Scoff ‘n’ Scuff Dinner, Dance & Silent Auction

PUT SOME SPRING IN YOUR STEP!
In support of the Newfoundland and Labrador Folk Arts Society
Friday April 11th, Benevolent Irish Society 30 Harvey Road
7pm – Tickets $25 at O’Brien’s Music

The Newfoundland and Labrador Folk Arts Society invites you to a dinner, dance & silent auction. Traditional dance caller, Ford Elms, will lead the way, with musicians Rick West, Danny Mills, Tony O’Brien, Allan Ricketts & Fergus Brown-O’Byrne providing the tunes. Enjoy hot beef stew and rolls, and bid on some fabulous silent auction items. Spring may not be here yet, but you can put some spring in your step to coax it along!

ABOUT THE NEWFOUNDLAND & LABRADOR FOLK FESTIVAL

Now in its 37th year, the Newfoundland & Labrador Folk Festival takes place in St. John’s on the weekend following the Royal St. John’s Regatta. It is the second oldest continuously running folk festival in Canada. Each year, the NL Folk Festival brings thousands of people together to celebrate the best in traditional and contemporary folk music and dance. The Folk Arts Society promotes folk arts in Newfoundland & Labrador and throughout Canada.

ABOUT THE NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR FOLK ARTS SOCIETY

The Newfoundland and Labrador Folk Arts Society (NLFAS) is a charitable organization located in St. John’s, NL whose mandate is the promotion of the traditional folk arts of the province. Active Since 1966, the organization works towards its goals by presenting educational and cultural events that provide artists with the opportunity to showcase their work and that engage our youth and the general public in the transmission of our intangible cultural heritage. The NLFAS produces the weekly Folk Night at the Ship Pub and several annual events including Young Folk At The Hall, the Holiday Wassail and the popular Newfoundland & Labrador Folk Festival. The 2010 Folk Festival received the City of St. John’s Event of the Year Tourism Award, and was voted Best Volunteer Opportunity by readers of the Scope.

www.nlfolk.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/nlfolk

Wells and Springs Occasional Paper, and a Farewell

After finishing all the research, interviews, photographing, analyzing and writing, I have finally completed all the different projects I wanted to with the Wells and Springs project. It was a great summer of work, and I got to meet and chat with a lot of wonderful, interesting people. I also was able to create a bunch of resources for anyone to access about well stories, traditions, cleaning techniques, and more!

So far we have produced a wells and springs infographic, a guide on cleaning wells, months of newsletter articles and blog posts, and a couple presentations - one for the Harris Research centre and one for the ICH mini forum! The latest resource produced, and the one I am the most proud of, is an Occasional ICH Paper, entitled "The Folklore of Wells in Newfoundland", Occasional Paper of Newfoundland and Labrador 005.

The occasional paper is available online at the MUN ICH resources page. This is the most academically focused resource developed out of the wells and springs project, and something I hope can be used in the future for educational purposes!

With the completion of the occasional paper and the Baccalieu Trail Heritage Forum report, I am now finished my contract at the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador ICH office.

Thank you to everyone who took time out of their busy schedules to chat with me, show me their wells, and tell me their stories over the wells and springs project. A special thanks to the Harris Centre and the RBC Blue Water Project for the support in allowing the project to go forward, and to everyone in the ICH office and the HFNL for being amazing coworkers over the nine months I was lucky enough to work here.

It has been an amazing experience, and I am now off to a new project with the Carbonear Heritage Society! I look forward to using the new skills I've learned, and applying my passion for heritage, history and its preservation to this next endeavour.

Cheers!

Tuesday's Folklore Photo: and now for something completely different

Okay, so I might be cheating a bit with today's folklore photo, as the real focus of the post is actually a reel-to-reel film. We often have the most random items dropped off to us at the Intangible Cultural Heritage Office, which we're more than happy to receive. As cultural and heritage mediators and facilitators, we often become the custodians of items in order to preserve and make them accessible to the public.

We recently came into possession of a 12 inch reel-to reel film entitled Architecture of Newfoundland and were tasked with figuring out how to digitize it. To our delight, it has already been digitized and made available to the public via Memorial University's Digital Archives Initiative. This film was produced by the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador and is a fantastic snapshot of architecture in the province in 1975. The film has been made available to view in its entirety by Memorial University of Newfoundland Distance Education, Learning and Teaching Support (DELTS). 

Click here to watch Architecture of Newfoundland!

-Nicole

Nan's Cookbook: Tea and Talk

Recipe for Seven Cup Pudding, provided by Natalie Austin.
This recipe belonged to her grandmother on her mother's side,
 Lily Butt of Carbonear/Old Perlican. 

This past Friday the Intangible Cultural Heritage Office hosted  Nan's Cookbook: Tea and Talk at The Cupids Legacy Centre. It was a lovely afternoon where we invited people to bring out their favorite old cookbooks and recipes and share their memories of cooking and baking.

Along with Mary Ellen Wright, Professional Development and Outreach Officer with the Association of Newfoundland and Labrador Archives, we provided advice on scanning and preserving these documents for long term access and how to best preserve the original cookbooks and recipes, which for many are family heirlooms.

Spanish Cream Recipe provided by Linda Saunders.
This was her mother's recipe and Saunders notes,
 "We used to have this with fruit and jelly for dessert on Sundays."

-Nicole

A Lovely Cookbook Treat

Yesterday we had a lovely little visit from Sue Crichton, who reached out to ICH office after seeing our posting for the Nan's Cookbook: Tea and Talk event that is happening today. She had a few old cookbooks that belonged to her mother and mother in law (and likely their mothers as well!) that she didn't want anymore, and so donated them to us so we could share them at the event! They are some great looking cookbooks, and date between the 1920s and 1940s.

Sue's mother in law was Emma Angel, whose mother was a sister of Captain Bob Bartlett's, the well known navigator and Arctic explorer.

Sue's grandmother, Bertha Dicks, was a daughter of the Dixon family, and met her husband, Thomas Foot, after moving to Grand Banks. Thomas was a merchant before the market crashed in 1929, and is a brother of the J.B. Foot and Sons Company merchants from Grand Banks.

This was Nicole's favorite snippet from one of the books: how to make the perfect pot of tea!

The Tea and Talk is this afternoon, Friday March 21st, from 3-5pm at the Cupids Legacy Centre - it's free, and open to everyone! We would love if you joined us for a hot beverage, some baked treats, and had a chat about old cookbooks and recipes!

Thanks again to Sue who was sweet enough to drop these off for us to share at the tea today - they are beautiful books, have some interesting recipes in them, and I'm sure will be a great conversation piece this afternoon! We really appreciate it :)

-Sarah

What is Intangible Cultural Heritage, anyway?

Earlier today, I gave a guest talk for an intro to folklore undergraduate class taught by Mu Li, one of the PhD candidates in the Department of Folklore. My talk was about intangible cultural heritage (ICH) and what we are doing in Newfoundland and Labrador to safeguard it.

I deal often with ICH, so it isn't every day that I stop and think about what it means to people who've never heard the term before. So here are a few definitions.

The first is from UNESCO, and the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. The 2003 convention informs much of our safeguarding work in Newfoundland and Labrador, and this is how ICH is defined therein:

The “intangible cultural heritage” means the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills – as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith – that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage. This intangible cultural heritage, transmitted from generation to generation, is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history, and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity, thus promoting respect for cultural diversity and human creativity.

UNESCO has a detailed website with great info on the Convention and what has been listed and recognized as ICH around the world.

Closer to home, the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador has been working on ICH issues since 2008, and in that year, we published a handy PDF booklet called "What is Intangible Cultural Heritage?" We also run, in cooperation with Memorial University, an ICH website with lots of resources and information about local intangible cultural heritage.  Here is how we define ICH in the booklet:

Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) or what some call “Living Heritage” encompasses many traditions, practices and customs. These include the stories we tell, the family events we celebrate, our community gatherings, the languages we speak, the songs we sing, knowledge of our natural spaces, our healing traditions, the foods we eat, our holidays, beliefs and cultural practices.

Fashion, alcohol, and religion in Regency Conception Bay, Newfoundland

A Tale of Two Houses: Fashion, Alcohol, Religion in Regency Conception Bay Townscapes

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

7:30pm

Benevolent Irish Society, Harvey Road.

Robert Pack—English Methodist Politician and Merchant—and William Innott—Irish Catholic Publican and Horse Breeder—shared the streets and social circles of their respective towns of Carbonear and Harbour Grace. Wealthy and prominent, they built summer dwellings away from their urban households and business interests. Constructed in the 1820s, the summer dwellings were part of the architectural fashion of villa and cottage—retreats from towns of noise, crime, prostitution, and wayward pigs. These juxtaposing houses become an entrée into the material, social, and aesthetic life of Regency Newfoundland townscapes.

Folklorist Dr. Gerald Pocius will present on Pack and Innott at the Annual General Meeting of the Newfoundland Historic Trust on Wednesday, March 19, 2014, at 7:30pm, at the Benevolent Irish Society on Harvey Road.

Pocius has researched and written on topics ranging from joke-telling and pop music, to tract housing and religious popular prints. He has worked on many aspects of Newfoundland folklore and popular culture, publishing studies of belief, religion, medicine, narrative, and music. His specialty has been material culture, and he has published widely on gravestones, cemeteries, textiles, folk art, architecture, furniture, and cultural landscapes. While working primarily in Newfoundland and Labrador, he has also conducted fieldwork in the United States, Great Britain, France, and Lithuania.

Nan's Cookbook: Tea and Talk

Nan’s Cookbook

Tea & Talk

Friday, March 21, 2014

3-5 p.m.

Cupids Legacy Centre

368 Seaforest Drive, Cupids

Do you have your nan’s recipe cards? Did your mother keep a scrapbook of her favourites? Do you reminisce about that old copy of the Cream of the West Cookbook with the comments and changes written all over its pages?  Bring your old recipe books and cards, and join us for some tea, buns, and memories of cookbooks and cooking.

Free event, please RSVP to Sarah

sarah@heritagefoundation.ca

1-888-739-1892 ex. 5

Dance to Your Heart’s Content - Dance Workshop March 22nd

A Workshop with the Mizzen Heritage Dancers

Memorial University’s Folklore Department is thrilled to present a public dance workshop with The Mizzen Heritage Dancers from Heart’s Content on March 22 from 1-3:30pm at the MMaP gallery in the St. John’s Arts & Culture Centre. This workshop is open to dancers of all ages and all skill levels. A panel discussion with the dancers will take place immediately following the workshop.

The Mizzen Heritage Dancers are a group of 12-14 residents of Heart’s Content who have enjoyed performing their regional square dancing tradition for the past 15 years. This group has offered dance workshops at schools and community centres across the Avalon in hopes of recruiting dancers who may like to share in their tradition. The Mizzen Heritage Dancers are proud to announce such a workshop will be held on March 22 for the people of St. John’s. Put on your dancing shoes and join them at the Arts & Culture Centre’s MMaP Gallery for an exciting foray into the tradition of Newfoundland square dancing.

Admission is $10 or $8 for students & seniors. Refreshments will be served courtesy of Starbucks and Sobeys. Free parking will be available.

Dr. Jillian Gould, provincial folklorist Dale Jarvis, and folklore/ethnomusicology graduate students of Memorial University have organized this workshop as part of a practical exercise in public programming and cultural presentation.

Space is limited! To register, please contact nicole@heritagefoundation.ca

or call 1-888-739-1892.

***
For all publicity inquiries:
Michelle Robertson – Memorial University, M.A.
michelle_robertson23@mac.com
709-764-5000

Youth Hoop Dance Workshop - March 15th

The St. John’s Native Friendship Centre and the Intangible Cultural Heritage office of Heritage Foundation of NL are co-sponsoring a Hoop Dance Workshop, with Beany John.

Crystal (Beany) John is Taino and Cree from Kehewin Alberta. At 22 years of age she is a champion Grass dancer and Hoop Dancer. She is one of two women in Canada given permission to be part of the Grass Dance Society and was initiated in 1998. Beany has been teaching Hoop Dance to youth in Alberta and Ontario since 2004. She has taught at the Centre for Indigenous Theatre, Anishnabe Health Youth program, Trent University, Toronto Native Canadian Centre youth program and the Kehewin First Nation.

Her mix of Hoop Dance and Hip Hop has been called “dynamic” and “exciting”. Her contemporary style, mixing traditional forms with circus skills and hip hop, is one of a kind and she has a following of young Native people throughout Canada and the United States.

Location: 3rd Floor Dance Rehearsal Space, St. John's Arts and Culture Centre

Date: Saturday, March 15th, 2014

Time: 10am to 1pm

Cost: $25

What to Bring: Participants are invited to wear comfortable clothing, nothing too loose so that it doesn't get caught up in the hoops. The room has a professional dance floor, so no outside footwear is permitted. Workshop is for participants age 8+

Registration is extremely limited, so participants MUST pay in advance either by cheque made payable to “Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador” or by email money transfer.

Registration mandatory. To register, contact Dale Jarvis at ich@heritagefoundation.ca or call 739-1892 ext 2.

Cable Avenue Heritage Meeting, Bay Roberts

Earlier tonight, I finished up a meeting with the heritage committee of the Town of Bay Roberts. We went over the commemorative text for the bronze plaque that will mark Cable Avenue as a Registered Heritage District. Last year, the Heritage Foundation of NL designated the avenue, and helped to celebrate its 100th anniversary; this year, we'll install a large bronze plaque to mark the avenue's historic and architectural significance.

We've tentatively set the first weekend of August for a formal plaque unveiling. Stay tuned for your invite!

Photo: Surveying site of superintendent's house, August, 1913. From The Cable Building Story.

Finding Folklore in Foxtrap

Today the ICH office visited Queen Elizabeth Regional High School in Foxtrap to talk about local folklore and supernatural belief. Dale and I visited with Lori-Ann Ash and Darrell Sneyd's grade ten English classes to discuss local superstitions, charms, ghost stories, fairy stories and urban legends. We also explored oral tradition, the transmission of folk belief and offered advice about collecting oral histories. To help the students out, we developed a one-page questionnaire for them to take home and use while interviewing parents, family members, friends, or neighbours.

During our visit the students told us some great stories of the supernatural. The following is an urban legend recalled by a female student:

In grade three or four the older girls at school would tease the younger girls about a monster in the toilet. The legend is that one stall, identified with a mark of red spray paint, has a creature living in the toilet and if you flush it, a green slimy hand reaches up, grabs you and pull you down. When I got to grade six, I realized this was made up but by that time we used it to scare the younger girls too, and kept it going. My younger sister goes to that school and that urban legend is still told today.

Another young woman, whose mother is from Denmark, told a Danish folktale about a man who was plaqued and tormented by the nisse, which are elves. The story the student told is as follows:

An old man was out in his garden, smoking his pipe and tending to his horses, when the nisse began to torment him. The nisse stole his pipe and used it to fill his home with smoke. The old man,thinking his house was on fire, called for help. Firemen arrived to put out the fire but they couldn't find any flames. When the old man suggested it was the nisse and that 'the fire was in his mind', the firemen promptly dowsed the man's head with a bucket of water.

We were also very excited to receive a little narrative regarding fairy belief in the area. According to one student, "in the elementary schoolyard there is a fence and we were told that if we went near the fence while wearing green, the fairies would take you away."

We are heading back to Queen Elizabeth Regional High School tomorrow afternoon to see what the students collected and to help them write up their folklore findings.

Here are the questions the students are using:

1. Is there a place in your community that people say is haunted? ....a haunted cemetery, a haunted walkway, a haunted cliff or rock, a house, or other building? What are the ghostly stories connected to these places?
2. When you were growing up, were there any places you were told not to go because the fairies would get you? Where was this and what are the stories you were told?
3. What are the local stories about shipwrecks? ...buried treasures? What about ghost or weather lights seen on the water?
4. Are there any people who are believed to be witches in the community? Why do people think this? What kind of powers does this person have? 
5. Have you ever had a visit from the Old Hag while you were sleeping? What happened and do you believe that this experience was real or just a dream?
6. Do you know of any special charms, superstitions, cures or remedies that are used in your community?

Teachers, librarians or museums: you can download a pdf of these questions right here.

A Successful Forum with the Baccalieu Trail

This past Monday the Baccalieu Trail Heritage Corporation, with some help from us here at the Heritage Foundation, held a forum for representatives from the 70 communities around the Baccalieu Trail. The aim of the forum, subtitled "Preserving the Past and Looking to the Future", was focused on discussing matters related to community heritage, future plans and how best to realize them, and opportunities for communication and collaboration within the region.

We had 50 participants for the forum, which consisted of a morning of presentations and an afternoon of open discussion. Speakers in the morning included Charlie Adams and William Gilbert from the Baccalieu Trail Heritage Corporation, Jerry Dick from Tourism, Culture and Recreation, Dale Jarvis from the ICH office at the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador, Beverly King from the Wooden Boat Museum of Newfoundland and Labrador, and Jim Prowse from Canadian Heritage.

The afternoon was formatted as a conversation cafe-styled cafe, where the participants table hopped while answering questions related to the heritage in their area, what struggles they have, and how the Baccalieu Trail Heritage Corporation can help. The afternoon concluded with everyone returning to their original tables, and sharing the most interesting things they heard or learned that day. Each table narrowed that down to a top three, which was shared with the full forum during the final wrap up.

In the near future a report will be compiled of all of the information that was gathered during the forum; a preview of the results will be available in the March issue of the ICH newsletter!

-Sarah

Folklore Photo - Heritage Lighthouse in Heart's Content

I wrote the other day about how we took a group of public folklore grad students out to Heart's Content.  Today is folklore photo day, so here is that group of students, in front of the Heart's Content Lighthouse. The lighthouse was constructed in 1901, and is a Recognized Federal Heritage Building.

You can read more about the lighthouse here and on the Canadian Register of Historic Places.

- photos by Dale Jarvis

Tradition in Motion: A day with the Mizzen Heritage Square Dancers

Our intangible cultural heritage office sometimes uses what we term a “project-based training” model. You can read all about that in this occasional paper.  Yesterday, we took that model on the road, with a group of Memorial University students, to Heart's Content.

Dr. Jillian Gould is an Assistant Professor within Memorial University’s Department of Folklore, whose research interests include public folklore, ethnography, and fieldwork. Since 2011, her class has been partnering with HFNL to deliver a type of project-based training as a component of the graduate public sector folklore course. Typically, graduate students organize some kind of public folklore event or workshop, a model which engages the public while teaching the students practical and varied skills in facilitation, group work, community outreach, and project planning. 

This semester, students are working on organizing a workshop on traditional Newfoundland set dancing, in cooperation with the Mizzen Heritage Square Dancers. Thos dancers will be coming into St. John's to run a workshop later in March, but I suggested that the students go out to Heart's Content, meet the dancers in advance, learn the dances, and be better able to facilitate the workshop when it happens.

So yesterday, two carloads of us drove out to Trinity Bay, and met up with the dancers of Heart's Content at the Society of United Fishermen Hall. The dancers demonstrated two dances, the old fashioned square dance, and the Lancers, and students were able to run through the square dance twice. Then everyone took part in the Virginia Reel, and finished up with a lunch prepared by the community. Students, where possible, did on-the-spot folklore interviews with many of the participants.

Some of the students had never been to Heart's Content, and the set dances were new to most of them. It was a great experience, and everyone was moved by the kindness and generosity of the folks from Heart's Content. At the end, the dancers made sure everyone left with a Heart's Content pin. It was tremendous fun, and a great way for students to see folklore in action, rather than just reading about it. 

Stay tuned for more information on the in-town workshop itself. 

Photos by Cyndi Egan.