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QuickTake:
The three-day flute festival in Springfield has become the pre-eminent flute festival in the Pacific Northwest. It all started with an Eastern red cedar.
Alby Thoumsin didn’t want to stick such beautiful wood into the chipper.
After felling a branch of an eastern cedar, the Eugene arborist knew what to do. He had recently struck up a conversation with flutemaker John Eley at a 2009 Lane Community College powwow, and told him the next time there was usable wood to spare, he would call.
Eley carved flutes from the cedar, including one for Thoumsin. There was one problem — Thoumsin did not play the flute. Eley’s response was simple, in Thoumsin’s recollection.
“You will,” he said.
He did. In 2017, Thoumsin went on to become the founder of Flutestock, a free, three-day festival celebrating the Native American flute. (Native American flutes, with their simple holes carved into wood, are different from metal Western classical flutes and their complicated system of tone holes.)
The event started much smaller, in an Elkton community center, but it grew over the years and now takes place in Springfield’s Island Park. After this year’s festival, Flutestock will take place every two years, to allow organizers more time to put the festival together.
Next year will see a smaller event, a one-day “Flutestock Lite,” in Lebanon, Oregon; Eugene-area flute enthusiasts can get their fix with a flute circle, Voices of Cedar.
This year’s festival started on Friday, July 25. Flutestock has now grown into a festival attracting top-caliber players of Native American flutes, like Rona Yellow-Robe and Timothy J.P. Gomez. But it’s still welcome to anyone who, like Thoumsin at first, has never picked up a flute.
“There’s no judgment,” he said of the open-mic stage, where novice players can test out the instrument. “People clap, no matter what.”
How Flutestock has grown
Unbeknownst to Thoumsin, Flutestock stepped into a gap in the flute ecosystem. The festival started right as the popular Pacific Northwest festival Flute Quest, in the greater Seattle area, sunsetted.
Thoumsin said attendance has grown each year of the festival by another 200 or 250 people, which urged a move from the more remote Elkton to Springfield. Thoumsin said that these days, around 1,000 to 1,200 people will attend during the three-day run.
Sara Marvin started attending at Thoumsin’s recommendation. She first went as a favor to the arborist, who also managed the trees at her Eugene home, but eventually became a Flutestock board member — and the owner of “many, many, many, many, many” flutes.
“I corrupted her. She became addicted,” Thoumsin said in a joint interview with Marvin.
“It’s his fault,” she added.
As the festival has grown, its organizers have been conscious of their role within the Native American flute community. Thoumsin is not Native American, nor is he American in origin. He moved to the United States from Belgium.
That background means that in putting on Flutestock, he’s especially concerned about the event not sliding into cultural appropriation. He noted the Indigenous presence at the festival with vendors, performers, a board member and a blessing before each festival.
“One of the key parts of our mission statement is to make sure that we are honoring and recognizing the Native community and the origin of the instrument, back to the roots of the instrument,” Thoumsin said.
On Friday afternoon, flute music filled the Island Park air as the festival began, with flute enthusiasts trickling in to buy T-shirts, crafts and, of course, flutes.
For Anthony Redfeather, a member of the Oglala Lakota nation, Flutestock is a way to sell wares (dreamcatchers and other crafts) in an environment that values tradition, though its organizers were not born into it.
“They’re saying, ‘This is where I learned it from, this is how they taught me how to do it,’” Redfeather said. “That’s what I really love. They give credit to how they know.”
