Amerikin Carnival
A hOMEcoming in
Three MOVEMENTS
Amerikin
Carnival
A HOMEcoming in
Three MOVEMENTS
Amerikin Carnival is a multidisciplinary storytelling migration that aims to connect people to the Great Lakes waters; celebrate Great Lakes people, cultures, and histories; and imagine livable futures of reciprocity. Through performances, prayer walks, workshops, and story circles taking place across the western Great Lakes in summer 2026, Amerikin Carnival draws people together from segregated communities to consider what it means to be American in this 250th Anniversary.
A Note About the Name America:
"America" is named after Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian explorer who first proposed that the lands discovered in 1492 were part of a new continent, rather than Asia. In 1507, German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller mapped these new lands, using the feminized Latin version of Vespucci's first name, "America," to label the continent of South America. The name “America” formally refers to all countries of the Americas, yet in the United States, “America” is commonly used to refer to the U.S., thus “America” is used here in that way to reflect many Americans’ view of self.
Wake
[What binds us blinds us.]
The American story has dazzled and inspired poor peoples of the world for two and a half centuries. Set against a backdrop of medieval torture and monarchal tyranny, trailblazers of American rights and liberties have seemed to make the impossible possible. But are we truly as free as they claim us to be? How much of American hope has been hype? How much has been outright trickery?
The Amerigo Brothers Circus brings together electrifying and mesmerizing historical figures to perform death-defying acts of daring-do.
Amerigo Brothers Circus
Whether we admit it or not, America is in a death spiral. This last great attempt at greatness, witnessed in full-throttle imperial fantasy, reveals the promises of America to be paper thin. As this chapter of American glory closes once and for all, what lessons can we learn about who we are and who we can become? How might we honor America’s history while giving wake to legacies of complicity?
Americas Wake welcomes children from every walk of life to offer gifts to America’s effigy. Singing and dancing helps us make sense of our losses as we count our blessings of American beauty.
Americas Wake
Walk
[What breaks us remakes us.]
Cultural warriors of all kinds are needed in this time of tremendous trial and tribulation. Only together can we walk the long, perilous path back toward a good life. Our hearts, bodies, and spirits know the way. Our inner gifts, when permitted to be expressed, form an intricate constellation of care. Every step a prayer for collective healing and awakening of spiritual strength.
Walks with the Ancestors invite warriors of all ages to form, join, and support walks taking place along many Great Lakes rivers. Each walk of a few days to a few weeks converges people from rural towns, suburban villages, and urban centers in deep dialogue leading up to the Wake.
Walk with the Ancestors
How many histories have been hidden that now haunt these lands we inhabit? How much of progress has been a paving over of peoples, places, and cultural practices? Until we compost the conditions of cognitive dissonance we may not be able to create new life-giving contexts of ecological and economic repair and renewal. History rhymes unless we can reveal it.
Deity Dances are original presentations of place-based theatre, dance, music, film, sculpture, spoken word, and more that remix local history and portray perspectives of polyvocality. Deity Dances are encountered along the Walks in libraries, parks, and corner stores, helping us break down single stories of supremacy.
Deity Dances
Weave
[What mends us blends us.]
In reciprocal cultures, gifts form the foundation of every relationship, games generate conflict resolution without crisis, and gatherings create rhythms for shared realities. We can rebuild our basis of belonging, not by how much we own but by how well we care for others and the earth.
Teachers, healers, makers, and menders of many kinds are invited to share ancient teachings and Indigenous technologies at Great Lakes Gatherings following the Wake and Walk. Gatherings create shared sacred spaces and take place all day alongside and with Great Lakes waters.
Great Lakes Gatherings
Weaving Workshops
On the underside of collapse is creation. To be able to understand the greater truths of our time, let’s heal our wounds of separation, rebuild trust and intimacy, and weave together generational stories of survival and unshackling.
Weaving Workshops incorporate storytelling, circle sharing, as well as practices for grounding our many truths and remembering how to hold space for unraveling, unknowing, and recovering. Workshops close each day and interweave the Wake, Walk, and Gathering.
The United States poses the greatest threat to the survival of life on Earth.
Like the automobile, hamburger, firearm, and fireworks, industrial empire was not born in America but perfected here. In its 250 years of existence as a nation, the United States has not been expanding its territory for only 3 years (in those years of 1854-1857, the federal government was intensifying its forced marches and military confinement of Native tribes onto reservations). In our endless war, theft of resources, and subjugation of peoples, the United States has caused more collapse of communities and ecosystems than any other society in human history. In our militarism, materialism, and manifest destiny (the "triple evils" identified by Martin Luther King, Jr.) lie the seeds of our total destruction.
Yet America is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions.
Rights are being revoked. Pathways to prosperity are bottoming out. Poisons pump through every body. Media is manic. Leaders are losing. Terror tugs our heartstrings with panic and paranoia. Addiction of every kind is out of control. Institutions are freezing. Ethical professionals are being eliminated. Wars waste resources beyond imagination. AI endangers reality. Environmental protections are pulverized. Members of nearly every group are being persecuted. Abuse is absolute. The power of the people to move the needle of progress is being policed to the fullest. Wild weather whips through the grid faster than we can gather. Corporations control every facet of our lives. The promise of heaven has turned into a hellscape so insidious we’ve barely noticed it creeping in.
In short, our unmetabolized histories of exclusion and extraction have fully come home to roost.
The Great Lakes are home to stories that foretold these conditions.
Around 1,500 years ago, while the Anishinaabe were living peacefully along the Northeast coast of North America, seven prophets came to the people and left them with predictions of the future, now called the Seven Fires Prophecy. The prophets instructed the people to rise up and migrate inland or they would be destroyed. They told of the coming of the light skinned race and said, “Beware if the light skinned race comes wearing the face of death. The face of brotherhood and the face of death look very much alike. If they come carrying a weapon, if they come in suffering, they could fool you. You shall know that the face they wear is one of death if the rivers run with poison and fish become unfit to eat.” These prophecies prompted the Anishinaabe to begin their generations-long Great Migration to the “land where food grows on water” (manoomin, wild rice, is found throughout the Great Lakes bioregion). It is here that the Anishinaabe Three Fires Confederacy (Ottawa, Potawatomi, and Ojibwe) created a vast, powerful homeland (Anishinaabewaki) and experienced the fulfillment of all the prophecies.
The Great Lakes are what made America “great.”
Motown, Techno, House…the Great Lakes have been the birthplace of cultural flourishing for generations. For time immemorial, the Great Lakes waterways provided travel routes and a meeting ground for tribal (and eventually European) nations to come together. During American slavery, the Great Lakes provided crucial routes on the Underground Railroad to Canada. The Great Lakes continuous waterways from the American heartland to the Atlanta Ocean helped industries like agriculture, electrical transmission, iron mining, steel manufacturing, oil pipelining, and automobile manufacturing rapidly expand across the continent, usher in industrial production at mass scale, and establish global trade. The Great Lakes became a destination for African Americans during the Great Migration as auto plants in Southeast Michigan built America’s middle class, became the “Arsenal of Democracy” for weapons production during WWII, and paved the way for U.S. global supremacy. And throughout the 20th century, the Great Lakes helped transform the labor movement with the Flint Sit-Down Strike, shaped civil rights with the Niagara Movement, saw the birth of the modern environmental movement, and made significant strides in the Indigenous rights movement.
The Great Lakes hold 95% of the U.S.’s surface freshwater (a nonrenewable gift of the glaciers); as such, they are known as “the heart” of Turtle Island (North America) by the Anishinaabe. What we do in the Great Lakes ripples out across the continent.
Carnival means “farewell to flesh.”
Originating in the 17th and 18th centuries in Brazil, Tobago, and Trinidad, Carnival (today the world’s largest party) blended European pre-Lenten masquerade balls with African rituals, music, and dance. Enslaved people created Carnival celebrations as a form of defiance, mocking the elites and celebrating their resilience. Over centuries, Carnival has developed into a vibrant expression of freedom; a place where old hierarchies are flipped on their head, ancestors are danced with, and ancient cultures spill into the streets. Carnival celebrations around the world provide a counter to the brutal history of the American circus. And in a time when divisions are hardening and many of us are forgetting how we got here, Carnival helps us reclaim our mother cultures from erasure and shake loose rigid identities.
We are in a time of spiritual reckoning.
The last prophet of the Anishinaabe said, “In the time of the Seventh Fire, the light skinned race will be given a choice between two roads. If they choose the right road, then the Seventh Fire will light the Eighth and final Fire, an eternal fire of peace, love, brotherhood and sisterhood. If the light skinned race makes the wrong choice of the roads, then the destruction which they brought with them in coming to this country will come back and cause much suffering and death to all Earth’s people.” Anishinaabe people believe we are in the time of the Seventh Fire, a time when we might still be able to deliver our society from the scorched Earth path if we can retrace our steps to find what was lost, rekindle old ways, and midwife a rebirth of many nations that are guided by respect for all living things. If we can say farewell to militarism, materialism, and manifest destiny, we might still be able to walk the green Earth path.
Amerikin Carnival calls us into reconnection with our stories, histories, legacies, and great spiritual mysteries.
Page Art Credits:
Kin Carnival Collages by Thomlin Swan