Martha “Momfeather” Erickson shed her red-and-gray beaded shawl as she stood in front of the circle.

“How many of you believe in dragons?” she asked.

The glint in her eyes mirrored the firelight she remembers seeing in her grandfather’s as he told the same story when she was young. She spread her hands and described a village plagued by a three-eyed dragon and a brave boy determined to slay it. When she finished, she pulled out a smooth, murky green stone and asked, “Do you believe that story? Do you? Well, I do because I’ve got the dragon’s eye right here.”

Erickson, a Cherokee elder and founder of the Mantle Rock Native Education and Cultural Center in Marion, spoke to more than 20 students and community members about Native American heritage at the Kentucky Museum Tuesday night. The talk centered around cultural acceptance.

Adorned with orange, green and brown beaded necklaces, colorful dangling earrings and a purple rhinestone barrette that held her mane of peppery white hair, Erickson looked the part as she explained the myth of “rainbow warriors.”

When she was young, her grandfather told her, “Someday, honey, you’re going to see the rainbow people.” As she grew older, she learned that this rainbow was all around her in the blend of ethnicities and cultures and personalities of the people she saw every day.

“You look at all the people in this room, and you’re all mixed blood,” she said. “There is nothing more beautiful than the people I am looking at right now.”

Ricardo Nazario-Colón, director of the Office of Diversity Programs, brought Erickson to Western for “A Conversation with Momfeather.” Part of Nazario-Colón’s mission is to help students embrace multiracial heritages, and he believed Erickson’s message would emphasize that acceptance.

He also wanted to draw attention to Kentucky’s contemporary American Indian culture.

“We tend to talk about Native Americans in a historical context to the point that some people don’t even know if Native Americans still exist,” he said. Nazario-Colón brought a poet from Idaho to Western last year in an effort to expose students to American Indian literature.

Erickson shared memories of her childhood in Harlin County, growing up among extended family in a community she remembers calling “Indian Holler.” She recounted four-day ceremonial Cherokee gatherings marked by the 24-hour pulse of drumbeats and spoke of her grandfather performing the Buffalo Dance in a worn skin and a pair of animal horns. She described Cherokee recipes with herbal ingredients such as “spice bush,” “horse tail” and “colt’s foot,” along with nuts, berries, wild onions and mushrooms.

Erickson spoke of a spiritual experience she had the first time she visited Mantle Rock in Marion. The rock formation served as a winter shelter for more than 3,000 Cherokee along the Trail of Tears, and the history of the location inspired Erickson to move to western Kentucky and open the cultural center.

Graduate student Jennifer Skornicka came to Western from Mount Pleasant, Mich., to study folklore. In Michigan, she celebrated her Ojibwe heritage through traditional dancing. The conversation gave her a chance to participate in cultural celebration in Kentucky.

“I was just excited to see someone talk about Native American heritage,” she said.