Powwow: A Celebration through Song and Dance

Powwow: A Celebration through Song and Dance — page 7
Children in the Shawl Dance in the late 1970s Ron Spence It wasn’t easy living off the reserve though with our brown skin I felt sad when I was teased and bullied for being Indian We just did what we were supposed to do work or go to school and kept silent But when we went home to the reserve for the summer I would get to dance play and just be myself without keeping silent Powwow time was the time to celebrate our identity Being around powwow dance always made me feel beautiful Later when I was a teenager powwow dance began to mean something different for me Through the American Indian Movement with its songs headbands and political marches dance became an expression of political power Reading Dee Brown’s book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee about the history of Indians in the American West made me feel both sorrow and an immense pride in the fact that Indian people were still around that we still had our songs our dances and some of our ceremonies It was also around this time in the early 1970s that my parents took me to my first large powwow away from Manitoulin Island It was at Mount McKay south of Thunder Bay Ontario The powwow grounds there were outdoors with campsites all around the dance area The camp and dance areas both had a kind of magnetism full of laughter visiting and big pots of simmering stew As I grew older and became a seasoned dancer I came to realize the value and importance of the camp life too and how it kept our culture strong In 1982 my sister and I went with our young children to the largest powwow in Canada the World Assembly of First Nations north of Regina Saskatchewan It was my first powwow outside of the Great Lakes region I was awed not only by the hundreds of dancers the power of 4 karen pheasant-neganigwane