Schedule of Events

We’ll be offering a variety of expert-guided field trips, workshops, presentations, and arts and entertainment events.

Full schedule and registration for the 2024 Gila River Festival will be available August 1, 2024.

PARTIcipants

Speakers

The 2024 Gila River Festival will feature exciting and thoughtful speakers that will examine the many ways in which water connects us.

Here is the list of speakers from the 2022 Gila River Festival.

Leeanna torres

Leeanna T. Torres is a native daughter of the American Southwest, a Nuevomexicana who has worked as an environmental professional throughout the West since 2001. Her essays have appeared in publications including Blue Mesa Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Eastern Iowa Review, Minding Nature, and High Country News. More recently, she has work in two anthologies by Torrey House Press including First and Wildest: The Gila Wilderness at 100 (2022).

Skylar Begay is an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation, and has Mandan and Hidatsa ancestry as well. He is the Tribal Outreach Fellow at Archaeology Southwest where he works on the Respect Great Bend campaign. As a young Indigenous person passionate about conservation, Skylar bring a perspective that incorporates his ancestry and his western education. He hopes to find effective ways of bridging these two worlds.

Barnaby V. Lewis is the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Gila River Indian Community since February 2009. THPO consults with federal and state agencies regarding the religious and cultural significance of historic properties. Mr. Lewis supervises all aspects of cultural resource consultation in connection with federal, state, and tribal laws.

Lori Gooday Ware has been chairwoman of the Fort Sill Apache Tribe since 2018, and is a descendant of Chief Mangas Coloradas and Chief Loco of the Mimbreno and Warm Springs Apache Tribes. The headwaters of the Gila are her people's homeland.

Alex Mares

Michael berman

neil fuller

Wendel Hann

Alex Mares is of Diné and Mexican American heritage. He has served as a Park Ranger and Interpreter for 32 years in both Texas and New Mexico. He also served as Native American liaison for New Mexico Wild in the successful effort to establish the Organ Mountains Desert Peaks National Monument.

Michael P. Berman wanders the terrain of the American West and Mexico Norteno. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008 to photograph the Chihuahuan Desert for "Trinity" the third book of a border trilogy with writer Charles Bowden. His most recent book, published by Museum of New Mexico Press, is "Perdido: Sierra San Luis". His photographs are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Amon Carter Museum and the Museum of New Mexico.

Neil was raised on his grandfather’s cattle ranch, a property of approximately 95,000 acres that encompassed 7 miles of the Lower Gila River Box. Retired from the USDA Soil Conservation Service/Natural Resources Conservation Service, Neil brings history to life as a volunteer with the NM Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum. One of the characters he enjoys portraying is his grandfather so he can share his experiences as a homesteader and rancher along the Gila River.

Wendel is a rancher in Southwest New Mexico and national-level ecological consultant. Through a 30 plus-year career with the U.S. Forest Service, Wendel provided national leadership in fire and natural resource ecology for the Departments of Agriculture and Interior. Raised on a farm, he has always paralleled his professional travels with owning a local farm or ranch. Wendel is committed to imple-menting and expressing the values of holistic agricultural and wildland management. His lifelong wildland adventures, combined with mule packing and outfitting skills, have provided unique observations of landscape processes across North America.

Location

Silver City, NM

The Gila River Festival is based in Silver City, New Mexico, the gateway to the Gila Wilderness -- America's first wilderness area.

Huge thanks to the 2022 Gila River Festival Planning Committee:

Jody Norman (Coordinator), Claudia Elferdink, Dylan Duvergé, Guadalupe Cano, Michael Darrow,

Carol Martin, Joe Saenz, Leia Barnett, Phillip Schoenberg, Joel Davis, Naomi Hartford, Allyson Siwik