Sharing her tribal roots

In July, four dozen children and their parents packed a dark room at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa to watch a bubbly woman give a presentation on Native Americans. The host, Jacque Nunez, decked out in full Acjachemen garb, showed audiences 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. Nunez, a native Acjachemen and a longtime activist for her tribe, next week plans to share her program, “Journeys to the Past,” with the city of Huntington Beach.

At 4 p.m. Tuesday, Nunez will bring her stories, crafts and some family members to the Huntington Beach Central Library, and even the staff is excited.

“The kids love her; it’s so different from what they’re used to,” librarian Janet Judson said. “Here is someone who takes the time to tell them stories and introduce them to a culture they have never known.”

During the first half of the play, Nunez 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 ago. The actor has been known to bring her sons to join in the performance, wearing elaborate costumes and engaging in traditional Acjachemen dances, Judson said.

Throughout the show, audiences get a chance to be a part of the act as well. To evoke the sound of walking back in time, Nunez has the children slap their thighs in unison. Later on, Nunez teaches a number of her people’s songs, even assigning different parts to the boys and girls.

Every weekend, she and other Acjachemen descendants 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.

The two-hour presentation will consist of two parts: a performance in the library’s theater and a workshop afterward in which children made Acjachemen headbands out of rope. The headbands, in Acjachemen tradition, are used to tie back hair, and Nunez provides the children with modern-day ingredients: pipe cleaners to represent willow twigs, string for yucca plants.

A longtime staple of Orange County education, Nunez has had a number of performances at the library, and hopefully there will be even more planned in the future, library staff said.

“She is from a native tribe here in Orange County and explains a lot of the history,” Judson said.

“She has a lot of fantastic arts and crafts she shows the children, and they can each go home with beaded drums and headdresses.”