November 13, 2003

Plains Folk: Powwow

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

At a recent scholarly meeting I heard a speaker making fun of cowboy weddings-you know, western tuxes and all that-as hopelessly hokey and culturally false. This was in the same way we used to make fun of drugstore cowboys as dress-up wannabes.

All the while I was thinking, this guy is missing the point. Westerners know about the commercial and pop-culture origins of the Western mystique, but what they say in the form of a cowboy wedding is, we know, and so what? We are Westerners, and you can’t take that away from us. This is to say, they have appropriated the very parody of Western identity and made it serve their own meanings.

People say similar things about powwows, and it’s easy to see why. Powwow as spectator sport in urban arenas, complete with beauty pageants and flooded with commercial vendors, doesn’t seem to have much to do with Indian identity traditionally defined.

If you’re thinking along these lines, take a look at the new book by Clyde Ellis, A Dancing People: Powwow Culture on the Southern Plains (University Press of Kansas). Clyde sorts out the origins of powwow culture and traces the lines of descent. There are lessons here, such as the commonplace that things cannot remain the same. Indian identity today is not that of yesterday, but it is descended from it. Plus there is the lesson like that of the cowboy wedding, that within a glitzy public shell, there can be deep and genuine meanings.

The origins of powwow lie in tribal societies centuries old. These were organizations of fellowship, mutual aid, and warfare to which dance was important as an expression of identity. They also were avenues by which individuals pursued respectability and stature.

On the reservation, Indian agents tried to suppress all things tribal, but they could not. Moreover, pan-tribal dance traditions such as the Grass Dance (which originated among the Pawnee and spread) fostered connections among tribes.

A great example was what happened at the Haskell Indian School, Lawrence, Kan., in 1926. Haskell planned a grand dedication of its new stadium, the program focusing on the football game with Bucknell, but as Clyde says, "a funny thing happened on the way to assimilation via the forward pass." The dance program, intended as mere local color, captured attention and launched the revival of Indian dance as performance.

Fancy dancing, frenetic and acrobatic, increased the spectacle. The appeal of social dances such as the Forty-nine and the Rabbit Dance brought youth into dance culture. Most of all, new cohorts of military veterans, those of the two world wars, reasserted the martial traditions of dance, as "a new generation of warriors breathed new life into old rituals." Even as dancing venues got larger, events more spectacular, older elements reappeared, such as the renewal of the Kiowa Gourd Dance at the American Indian Expo in 1955.

The warrior tradition is still present at the core of the modern powwow. So are traditional elements of the dance kit, such as bustles and roaches. And so is the traditional value of generosity, demonstrated (often, it seems, interminably) by giveaway ceremonies. So things are fine. Relax. Have a funnel cake.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2942, isern@plainsfolk.com
Editor: Rich Mattern, (701) 231-6136, richard.mattern@ndsu.nodak.edu 

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