SOUTHEAST DEEPENS NATIVE AMERICAN TIES; SILVER FEATHER FESTIVAL BRINGS MUSIC TO UNIVERSITY CENTER SUNDAY

flutist Mary Youngblood will perform Sunday at the University Center Ballroom.

Dr. Carol Morrow dates the university's growing interest in Indian heritage to a visit by Cherokee poet and author Awiakta. Awiakta was speaking to one of Morrow's classes a few years ago, with then-President Dale Nitschke and his wife, Linda, in attendance, when a student asked Awiakta's opinion of the university's Indian mascot."She said, I'm a guest here," recalled Morrow. "I don't know your situation. But the Cherokee way is always one of respect. If the university uses that, what do you give back?"Nitschke later asked Morrow to arrange a meeting with Awiakta. "He met her in Memphis," said Morrow, who teaches in the sociology and anthropology department, "and made a commitment that we were going to be in balance on this issue."With Nitschke's support and that of every college at the university, last year's powwow was hugely successful.

This year's Silver Feather Festival to be presented Sunday at the university continues that rapprochement between the university and a people it has a traditional connection to.

The festival is a celebration, a concert by three of the most popular Native American musicians currently performing. It will be presented at 7 p.m. Sunday in the University Center Ballroom. It is free to the public.

They include singer Joanne Shenandoah, who was named Best Female Artist at the 1998 Native American Music Awards, saxophonist/poet Joy Harjo and flutist Mary Youngblood.

Shenandoah accompanies her complex melodies and chants with the sounds of wind, water, percussion and Native American flute. She has performed and recorded with the likes of Neil Young, Willie Nelson and Robbie Robertson. Harjo and her band Poetic Justice have toured throughout the U.S., Europe and India since 1997. Now a resident of Hawaii, she grew up in Oklahoma but didn't learn to play the saxophone until much later."I had always wanted to (play it) but when I went to junior high the band teacher wouldn't let me because I was a girl," she said in a phone interview from Honolulu. Rather than play one of the instruments deemed suitable for a girl, Harjo quit band.

She eventually started making the sound she loves in her mid-30s. "To me it sounds like the human voice," she says. "It's very expressive. It can get to places I can't get to with human words.

Harjo came later to poetry as well, starting in her late 20s. Before that she was headed into a painting career. "What broke through was hearing a Native writer read poetry, that you could be an Indian and be a poet, that you could write poetry using the stuff around you, that you didn't have to be from Europe," Harjo says.

Harjo has written several books of poetry, including "The Woman Who Fell From The Sky."Her newest album is "Letter from the End of the 20th Century," a work she says is "about connecting with people and having compassion."... It has to do with turning what are violent and harmful acts ... into something that can regenerate rather than destroy," she said.

Her band, which includes two guitarists, two percussionists and a bassist, plays music described as a mix of tribal, jazz and reggae. It is untraditional Native American music."There are some people who create within structures," Harjo explains. "And there are other people whose place in the world is to work outside the structures."Youngblood also is breaking with tradition -- not in her performing but in the mere fact of playing a traditionally male instrument. Male plains Indians played the flute in courting. "It would be his way of calling her to him," Youngblood said from her home in Sacramento, Calif.

Her first CD, "The Offering," was recorded in the Moaning Cavern in Northern California's Calaveras County. Her second, "Heart of the World," was released in August.

Playing the flute is a spiritual experience for her. "I believe that, along with the flute makers, that it helps make the trees sing, gives the trees a voice," she said.