Heads & Hearts

On Sunday, October 25th, join Gesa Power House Theatre as we welcome Heads & Hearts to our stage at 5PM. The building will open at 4PM for an art exhibit, one hour before the presentation begins. The event is free, but advance registration is encouraged! Heads & Hearts explores what becomes visible when we learn to see a familiar landscape through another way of knowing. For the nimiipuu (Nez Perce), the landscape is not simply a backdrop or collection of resources, but a living world of relationships—among people, water, salmon, animals, stones, mountains, and the forces that have shaped the land over thousands of years. Stories, place names, art, and traditional knowledge carry careful observations of that world, preserving memories of floods, landslides, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, ancient animals, and the changing courses of rivers. This program brings those understandings into conversation with Western geology through the lens of ethnogeology: the study of Indigenous knowledge of landscapes, earth materials, geologic processes, and deep history. Rather than treating traditional stories as simply “myths,” ethnogeology asks what they can teach us about events witnessed and remembered across generations—and how scientific and Indigenous perspectives can illuminate one another. Join Roger Amerman, Dr. Ellen Bishop, and Harry “Judge” Slickpoo Jr. for an exploration of nimiipuu stories, art, First Foods, rivers, rocks, and geologic history. Through this practice of “Two-Eyed Seeing,” we are invited to engage both head and heart—and to come away seeing the landscapes of the Northwest with new eyes. This event is a rental by The Confluence Series. Learn more about renting the theater for your own event here!