Since 2021, high-school aged Native American youth from Oregon and beyond gather for a week at a performing arts camp with their peers. The program, Arts Learning Project for Native Youth or ALP4NY, run by Bag & Baggage Productions, gives students instructions in acting and writing with additional electives depending on their interests. It exposes them to a wide variety of skills in the performing arts, provides them with training, and facilitates relationships with professionals working in the arts.
This is a unique opportunity for these students. One 2019 study found that 25% of Indigenous students don’t have any arts instruction at all, a number that’s worsened since the pandemic and the closure of many arts programs.
“For some students, this is the only place where they get any performing arts instruction and skills building,” said Jeanette Harrison, co-director of the youth program and creative director of Native Theater Project at Bag&Baggage Productions, the Oregon theater company that hosts the programs. “Other kids are really into the performing arts but doing them in dominant culture spaces without other Native kids around them.”
The camp is truly special. Not only are the students who attend from different Tribes, the faculty is also Native. The plays and monologues performed during the summer program are either written by students or by Native authors, some of whom write in Indigenous languages.
Last year the students acted out scenes from a play partially written in Navajo. “We had Navajo students who taught their scene partners the language,” Harrison said. “One of those campers was one of the shiest we’ve had but once she saw it was her language being featured, she just blossomed.”
It’s so popular that many kids have returned for multiple years. A grant from the Roundhouse Foundation has helped keep the program entirely free for students and some from rural Oregon have travel stipends as well. “The average household income in one of the communities we work with is $18,000 a year,” Harrison explained. “We don’t want price to be a barrier and want all kids to come in on an even footing.”
Not only does ALP4NY provide arts education for students, it’s also an introduction to colleges they might want to attend. Many students would be the first in their family to attend college. “When you look at college retention rates, Native students have one of the poorest outcomes as far as retention and getting all the way to that terminal degree,” Harrison said. The camp goes out of its way to introduce Native faculty at host institutions to the students so the kids have a friendly face if they decide to attend that school.
Harrison shared that one student who attended ALP4NY’s first year, hosted at University of Nevada—Reno, has graduated high school and will be a student at Reno in the fall.
Every year, ALP4NY tries to expand the number of students it can enroll as well as the types of performing arts specialties to make sure there’s something for everyone who attends the camp. As Harrison put it, “This whole camp is about making our kids feel centered and loved.”
