A dancer in traditional India dress performs a folk dance at Pangea.
Emily Kulzer and Levi Magnuson of HCSCC show off Pangea T-shirts available at the annual multicultural festival on Saturday, Nov. 16, at the Hjemkomst Center. (Photo/Nancy Hanson.)
Dancers from Chinese Heritage of Recreation and Dance share their culture at Pangea.
Nancy Edmonds Hanson
Moorhead goes global Saturday, Nov. 16, when neighbors representing some two dozen cultures fill the Hjemkomst Center with the music, dancing, foods and arts and crafts of the homelands that contribute to community’s colorful mosaic.
It’s time for Pangea, one of Moorhead and Fargo’s brightest festivals. Subtitled “Celebrating Our Cultures,” the gathering of ethnic Americans again brings a taste of the world to town two weeks before Thanksgiving.
This year is especially significant, say Emily Kulzer and Yoke-Sim Gunaratne. It marks the 30th anniversary of the event that began in school gymnasiums – now a major date that last year drew more than 1,200 visitors to the Hjemkomst in just six hours.
Emily is director of museum operations for the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County, which has co-sponsored Pangea since 2005. Yoke-Sim founded and leads Cultural Diversity Resources, which conceived the festival back in 1994 as a means to build an intercultural bridge for strengthening the bonds between Fargo-Moorhead’s increasingly diverse residents.
“We wanted to create an event that’s fun, that’s entertaining,” Yoke-Sim explains. A native of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, she came to Moorhead more than 30 years ago with her late husband Shelton Gunaratne, a professor of mass communications at Minnesota State University Moorhead. “It reduces the anxiety people sometimes have about mingling and getting to know each other.”
Anxiety has no place there. Instead, Emily suggests curiosity and appetites rule the day.
While dancers, drummers and fiddlers show their talents on the stage, “food is probably the biggest attraction,” she suggests. Visitors always line up to devour dishes from five continents. Among them:
Aebleskiver (little spherical pancakes) from Denmark.
Kuku Muchuzi (African chicken) from East Africa.
Dolmas and Chicken Borek from Kurdistan.
French Crepes.
Wojapi and Fry Bread Tacos from the Lakota and Ojibwe cultures.
Faijoada (black bean stew) from Brazil.
Meanwhile, the FM Community Theater stage rocks with a dizzying range of performers. Starting at 10 a.m. with the Fargo Spelemannslag – Norwegian fiddlers – a cavalcade of local artists takes the spotlight until 4 p.m. Among them: MinDak Belly Dance, Ethiopian-Eritrean Habeshas, Native American Niimi’idiwag, folk dances of India, an international fashion show, Kurdish performers, Fargo Foklorico, Chinese Heritage of Recreation and Dance, and Brazilian Adolfo Mendonca.
Thirty organizations host booths – some promoting their services, others telling stories of their cultures, and still more showing and selling traditional crafts.
The Pangea vision has grown far beyond the modest events Yoke-Sim organized in the earliest days of her multi-cultural organization. “Other groups for immigrants and New Americans focus on a single culture,” she notes. “We work with all of them, with everyone.” Today, CDR’s educational programs include entrepreneurship, financial literacy and self-sufficiency. It provides bilingual interpreters and partners with SEED (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity) for local educators, and partners with Americorps’ VISTA to train BIPOC leaders (Black, Indigenous and people of color).
Collaboration with the historical society, Yoke-Sim says, was a turning point for the cultural festival. “At first our events were fragmented – a different location every year, with no consistency,” she says. “Refreshments were just cookies and muffins.
“[HCSCC executive director] Maureen Kelly Jonason has been very open-minded and generous in building the festival to what it is today,” she continues. Among Jonason’s innovations was addition of the name “Pangea,” a reference to planet Earth’s supercontinent of 200 million years ago. Jonason also secured grant funding and sponsorships, including the Minnesota State Arts Board, Lake Region Arts Council, The Arts Partnership, and the cities of Fargo, Moorhead, and West Fargo. Additional funding has been provided by the Awesome Foundation, Fargo-Moorhead Convention and Visitors Bureau, FM Area Foundation, Hornbacher’s, Marvin Composites and the West Central Initiative.
Admission to Pangea, with its entertainment and booths, is free for all ages. Food court vendors charge nominal amounts for their menus. The doors are open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
“With all the construction downtown, parking may be at a premium,” Emily adds. She says the Hjemkomst lot is reserved for senior citizens and people with disabilities. Instead, she recommends parking across First Avenue in the American Crystal Sugar lot and the area north of what’s left of the Center Mall. A LINK bus will offer free rides between those areas and the festival site.
