 This year, I have had the extraordinary privilege of serving as Guest Curator and Co-Lead Facilitator, alongside Dr. David O. Fakunle II, for We Hold These Truths, a national storytelling and dialogue project connected to the Smithsonian’s Our Shared Future: Culture Of, By, and For the People, led by the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.
As the United States marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, we have been asking people not simply to commemorate the past, but to sit with a much more personal set of questions: What truths do we hold today? Which promises have we lived into, and which remain unfinished? What do we carry from the places and communities that shaped us? And what do we still hope this country might become? David and I, together with an extraordinary team of Smithsonian colleagues, festival partners, artists, cultural organizers, documentarians, educators, and community members, have tried to make these conversations feel less like formal interviews and more like conversations around a kitchen table. The questions shift from place to place. They respond to the festival, the traditions being celebrated, and the people gathered there. We might begin with music, food, family, neighborhood, a memory, or a place someone calls home. From there, people often move naturally toward larger questions of freedom, equality, belonging, responsibility, and hope. And the stories are wonderfully unpredictable. In Detroit, a ninety-five-year-old woman reflected on all she had lived through and witnessed across nearly a century of American life. At another gathering, an eleven-year-old bluegrass musician and devoted Star Wars fan began imagining what might happen if Darth Vader played the banjo. An eight-year-old, after hearing my accent, became determined to conduct part of our conversation in a British accent too. So we did. Those moments matter just as much to me. Storytelling is often associated with the distant past, but I have always felt that stories are equally about the present and the future. They help us make sense of what is happening around us. They give us a little space from fear, uncertainty, and struggle. And they allow us to imagine what might come next. Stories do not have to arrive polished or complete. They live in everyday conversations, in jokes and memories, in difficult truths, in the things people are only beginning to understand about themselves. Our life stories are never neat. They change as we change. Already, this journey has taken us through very different expressions of American culture. At the Anacostia Community Museum’s Juneteenth celebration in Washington, D.C., people reflected across generations on emancipation, memory, freedom, and what freedom continues to demand of us. At ROMP Festival and the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum in Owensboro, Kentucky, musicians and festivalgoers spoke about music, inheritance, and place. A conversation with Dom Flemons about Arnold Shultz and the Black roots of bluegrass reminded us how layered American traditions truly are—shared, borrowed, contested, carried forward, and continually remade. During Detroit’s Concert of Colors, stories unfolded across museums, libraries, stages, streets, and community spaces. Young people spoke with elders. Artists reflected on migration, race, neighborhood, joy, struggle, and home. The festival itself felt like a civic commons: people gathering through culture while retaining all the richness of their differences. And most recently, at Jazz House Kids and the Montclair Jazz Festival, I found myself thinking about what cultural democracy actually sounds like. I did not grow up with jazz, but listening to young musicians, teaching artists, elders, and NEA Jazz Masters deepened my appreciation for how central jazz is to the American story. One young musician described jazz as finding the best part of yourself and learning how to tell your own story. In jazz, everyone gets a turn. You learn the form. You listen. You honor what came before. Then you find your own voice within it. There is something profoundly democratic in that. What we are learning is that festivals and community gatherings can become remarkable spaces for civic imagination. Through music, food, dance, ritual, craft, poetry, storytelling, and shared celebration, people practice participation, encounter difference, and experience belonging. And we are only about halfway through. Upcoming activations will take us to Black Rock City and Burning Man, Farm Aid, the National Folk Festival, Tucson Meet Yourself in Arizona, The Huntington in San Marino, the August Quarterly Festival, the Great Valley Gathering, People’s Poetry in New York, and other gatherings still ahead. The archive emerging from this work is itself deeply collaborative. It does not belong to one curator, institution, or storyteller. It is being created together by communities, festivals, interviewees, cultural workers, documentarians, and everyone willing to sit down and offer a piece of their experience. These recordings will become part of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage’s Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, carrying these voices beyond this anniversary year. What we are making is not a definitive story of America. It is something far more human: a collection of memories, contradictions, traditions, humor, struggle, possibility, and hope. Every story starts somewhere—sometimes with a question, sometimes with a difficult memory, sometimes with a name, sometimes with Darth Vader and a banjo. And perhaps that is one of the gifts of this 250th anniversary: not simply the chance to look backward, but an invitation to listen more deeply to one another and to imagine, together, the country we are still becoming. Learn more about We Hold These Truths- including an animation of David and I, produced by Smithsonian Folklife. Sign Up to Storytelling: Gift of Hope Newsletters & Blogs |