StoryHarvest 2023 feat. Bill Miller

Join The Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy for StoryHarvest festival to celebrate the harvest with music, food, and community, highlighted by three-time Grammy award winning musician Bill Miller of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans returning to his ancestral homeland at Freedom Square!

One of the Center’s key annual food justice celebrations is “StoryHarvest: From Seed to Table,” this event encourages diverse members of the community to celebrate and connect through music and stories of food. Initiated back in 2012 by food artist Ellie Markovitch, we invite you to celebrate with us after a three-year hiatus! A KitchenSanctuary workshop with Ellie Markovitch, in collaboration with Azuré Keahi and Amy Halloran (in the morning from 10am-12pm), will provide food for the festival and context around the importance of corn in Indigenous food and culture.

Bill Miller is an award-winning Native American recording artist, performer, songwriter, activist, painter, and world-class native flute player. Over the entirety, Miller has produced over a dozen albums, received three GRAMMY® Awards, numerous Native American Music Awards & Association (NAMA) awards (including a “Lifetime Achievement” Award) and led Wisconsin’s La Crosse Symphony Orchestra. Overcoming the hardships felt by the global community in 2020 during the COVID-19 Pandemic, 2021 finds the living legend living life— stronger with a renewed focus on healing through song, art, and speaking — as he prepares to release a fresh EP.

This event is part of the Sanctuary Eco-Art Trail project, funded by a National Endowment for the Arts Our Town creative placemaking grant, connecting Indigenous legacy to an urban nature walk on 6th Avenue. The Eco-Art Trail weaves a journey from Freedom Square on 101st St south to our newest community platform, NATURE Lab (with Citizen Science Laboratory and People’s Health Sanctuary) and on our growing permaculture forest reaching south to Glen St.

The Sanctuary Eco-Art Trail is dedicated to celebrating the sacred Mohican soils we are honored to tend. We are beneficiaries of millennia of human history unfolding in a majestic river valley, where the land has been nurtured by Indigenous hands and traumatized through industrial development and systemic inequity. Embedding art, ancestral history, culture and local and Indigenous artist presentations, the trail engages our rich local ecology and the struggle for environmental justice, while offering settler communities insight into the history and living legacy of Indigenous peoples on these lands.

The Sanctuary Eco-Art Trail is located on a block-wide environmental campus in North Central Troy, near the Northern tip of the Mahicannituck (Hudson) River Estuary—just a few hundred feet from Federal Lock One of the Erie Canal. Part of the river’s historic flood plain and home to significant Mohican cultural sites, this neighborhood is also one of the poorest in New York State, with a long history of disinvestment and environmental contamination. The Eco-Art Trail acknowledges these layered histories as we dream and build towards restored biocultural diversity and robust Indigenous futures.

Subject to change, last updated in June 2023: Check out our developing schedule of events ranging from summer ’23 through spring ’24.