Native American history comes to life on O.C. stage

Last Thursday, four dozen children and their parents packed a dark room at the Orange County Performing Arts Center to watch a bubbly woman give a presentation on Native Americans. The host, decked out in full Acjachemen garb, showed how to weave baskets, how to play clapper sticks and even how to roast rabbit over a fire.

It was an impressive act ? except that, technically, it wasn’t an act at all.

Jacque Nunez, whose “Journeys to the Past” program opened the Performing Arts Center’s summer series, is a native Acjachemen and a longtime activist for her tribe. Every weekend, she and her people meet in Orange County for a “pow-wow,” singing their ancient songs and celebrating the old ways of life. In between, for the past decade, Nunez has brought her presentation to schools and libraries around the region to help keep her heritage alive.

“The people I represent, we still basket-weave, and we still have some of the things we had in that ancient time,” Nunez told the crowd at one point on Thursday.

The two-hour presentation consisted of two parts: a theater piece in Founders Hall and a workshop afterward in which children made Acjachemen headbands out of rope. The headbands, in Acjachemen tradition, were used to tie back hair, and Nunez provided the children with modern-day ingredients: pipe cleaners to represent willow twigs, string for yucca plants.

Although a longtime staple of Orange County education, Nunez only joined the Performing Arts Center’s roster this year. Jason Holland, the center’s manager of educational programs, said the Native American material was ideally suited to history students.

“She ties really well into the curriculum they’re studying, so she’s very popular,” Holland said.

The last two weeks of July, Nunez and her tribe plan to host a camp for students at Mission San Juan Capistrano.

During Nunez’s play, she portrays a flustered modern-day mother who struggles to get her kids to school on time, then pines for the slower-paced days of Orange County a few centuries back. Many of the actor’s own family members join in the performance, wearing elaborate costumes and engaging in traditional Acjachemen dances.

Throughout Thursday’s show, the audience often joined in as well. To evoke the sound of walking back in time, Nunez had the children slap their thighs in unison. Later, Nunez taught them a number of her people’s songs, even assigning different parts to the boys and girls.

The show, which continued at Founders Hall through Saturday, got a rousing reception its opening day. Among those in attendance was Danielle Weniger, 8, who lives in Tustin and belongs to Indian Princesses at the YMCA. Her assigned tribe is the Sioux, and she said she enjoyed comparing them to the Acjachemen way of life.

“Every tribe is different in their own way,” Danielle said. dpt.11-onbreak-2-kt-CPhotoInfoLA1SQCPD20060711j27nh8nc(LA)Marisela Banda sings during a presentation of the “Journeys to the Past” workshop. dpt.11-onbreak-1-kt-CPhotoInfoLA1SQCPG20060711j27ng6ncPHOTOS BY KENT TREPTOW / DAILY PILOT(LA)Jacque Nunez, center, sings with other performers during a presentation of her “Journeys to the Past” workshop at the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Thursday.