The JustStories Fellowship seeks to challenge and energize the professional storytelling community to develop, create and perform stories that deal with ethnic identity, race relations and valuing differences.

The Fellowship provides financial and creative support to a storyteller to find the time and space to create an original performance piece or pieces that deal with inclusive themes.

The JustStories Fellowship is an initiative of Angels Studio/Chicago in collaboration with O’Halloran Communications/Evanston, Illinois.

The 2011 JustStories Fellow is the inspiring

and vibrant Storyteller Arianna Ross.
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A Journey into the Heart of Interracial
Families and the Immigrant Community

By Storyteller Arianna Ross

About this Story

Storyteller Arianna Ross .

Arianna Ross has made a career building bridges among different cultures and communities through dance, teaching, and storytelling. She has taken these bridge-building skills to communities all over the world, working with both children and adults. Now Ross tells the story of her own personal experience of border crossing and cultural bridge building in her latest story Are We Teammates? A Journey into the Heart of Interracial Families and the Immigrant Community.

In this story, Arianna Ross examines her own racial identity, tells the story of falling in love with a man of a different ethnic background and nationality and their ensuing experience with immigration, and examines the fraught immigration system in America through the lens of being the wife of an immigrant and the mother of a bi-racial, bi-lingual, bi-national daughter.

As a Jewish-American woman who is often mistaken as “something else” when in other ethnic communities, Ross knows how easy it is to stereotype those who look different from ourselves rather than seeing ourselves as belonging to the same human “team.” Instead, we divide up into the “Black Team,” the “White Team,” “The Jewish Team,” “The Spanish-speaking Team” and so on. Although Ross was aware of our tendency to divide along racial lines and even told stories about that, it wasn’t until she was pregnant with her daughter Julianna that she was confronted not only by others’ stereotypes and prejudices but had to think about her own.

As a white woman married to a Brazilian man of a diverse racial background, Ross found that even her friends would ask her what she thought her baby would look like—would she come out white, light-skinned, or brown? Would she have blue, green, or brown eyes? Would her baby look like Ross’s family of European Jews or like her husband Taia’s family comprised of Europeans, Africans, and indigenous Brazilians?

Although Ross had spent her whole life combating prejudice and trying to build multi-racial “teams” of friends, she found herself worried that she and her daughter would not look alike and about the effect of white privilege on her daughter. Ross wanted to ensure that her daughter Julianna would be accepted no matter what she looked like or what language she chose to speak—Portuguese or English.

Language introduced another multi-cultural challenge as friends warned Ross against raising her child with two languages and Ross waded into all the research on dual-language learners. Before her child was even born, Ross was worried about what “team” she was going to be placed on—black or white, immigrant or native, English or Portuguese—and how to keep her on the “just human” team, able to communicate and live in either of her parents’ countries.

Both Ross and her husband had lots of adjustments to make upon falling in love, especially since neither had been looking for a relationship. They met while Ross was in Brazil studying Capoeira, an African-Brazilian martial art, and Taia was helping the Capoeira instructor renovate his house. After a bout with dysentery and some cross-cultural misunderstandings, Ross and Taia fell in love and conducted a long-distance relationship between Washington, DC and Salvador, Brazil.

Within months and after long romantic phone calls and visits, they realized they wanted to spend their lives together. That’s when they entered the byzantine immigration process, choked with forms and requirements and suspicion. The young couple in love had to prove their love to the American government so that Taia could come to the United States.  Luckily, they found the immigration process relatively simple compared to the horrors others have gone through, and they were married soon after Taia arrived in America.

But Ross soon found that many others were not so lucky when it came to dealing with the U. S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. After they had their baby Julianna, the young couple found it impossible to get the right documents needed forTaia’s mother to enter the U. S. to visit her new granddaughter. They were shocked, too, by the stories told by the men Taia worked with at the car shop. Many of them were undocumented, forced by the abysmal economies in their home countries to come to the United States to earn money to send back to feed their wives and children. They told stories of being forced by “Coyotes,” the smugglers who are paid to help people cross borders illegally, to cross a hot, dry desert on a journey that would take days with only a gallon of water to drink.

Ross, now so close to the immigrant experience because of her husband and daughter, found herself unable to accept our current immigration policies. She understands the arguments against allowing unchecked immigration, but the human stories haunt her. And the history of the schizophrenic immigration policy during the 20th Century bothers her: the U. S. has shuttled back and forth between open and closed borders, depending on our economic needs, rarely treating immigrants fairly, only concerned about meeting the need of the economy for more, or fewer, workers.

Ross marvels at our desire to divide the world into teams: the insiders and outsiders, the haves and have-nots, the English-speaking and the Spanish-speaking, the legal and the illegal. She longs for a time when her daughter doesn’t have to choose between her father’s darker-skinned, Portuguese-speaking Brazilian “team” and her mother’s lighter-skinned, English-speaking American “team” but instead can choose just to belong to join the human team.

Arianna Ross has spoken of her new story:

” . . . As I have traveled the world telling stories, I have observed how many children and adults are struggling with their identity as immigrants (legal and illegal). My story will be an exploration of where we wear our race: on our skin, in our voice, or in our soul. Since I have lived overseas and been the single “different” person in a community of all one culture, I will mix the stories of America with those from my experiences  overseas. . . “

“My desire to create this story comes from the personal experience of being an immigrant as well as being married to a Brazilian in the US. After four years of struggle, my husband who now has a permanent green card, but looks different and speaks with an accent, constantly faces down a barrage of ‘isms’ from many people. Moreover, as the mother of a multi-cultural bi-lingual child we are constantly searching for ways to tell her story and navigate her waters. I feel the time is right to tell an empowering yet honest story of about race and immigration. . . .”

This new performance story will premiere in the Spring of 2011. Arianna is the founder and principal teller at Story Tapestries, and is based in the Washington DC area. www.storytapestries.com

JustStories is an ongoing initiative of Angels Studio/Chicago
and O’Halloran Diversity Producttions, Evanston, IL

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The JustStories Fellowship seeks to challenge and energize the professional storytelling community to develop, create and perform stories that deal with ethnic identity, race relations and valuing differences.

The Fellowship provides financial and creative support to a storyteller to find the time and space to create an original performance piece or pieces that deal with inclusive themes.

The JustStories Fellowship is an initiative of Angels Studio/Chicago in collaboration with O’Halloran Communications/Evanston, Illinois.

The JustStories Initiative announces with great pride and enthusiasm their 2010 JustStories Fellowship

Storyteller Nancy Wang

Nancy has been awarded the 2010 JustStories Fellowship because of her devotion to racial justice through the art of storytelling. Nancy’s new story In the Land of the Free (working title) tells of three generations of immigration stories of her family and their journeys from China to America and the return journey of her American mother to 1920s China to become a top athlete. Nancy also tells of her return to China as a tourist and leader of the Gencun storytelling delegation and the pitfalls and pleasures of her artistic partnership with a Japanese-Filipino man. The new story will premiere in the Spring of 2010 at the JustStories Storytelling Festival April 16 & 17, 2010 in the Chicagoland area.

Email Nancy at: nancy@ethotec.org

… Using stories to connect to our common story …

photos : firstlightcreative.com

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Download Printable Flyer (PDF)
Download Concert Program (PDF)

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Previous JustStories Events
2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006
2005 | 2004-2003

Other RaceBridges Projects
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Evanston Concert

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photos by: www.firstlightcreative.com

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Chinatown Concert

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photos by: Harvey Tillis Photography

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Presented by Angels Studio/Chicago, a communications ministry of
the Chicago Province of the Society of the Divine Word, O’Halloran Communications
of Evanston, IL, The Chinese American Museum of Chicago and
SPACE: Society for the Preservation of Art & Culture in Evanston.

INCLUSION • EQUALITY • DIVERSITY

Storyteller Gene Tagaban

CHICAGO, IL. 8.1.08. The JustStories Fellowship, an initiative of Angels Studio, Chicago and O’Halloran Communications, Evanston, Illinois has awarded its 2008-2009 Fellowship to professional storyteller, actor and musician, Gene Tagaban. The JustStories Fellowship supports professional storytellers in developing, writing and performing their own original personal story based on issues of race and inclusion.

Gene currently lives in Ferndale, Washington and is a Tlingit/ Cherokee/Filipino American. His new story is titled I Am… Indopino!

In this story, Gene shares his own as well as his family’s exploration and eventual acceptance of all of who they are. Born in Alaska, Gene felt like a true “other” because his mother’s Cherokee heritage was, at times, not accepted by other First Nation groups. In addition, the levels of other-ness expanded in Gene’s life because of religion. His grandmother was Catholic, his mother Baptist, his Native background had no word for religion and Alaska was a primarily Russian Christian Orthodox.

And what about being a Cherokee-Tlingit-Filipino American? The messages of outsider-ness were deeply embedded for many Native people as a cascade of broken promises. mistreatment on reservations and the memory of the U.S. Navy bombing Alaskan Indian villages in the early 1900s were passed down from generation to generation. Still, today, as Gene travels about this country he encounters people’s ignorance and prejudices toward Native groups.

But Gene’s journey to becoming a noted storyteller, musician, dancer and actor moves far beyond a mere acceptance of his cultures to an inspiring celebration that teaches all of us more about both our uniqueness and our deep universal connections. Gene’s original story comes to life with animated telling plus traditional flutes, drums, rattles, dance, masks and ceremonial regalia. His themes of family, lineage and our relationship with the natural world will resonate with anyone who has searched for their “place” and a sense of belonging.

This is the seventh JustStories Fellowship awarded to professional storytellers. Past recipients have included: Antonio Sacre (Cuban American), Dovie Thomas (Lakota-Kiowa Apache Nations), Gerald Fierst (Russian Jewish American), Gayle Ross (Cherokee Nation), Olga Loya (Mexican American), Arif Choudhury (Bangladeshi American) and Michael McCarty (African American).

Many of the professional storytellers have premiered their JustStories Fellowship pieces at the Chicago-area JustStories Storytelling Festival, which just celebrated its sixth year. These stories continue to be performed in high schools, colleges, storytelling festivals, professional conferences and non-profit settings of all kinds in the U.S. and overseas.

For more information, please visit www.racebridges.net/juststories

The JustStories Fellowship seeks to challenge and energize the professional storytelling community to develop, create and perform stories that deal with ethnic identity, race relations and valuing differences.

The Fellowship provides financial and creative support to a storyteller to find the time and space to create an original performance piece or pieces that deal with inclusive themes.

The JustStories Fellowship is an initiative of Angels Studio/Chicago in collaboration with O’Halloran Communications/Evanston, Illinois.

The JustStories Initiative announces with pride their 2009 Fellowship . . . .

Storyteller Gene Tagaban

Gene will be developing, writing and performing his new story about identity called I Am … Indopino! (Working title.) His new story will be ready in the Spring 2009.

Gene says :

How do we learn to embrace all
the parts of ourselves,
to be and accept all of our being?
I am Cherokee, Tlingit and Filipino.
How do I fit into all those
parts of who I am
as well as into this society
we all live in?
I am more than any one thing.
I am Indopino. . . !

Gene Tagaban: onecrazyraven@earthlink.net

• Read the Press Release about the 2009 JustStories Fellow, Gene Tagaban

… Using stories to connect to our common story …

photos : firstlightcreative.com

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Raven Dreaming:
Embracing the
Human Spirit

The 2009 powerful

with Story Artist, Gene Tagaban,
performing the songs, dances
and stories of his Cherokee,
Tlingit and Filipino heritages

.Friday, April 3, 2009

.• Download Printable Flyer (Download PDF)
• Read Press Release (Download PDF)
• Download Concert Program (Download PDF)
.
• Previous JustStories Events
2008- Festival | 2007- Festival
2006- Festival | 2005- Festival
2004- 2003 Festival .
 

Click on a photo to enlarge photos by: www.firstlightcreative.com

Raven Dreaming is a proud partnership of Dominican University’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science, River Forest, IL and the JustStories Storytelling Festival/Angels Studio, (a communications ministry of the Society of the Divine Word/SVD) and O’Halloran Communications.

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The JustStories Fellowship seeks to challenge and energize the professional storytelling community to develop, create and perform stories that deal with ethnic identity, race relations and valuing differences.

The Fellowship provides financial and creative support to a storyteller to find the time and space to create an original performance piece or pieces that deal with inclusive themes.

The JustStories Fellowship is an initiative of Angels Studio/Chicago in collaboration with O’Halloran Communications/Evanston, Illinois.

2008 JustStories Fellow:

Storyteller Michael McCarty
Have Mouth, Will Run It!

The JustStories project is pleased to announce the 2008 JustStories Fellowship that is given to Storyteller Michael D. McCarty. Michael McCarty will receive financial and creative support to set aside the time to write a new story for public performance.

It is planned that “Connecting the Dots” will be first performed on April 5th, 2008 at the 6th Techny JustStories Storytelling Festival in the Chicago suburbs.

The JustStories initiative seeks to nurture new stories created and performed by professional storytellers about inclusion and race relations.

In “Connecting the Dots” Michael McCarty remembers turning points of his life journey.

… Using stories to connect to our common story …

photos : firstlightcreative.com

If you use these pictures professionally please include the photo credit:
Photography: www.photosjd.com

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

Photography: www.photosjd.com

The 6th JustStories Storytelling Festival was held April 5, 2008 at Divine Word International Conference Center, Techny at Northbrook in Chicago’s northern suburbs. Six professional storytellers led the day of workshops and story-performances under the theme: Handing on the Stories to the Next Generation. This storytelling festival was devoted to strengthening and honoring the human family.

The major theme that wove through the stories and performances highlighted the power of storytelling to cross cultures and generations. The program focused on handing on the light and insight that flows from the best of our stories to the next generation. The tales and content flowed from the true-life personal stories of the storytellers. The storytellers were Brenda Wong Aoki, Motoko, Eshu Bumpus, Arif Choudhury. Michael McCarty and Susan O’Halloran.

At the BridgeBuilder Award Luncheon nine high school students from the Northbrook area were honored with awards for making a difference and bringing people together.

• See the Festival Program
• See more about BridgeBuilder Awards
• View more photos of the Festival (opens new page)
• Read about the JustStories Project
• Previous JustStories Festivals

The JustStories Storytelling festival was presented by Angels Studio of Divine Word, Techny in Northbrook, O’Halloran Communications, The Northbrook Islamic Cultural Center and the Northbrook Community Relations Commission.

www.racebridges.net

WORKSHOP 1 : HANDING ON THE STORIES TO THE NEXT GENERATION
with Susan O’Halloran and team of storytellers.

The workshop will explore the stories of the high school students who have won a 2008 BridgeBuilder Award.  It will also explore stories we have received from our elders and what stories we will pass on to the next generation.  We will discover how to make stories more impactful and compelling. What are the stories that set us free ?

WORKSHOP 2 :  NEW STORIES FROM OLD : MAKING FOLKTALES YOUR OWN presented by Eshu Bumpus.

This workshop is perfect for teachers who would like to use traditional tales in their classroom, storytellers who want to develop new material plus leaders and public speakers who want to use a unique and memorable communication tool.

A terrific buffet and a chance to honor high school students who are making a difference in their communities.  (The Awards Luncheon is included in your full day ticket. Please take your admission ticket with you to present in the Lunch area.)

ROOM A :  WELCOME : 1.30-2.30:
Welcome and Sampler stories from our wonderful storytellers. Hear a short story or song from every storyteller. It will help you make that hard decision: in the next two sessions where I have a choice, which teller am I going to go hear?

Room A :  Michael McCarty

Michael presents the premier performance of the piece he created under the 2008 JustStories Fellowship, Connecting the Dots. Michael traces his life’s journey from Chicago high school activist to Black Panther Party worker to the U.S. Army to alternative medicine through a spiritual experience in India and, finally, onto professional storyteller. How do the presumably unrelated threads of our lives come together to make a seamless whole?

Room B :  Motoko

Motoko tells Half Girl, the story of a woman facing a health challenge. Motoko will also delight audiences with a mime and humor favorite, The Umbrella Story. Watch words and movement come together in a breath-taking performance of Japanese and Japanese-American folktales.

Room A :  Brenda Wong Aoki
Brenda tells Uncle Gunjiro’s Girlfriend, the story of her great uncle who in 1910 became engaged to the daughter of the Archdeacon of the San Francisco Grace Cathedral. Their pending marriage set off a media blitz of yellow peril headlines, provoked public outrage and death threats. In the end, Gunjiro’s wife lost
her citizenship. How does the storm over their forbidden love still affect Brenda’s family three generations later?

Room B :  Eshu Bumpus and Motoko
Eshu Bumpus and Motoko share an hour of Japanese stories, traditional African and African American folktales plus personal stories. Their combination of wit, movement and music will provide a lively session of original stories and old favorites.

Arif Choudhury will share an excerpt of his upcoming documentary film about a Storytelling Cultural Exchange between U.S. tellers (Susan O’Halloran, Motoko and Eshu were there) and master storytellers in China. The audience will have a chance to reflect: What stories guide you in your life? What stories do you want to pass on? Eshu closes our afternoon of storytelling with music and song.

No meals sold on site.  Great food across the road at Whole Foods and in that shopping area and other nearby eateries. Directions at Front Desk in main entrance.  Enjoy a stroll in the beautiful Techny gounds.

Motoko will tell an insightful story about the racism she and her family have experienced in the U.S. but also the racism toward Koreans that she witnessed growing up in Japan (The Cost of Racism). Later, Motoko and Eshu Bumpus will perform a fun-filled Japanese-African American rap (The Sakura Rap). Susan O’Halloran will share a moment from the Chicago Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s (The Garbage Story). Michael McCarty tells about raising a teenage daughter in a multicultural world (That’s My Baby). Brenda Wong Aoki acquaints us with Japanese-American infants and mothers-to-be as they ride the trains to the U.S. internment camps of World War II (The Train Ride). All the stories are thought-provoking yet filled with humor and uplifting insight.

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The BridgeBuilder Award recognizes the outstanding service of individuals who have built bridges of dialog, cooperation and understanding between diverse groups and communities and who work, attend school or live in the northern suburbs of Chicago.

The Chicago Province of the Society of the Divine Word is honored to present the 2008 BridgeBuilder Award to nine outstanding high school students who, through their actions and energies have begun to make a difference in our world in building bridges of understanding and hope.

The BridgeBuilder Award honorees are from schools in and around the Northbrook, IL area.

Margret-Ann Ferrell
Glenbrook North High School
Northbrook, IL

Claire Tighe
Loyola Academy
Wilmette, IL

Clemantine Wamariya
New Trier High School
Winnetka, IL

Kenan Medzikovic
The Islamic Cultural Center
of Greater Chicago Saturday School
Northbrook, IL

Erin Sexton
Glenbrook South School
Glenview, IL

Sandra Siegel
Glenbrook Evening School
Northbrook, IL

Lisa Doi
Northshore Country Day School
Winnetka, IL

Rosie Kiken
Chicagoland Jewish High School
Deerfield, IL

Claire Kaufman
Regina Dominican High School
Wilmette, IL

Presenting the awards is Father Mark Weber SVD,
Provincial of the Chicago Province of the Society of the Divine Word.

Members of the Northbrook Human Relations Commission will also present a gift to each of our BridgeBuilder Award winners.

Many thanks to Teacher Mr. Jerome Hoynes of GBN High School who helped coordinate the outreach for this BridgeBuilder Award Project.

Further information about the BridgeBuilder Award
and past honorees go to : www.racebridges.net

RaceBridges is a companion project to JustStories. Go to www.racebridgesforschools.com
for free, downloadable Lesson Plans for high school students on a variety of diversity themes.

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The JustStories Storytelling project is an initiative that brings together diverse professional storytellers to develop, write and perform stories that deal with ethnic identity, race relations and dealing with differences. This project seeks to use storytelling as a tool to bring together the races, bridge differences and increase understanding and cooperation.

This project also includes a JustStories Fellowship that supports professional storytellers in developing, writing and readying for performance their own original story about race relations, belonging and inclusive themes.

• 2002 : The multi-ethnic performance Tribes & Bridges with storytellers Susan O’Halloran, Antonio Sacre and La’Ron Williams was developed and staged. This performance piece has toured throughout the Midwest and is in a DVD form : Tribes & Bridges at the Steppenwolf Theatre.
• 2003 : Antonio Sacre was commissioned and supported with a JustSories Fellowship to write and perform four stories about Latino-American life, journeys and challenges.
• 2003 : The first 2-Day JustStories Festival was held at Techny, IL
• 2003-04 : A series of JustStories Festivals were held for hundreds of high school students in the Chicagoland area.
• 2004 : Storyteller Susan O’Halloran wrote, produced and hosted the JustStories TV series for Cable Channel 17 in Northbrook, IL
• 2004 : The Asian Voices Day and Storytelling Concert with storytelling  duo Eth-Noh-Tec. This event celebrated the pains and joys of Asian-American journeys and lives. A Vietnamese storytelling wprkshop was held in connection with this day of learning, creativity and story-creation.
• 2004-05 : Lakota-Kiowa Apache Storyteller Dovie Thomason was commissioned to write and perform her story Spirit & Survival.
• 2005 : Gayle Ross of the Cherokee Nation received support from the JustStories Fellowship in completing her story about her ancestors : Inside the Beaded Beltway: Stories of American Indian Ambassadors.
• 2005 : New York storyteller Gerald Fierst was supported by a JustStories Fellowship to develop his Jewish-centered stories as part of the ongoing More Alike Than Not storytelling project.
• 2005 : More Alike Than Not : Stories from Three Americans – Catholic, Jewish and Muslim – a storytelling performance written and performed by Gerald Fierst, Susan O’Halloran and Arif Choudhury was premiered at the JustStories Festival. Also presented at this event : Towards a New Land : A Commemoration of the Vietnamese Diaspora.
• 2005 : Mexican-American storyteller Olga Loya was commissioned to write and perform her story about her search for identity : Nepantla : Between Two Worlds.
• 2006 : Olga Loya premiered her story at the JustStories Festival.   This event brought together the talents of storytellers La’Ron Williams, Susan O’Halloran, Antonio Sacre and Arif Choudhury under the theme : Searching For Home.
• 2005-08 : A schools-version of the More Alike Than Not project was further developed by Arif Choudhury and Susan O’Halloran.  This story-performance continues to engage and delight school students of many ages from Middle School through College age. Renowned Jewish storyteller Syd Leiberman has also joined the More Alike Than Not outreach.
• 2007 : Northbrook resident Arif Choudhury was commissioned with a JustStories Fellowship to develop and perform his new story My Real Name. It premiered at the 2007 festival.
• 2007 : The JustStories Festival gathered storytellers Antonio Roche, Susan O’Halloran, Arianne Ross, Anne Shimojima and Arif Choudhury under the festival’s diverse tent and theme : Insiders & Outsiders: Stories Across Cultures: Stories As Bridges.
• 2008 : The 2008 JustStories Fellow is Los Angeles storyteller Michael McCarty. Michael will premiere his new story Connecting the Dots at this festival.

The stories created under the JustStories Fellowship continue to be told— in forms long and short— in festivals, schools and events, for young and old across the U.S. and overseas.

JustStories is an ongoing initiative of Angels Studio/Chicago and O’Halloran Communications/Evanston, IL.

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