This summer we mark the 40th Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Decades of thought and work have gone into making the Festival the longest-lived, largest, and preeminent educational event on the National Mall of the United States. We relish that presence, but more so, are proud to have helped to enable people and communities to declare for themselves in the most public way to their fellow human beings that "We are very much still here!"

As might be imagined, the arrangements for the Festival--legal, logistical, fiscal, and bureaucratic--are formidable. Each Festival must be created and produced anew. Given the contingencies, the Festival has had a remarkable staying power. This was perhaps not so obvious when the Festival was first invented by James R. Morris and Ralph Rinzler back in 1967. The Festival began as a somewhat counter-cultural experiment during tumultuous times. Though located organizationally in the Smithsonian and conceptually within the museum world, it featured performances and demonstrations of cultural traditions by living, active practitioners and exemplars.