art is such a great way to escape,” Refeld’s Gallery Director Alix Kyrie said. “For those kids that are in the system, it’s just a good way for them to lose themselves in creativity and kind of make something beautiful. And so for us to be able to show it off on their behalf, it’s just really special.”
Halverson said the partnership with the Levitt and Refeld’s has been going on since 2020 with the first Innoskate festival.
“Whenever an opportunity comes and there’s an alignment it just works nicely because we’re so close and we’re both celebrating the arts and culture and it just works really well,” Halverson said.
