Kevin Locke said Wednesday that he's trying to preserve an ancient Sioux tradition - the courting flute. The 36-year-old musician, storyteller and Plains hoop dancer, is one of 13 folk artists receiving $5,000 awards this year from the National Endowment for the Arts for their success in preserving the nation's heritage. The artists - including a mariachi band, a Michigan accordionist, a cowboy poet from Montana and a Hawaiian lei maker - gathered for a congressional reception at a Senate office building. They were selected from 197 people nominated for the national grant by their peers. The NEA has been making the awards since 1982. ``America's deep and varied traditional heritage is one of this nation's greatest treasures,'' said NEA Chairman John Frohnmayer. Locke carried the flute, a long wooden recorder fashioned from cedar with the mouthpiece made into the head of a bird, wrapped in cloth in a long leather tube slung across his shoulder. Locke was raised on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in South Dakota by an elderly uncle who spoke only Lakota and learned the traditional courting songs from elders. By the 1960s, the tradition of the Plains and Woodlands Indian courting flute had been all but lost as the last musicians with the skill died off without passing it to a new generation. ``It is an important role,'' said Locke, who's working on a doctoral degree in education at the University of South Dakota. ``I see that they are a bridge between our ancestors and the people of today.'' The other artists honored were: Howard Armstrong, an Afro-American string band musician in Detroit; Natividad Cano, a mariachi musician from Monterey Park, Calif.; Giuseppe and Raffaela DeFranco, southern Italian musicians and dancers from Belleville, N.J.; Bun Em, a Cambodian silk weaver from Harrisburg, Pa.; Maude Kegg, an Indian beadworker from Onamia, Minn.; Marie McDonald, the lei maker from Waimea, Hawaii; cowboy poet Wallace McRae from Forsyth, Mont.; Art Moilanen, a Finnish accordionist from Mass City, Mich.; woodcarver Emilio Rosado from Utuado, Puerto Rico; Robert Spicer, a Dickson, Tenn., square dancer; and Doug Wallin, a Marshall, N.C., ballad singer.
