to get running water we also had a television Saturday morning cartoons made us laugh but when the cowboy and Indian movies came on I felt sad The TV Indians did not look or talk anything like my relatives on the reserve My grandma did not know how to speak English My cousins spoke in Anishinaabemowin most of the time not English The Hollywood version of Indians also caused a lot of teasing and bullying by other kids in our city neighborhood Life as the lone Indian family in the neighborhood was painful The good thing about television was that it gave me a window into dance When I watched Hollywood dance musicals I could leave my troubled reality and escape to another place The most famous dancing couple at the time was Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers They would float across the floor their graceful fluid movement holding me in awe and taking me to a magical place In the privacy of my bedroom I would imitate their dance and try to find that enchanted space for myself Then I would swoop swirl and twirl up and down our narrow hallway No matter how engaging their dips and swirls were though their dance was worlds apart from what I knew As soon as school was finished in June we would start to get ready for the day-long drive north The excitement of being home with my grandparents and other relatives would keep me awake the night before we left There was also my grandma’s soup and homemade pies to look forward to and there was the powwow Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers RKO Radio Pictures My granddaughter Kallan Pheasant Neganigwane Anishinaabe is a Traditional dancer Robert Snache 2 karen pheasant-neganigwane
introduction Hearing the drums and the power of the songs at the powwow and being with so many other First Nations people was incredibly exciting I urged my mom and auntie to make me a powwow dress so I could dance too It was as if once we put on our Indian dance clothes a power took over us on the dance floor The closer I moved to the dancing spirit the lighter my feet would become When I was little I would get lost among the dancers hiding from the tourists who were watching But as I began to feel the dance spirit I would forget about the tourists Those joyful dance moments were breathtaking They were also an escape from the harsh realities of being Indigenous in the city where we lived It wasn’t dance as I had experienced it watching Fred and Ginger from afar on the television screen It was a time of celebration and acceptance of identity if only for a moment Even after everything they had been through at Indian residential school my mom and dad had instilled in us pride in being Indigenous in being Anishinaabe My grandparents Mary Jane Pangowish and Alfred Mishibinijima in 1976 My Mishomis grandfather is holding my daughter Sophie Her dad Junior Pheasant is behind them Courtesy of Karen Pheasant-Neganigwane My granddaughter Francesca Pheasant Anishinaabe is a Fancy Shawl dancer She’s wearing beadwork that I designed and created for her Robert Snache 3
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
The Saturday afternoon grand entry Kainai Indian Days Stand Off Alberta That’s me on the left in my jingle dress Ruth Bergen Braun Children are introduced to the dance arena at a very young age Tamia is the daughter of Alexis and Nugget Bull Bear Siksika Blackfoot Ruth Bergen Braun the songs the breathtaking dance arena and the huge campsite with majestic family tipis that encircled it but also by the spirit that was present everywhere At the end of the first day of the powwow amid the evening songs and conversations I knew I had found my true place as a dancer During my years as a young single parent I learned that staying true to Indigenous cultural traditions involves relationships Federal government policies required children to be removed from their parents and communities for 10 months of the year sometimes even for the whole year to attend Indian residential schools which traumatized individuals caused families to break down and damaged Indigenous kinship systems the web of relationships that connects people and defines their 5
