ortfor "Journey Indiana" is provided by Columbus Visitors Center, celebrating everywhere art and unexpected architecture in Columbus, Indiana.

Tickets for guided tours and trip planning information at Columbus.in.us.

And by WTIU members.

Thank you!

>> ASHLEY: Coming up, meet a Madison County man making furniture and more with willow.

Explore a bit of Hollywood history in Bloomington.

Meet some Gibson County residents celebrating their family's agricultural legacy.

And enjoy a preview of this year's traditional pow-wow at Indiana University.

That's all on this episode of "Journey Indiana."

♪ Welcome to "Journey Indiana."

I'm Ashley Chilla.

And we're coming to you from the Lyles Station Historic School and Museum in Gibson County.

Originally settled in the early 1800s, Lyles Station stands as one of the last remaining African American settlements in Indiana.

And we'll learn all about it, and the restoration of this wonderful building in just a bit.

But first up, we're headed to the small town of Lapel, to meet a man making some remarkable furniture.

Producer Nick Deel has the story.

♪ >> To hear him tell it, you think you might not find much of interest at Greg Adams' downtown Lapel shop.

>> Um, I make furniture out of sticks.

I guess that's the simplest way to put it.

>> But he would be selling himself just a bit short.

For the past three decades, he's been turning raw willow into furniture and household items that are sturdy, functional, and old-fashioned beautiful.

>> The secrets are not mysterious.

The secrets are that you have to work your ass off.

>> And if you are lucky, you might catch Greg working his, uh, tail off in a patch of willow around town.

>> Watch out.

>> Willow is a broad category of trees and shrubs.

You can find it growing in moisture-rich soils just about anywhere if you know where to look.

>> I go about finding my material by being observant, rubbernecking going down the road.

But I'm very experienced with all the back roads around here for 200 miles.

And I go where nobody else goes.

And consequently, I see things that nobody else sees.

And that will keep me busy for a while.

This is what I use.

This is three years' growth of willow.

And you can see how uniform it is, how smooth, and there will be a thousand of them like this in one place.

It will all be identical almost.

I cut off these -- I cut off these little pieces.

This is what I might make a basket out of.

I might use this for maybe a trim piece, and then this will be the arm on a loveseat.

So it's like that.

>> And if you are curious how these sticks could be fashioned into functional furniture, you can pop in and watch Greg at work any day of the week.

>> I have set this place up deliberately to allow people to see how I do things.

So many times you go to a place, where they are making things.

Well, we make this part here, and then it gets shipped off to, you know, Reno.

And then it gets shipped off to, you know, somewhere else, and it's like the assembly line.

People get to see how you do things, they can kind of relate to it.

There's nothing magic about it.

It's very simple.

There's no exotic formula or anything like that.

It's simple carpentry.

I don't really like to do sanding.

I don't like to do saws.

I have a saw, but I hate to use it.

Scares me to death.

This, not so much.

♪ >> Strolling through Greg's workshop, you can find a wide variety of items crafted over the years, from the practical, to the beautiful, to the -- well, unique.

>> Here's a piece of beaver-chewed -- you see that?

To me, that looks like a fish.

It doesn't look like that to anybody else, though.

This is a black willow egg basket.

It's called an egg basket.

Sometimes they call it a butt basket.

It has that butt look to it.

I made this one in '86.

I just loved doing it, because you start out with nothing, and then it's something.

And not only is it something, and it's something that will last.

There's no reason why this won't last another 100 years.

I don't know what would stop it.

>> Recently, Greg had the good fortune to have his work and skill recognized by the likes of Cory Robinson, Professor of Furniture Design at the Herron School of Art and Design.

Together, they crafted this willow-covered shelter at the Newfields Art Museum in downtown Indianapolis.

>> I wanted to work with Greg specifically, because I knew him to be a regional expert in greenwood techniques, willow bending specifically.

I think what is interesting about what Greg does is he has a really kind of unique aesthetic vision for the things he makes, kind of in the traditions, but finding his voice with the material.

There's not people around that do what he does.

I couldn't have found a vision without him.

>> And after 30 years, Greg's one-of-a-kind vision is still clear.

>> What continues to draw me towards making things is the -- just the natural art of nature.

Nature does its own thing.

I kind of like to do my own thing, and it kind of combines.

Not everything is a home run.

Some things work.

Some things don't.

Our world is so uniform.

So plastic.

Two kinds of people.

People that want something that everybody else has got, and people who want something that nobody else has got.

I'm your huckleberry for the second one.

>> ASHLEY: When Greg pulls over and sees that willow on the side of the road and cuts it all down, it reminded me of my mom and I when I was younger.

My mom used to do crafts, and she would gather up cattails.

So sometimes we would be driving down the road, and one of us would see some cattails on the side of the road and say, stop, stop.

Let's get some.

Which just goes to show that you never know what you will find when you are driving down the road.

Want to learn more?

Just head over to Facebook and search for Willow by Greg Adams.

Earlier, we caught up with Stanley Madison to learn all about the Lyles Station Historic School and Museum.

♪ >> Our earliest history goes back to 1813, 1814, and that would have been Charles Greer.

He came here as a young man in his early 20s, probably about 21 or 22 years of age.

And in 1813 and 1814 -- of course, we hadn't become a state until 1816.

So this African American went up to Vincennes to the land bank and started purchasing land up there.

And 20 acres and 40 acres of a tract at a time, and he was kind of our first African American to settle into this area, about 7 miles to the south of us.

He was our earliest settler that went back to Virginia, North and South Carolina, down in Tennessee, and that's where the Lyleses kind of got exposed to the hearing of the story about this northwest territory being settled.

They left a little, small community down there, on the southern end of Tennessee called Lyle.

There's two reasons for them leaving down there.

One of them was because they told them that no African American could have a gun, and that was their food chain, you might say.

And then the other, they were going to take and withstand no more voting for the African Americans down there.

So that kind of made them a little bit upset, and they decided that this northwest territory had very little rules, very little laws.

Why not make a move and move here.

♪ This building here in 1922 was built here up on this hill with the idea that we were going to further the education of our children.

They actually built this with a science department, because they saw the need of the future of Lyles Station's growth, and they decided, well, why not make this state-of-the-art type of school?

And there's 4,000 square feet here that had three classrooms upstairs.

And these kids that went to school here, as you probably noticed around in the gallery, excelled out into the world, and did a lot of great things.

The space today is all about education, and it's about visitors that come and learn a little bit about African American history.

Because one of the things that has been short of, is learning and understanding more about African Americans.

The biggest, I guess you might say, with this particular building here, it is tied to education with the large scale of kids that we have that come for a field trip.

And that's called Work and Play.

Work and Play, kids come here.

They will actually make candles.

They will butter churn.

They will actually wash with the old washboard, talk about the lye soap.

We will make quilt blocks.

We will go out to the dairy barn, and we'll milk the cow.

We will go and talk about corn.

When you talk about the African American farmer, and you talk about the African American history, there's a lot that was put out in front of these individuals, but they were strugglers.

They were committed, and they made it happen.

>> ASHLEY: You can learn more at Lylesstation.org.

Up next, we are headed to the Lilly Library in Bloomington for the latest installment in our Treasures from the Museum Series.

♪ >> The Lilly Library is the rare books, special collections and manuscripts library here at IU.

The library building was built in 1960.

Following a very large acquisition of the collection of rare books and manuscripts that belonged to JK Lilly, Jr.

The library acquired his collection between about 1954, 1958, and then the building was built to house that collection in 1960.

Since then, we have grown the collection very substantially.

So today, we now have about 475,000 rare books and 8.5 million pieces of manuscript.

So a very large collection.

One of the largest of its kind in the United States, and certainly in the Midwest.

The Academy Awards are part of the John Ford collection that we have here at the Lilly Library.

The library acquired the papers and materials of John Ford in the 1980s and through the 1990s.

The awards that we have here in the library span about almost 20 years of the history of the Academy Awards.

So we have them from films as early as 1935, all the way through 1952.

Ford was one of the premier directors of the 20th century.

He started directing films very early in the 20th century.

His first films are silent films, and he directed and worked in film all the way up until 1973 when he died.

He is the most decorated director when it comes to Academy Awards.

The only director to have ever won four Academy Awards for best director.

Those include films like "The Grapes of Wrath," "The Informer" and some earlier films.

The star of our collections are five of the six Academy Awards that he won during his career.

The awards are very, very heavy.

They weigh almost 15 pounds.

So it makes sense when the actors usually get them at the ceremony, and they always say, oh, this was very heavy.

It is, indeed, very heavy.

We currently have two of John Ford's Academy Awards on exhibit in our galleries.

However, the other three live in our stacks currently, but if you would ever like to see or hold them, you are welcome to certainly make an appointment to come and view them in our reading room, and the reading room is open to the public by appointment.

>> ASHLEY: One of our first episodes we ever shot was at the Lilly Library, and Brandon and I almost broke one of their puzzle tables.

So I'm really glad this exhibit wasn't happening, because I would not have wanted to be the person who broke one of the Oscars.

The Lilly Library is full of treasures, and you can learn more at the address on the screen.

Up next, we're staying right here to meet some gardening gurus in Gibson County.

Producer Jason Pear has the story.

♪ >> Lyles Station in its zenith had over 800 families here.

People were here, like, 100 years even before it became Lyles Station.

So it was a colony, and it was an area where the Blacks had came and settled and survived, and, you know, made a way for theirselves.

It's a farming community.

Even where we are at right now was a part of Lyles Station, because a man named Thomas Cole owned thousands and thousands of acres that went all the way to Mount Carmel.

He owned it, and he was a Black man.

When I grew up in Lyles Station, it was a whole lot of family and friends, and we all went to Wayman Chapel Church, which was the center of Lyles Station.

We would have picnics.

We would have barbecues.

We would have fish fries.

And Lyles Station, right now, is the remnants of what it was.

Our part of the family, we've always worked the ground.

What it was then, it was farming, but it was also homesteading.

My father was recognized -- is recognized as one of the last remaining African American farmers farming land that's been in their family since pre-Civil War.

It's been passed down for generation and generation, and he's farming that still.

Today is the next generation, which is my son, who has decided that he wants to do the produce farming.

>> You know, there's a lot of things that you think you might want to do growing up, and farming never was a thought of mine at all.

Around 2016, when my grandfather was getting acknowledged and Lyles Station, a bell kind of rung in my head, or a lightbulb as you could say, just kind of went off and was, like, you know, my grandpa is the last one that they are saying in our family.

So I just, like, you know, thought it would have been easy at the time.

Like, hey, I can grow a garden.

Hey, I can sell some fresh produce.

Not really knowing what it all took at the time, just had an idea and just ran with it, really.

>> We're actually on what's called Produce Alley, and there's other produce stands on down the road.

So this is called the Gibson County's Produce Alley.

We do food giveaways.

So what we do is we go into the community, partner with organizations such as Young and Established, which work with inner city youth and give them programs.

We are doing a program with them to where we are giving away a fresh local produce bag.

You know, those are the most important seeds that I feel like I plant, is that -- is that seed of sustainability, that seed of opportunity.

We have hooked up with other Black farmers.

We did farmer's markets in the underserved areas.

In Evansville, we've hooked up with the churches that's in the underserved area, and we do youth programs.

With those youth programs, some of them we take them from seed, all the way to market, to canning and preserving.

So we teach them how to grow the food.

We educate them about food.

We educate them on the opportunities that agriculture can bring to them, because for them, agriculture is great, great grandpa or some old man sitting on a tractor making dust.

Agriculture is so much more than farming.

And that's what we try to plant those seeds.

>> My grandpa, he wants to see the best for me.

So he encourages me.

He gives me a lot of information to help me to be successful out here, because he's done it before too.

He's helped his brothers.

So he definitely gives me a lot of words of encouragement.

He probably won't say it, but I'm pretty sure he enjoys to see me out here.

>> You need to understand your roots, right?

For me, I recognized that Black farming is becoming extinct.

And I recognized the good life I had by living on a farm.

The people here worked, and they had their own community, and, to me, it's important for people to know, you know?

And it's important for people to get to come back home, you know, at some point in time, you know, because there's so much joy in the people coming.

And I guess for me, my joy comes from everybody else's joy.

>> ASHLEY: Finding something you love to do is so special, and being able to do it with your family is even more special.

My family and I love to share music, and their family loves to share food and gardening.

Want to learn more?

Just head over to legacytasteofthegarden.com.

>>> And finally, we are headed back to Monroe County, for a preview of this year's traditional pow-wow at Indiana University.

Producer Adam Carroll has the story.

>> The best way to learn about cultures, to learn about people, is to learn with people.

That's sort of number one.

That's the key first step in our book, is just being around and being part of the community.

>> Bozho, Dokmebisa ndezhnekas Bodéwadmi ndaw Bloomington Ndoch bya.

I'm Dokmebisa.

I am from Bloomington, and I am Potawatomi.

I'm a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.

As far as we can trace it back, we can trace it all the way back into the northern parts of Indiana and Michigan, through my mother's side, through my grandfather.

One of my great, great ancestors was on Potawatomi Trail of Death, where we were forcibly removed via the Indian Removal Act, to Kansas, and then later we moved down into Oklahoma where the tribe is today.

So I came here for ancient history, but as I have kind of gone through that, my interest has actually changed, and I'm starting to look into doing more history within Native American studies, particularly with the Anishinaabe tribes, which is the Ojibwe, the Odawa, and the Bodewadmi, particularly Potawatomi within that regard.

What I want to use that for is to kind of help bring back some of the culture, the history, of my tribe that was lost throughout the years, to kind of go back and reclaim that.

>> The First Nations Center is here to serve as a home away from home for Native American and Indigenous students on campus.

That's our number one priority, is making sure that students who come to Bloomington from all over the country, make sure that they have a point of connection, where they can come together and learn from one another and share in their cultures and traditions.

We have programming throughout the year.

We have speaker series and film series.

We offer workshops for anyone who is interested in bringing in a speaker to talk to whether it's their department or office or class sometimes.

The second Monday of every October is Indigenous Peoples Day, and we always invite speakers and host programming then.

November is Native American Heritage Month.

So we have more films.

We always bring in a speaker or an artist.

We invited artist Steven Paul Judd -- who is from Oklahoma.

He's Choctaw and Kiowa.

-- to Bloomington to help paint a portrait of Jim Thorpe.

We had been in conversation with Steven and said, hey, wouldn't it be great to come to Bloomington and paint a portrait of Jim Thorpe that could be hung here on campus?

And Steven said that in the past, he's worked on projects where it's sort of a community participatory-type of painting.

Something where he creates the outlines, and then invites everyone, passers by, whoever is there, to contribute to the painting.

He would tell them what color, and they would find that spot and paint in that piece.

It was a three-day event where Steven was set up in the IMU, and it was on the main stage in this wonderful public area, where everyone who passed by, from students to community members, to Dean Dave O'Guinn, came by and painted a little bit on this painting.

They got to connect with all of these points, and everybody got to learn and come together.

And at the end, a painting was produced that didn't just represent the history of Indiana University or a native history of Indiana, but it represented this coming together of the community to support and highlight the native history and native presence on this campus.

Our biggest event is my favorite event of the year, is our annual pow-wow, which happens at the beginning of April every year, out on Dunn Meadow.

The important piece of the pow-wow, I think, is making sure that native students on campus, and those who are part of the pow-wow committee, feel connected to it.

You know, there is so much planning that goes into it.

There's so much logistics and budgetary discussions that it's easy for something like this to become not fun.

And our call is to make sure that does not happen.

>> It's this big gathering of different tribes, of different cultures.

And it's just really interesting to see the similarities, the differences, to get to experience the different music, the dancing, and just generally meet people.

>> We're happy.

We, as staff members at the FNECC, are happy when our students get to see people from their communities.

When they get to see people they are related to, people who look like them, and dance like them, and sing the same songs.

When they get to see their communities present and represented on campus, that for me, is the win.

That for me is when the pow-wow has become a success.

♪ On a day-to-day basis, the FNECC is a place for native students to come and hang out, to work on homework, to have meetings, to work on craft projects together, to share, and to laugh.

And, yes, they can do that anywhere, but what's important about our center is that it's a place where they can be unapologetically native.

>> Native Americans aren't this monolith.

We are not just, you know, all Native Americans.

We're Anishinaabe.

We're Lakota.

We're Navajo.

We're Sugaree.

Where people think there's this one culture, it's multiple different cultures that have some similarities, differences, and it's just this amazing tapestry.

And that's something that we love to share.

♪ >> ASHLEY: This year's pow-wow takes place on Saturday, April 9th and you can learn more at firstnations.Indiana.edu.

And as always, we'd like to encourage you to stay connected with us.

Just head over to JourneyIndiana.org.

There you can see full episodes, connect with us on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, and suggest stories from your neck of the woods.

We also have a map feature that allows you to see where we've been and to plan your own Indiana adventures.

Before we say good-bye, let's spend a bit more time exploring the Lyles Station Historic School and Museum.

♪ >> Production support for "Journey Indiana" is provided by Columbus Visitors Center, celebrating everywhere art and unexpected architecture in Columbus, Indiana.

Tickets for guided tours and trip planning information at Columbus.in.us.

And by WTIU members.

Thank you!