Colloquially the term "powwow" refers to a meeting where important matters will be discussed. However, at the thousands of Native American intertribal dances that occur every year throughout the ...United States and Canada, a powwow means something else altogether. Sometimes lasting up to a week, these social gatherings are a sacred tradition central to Native American spirituality. Attendees dance, drum, sing, eat, re-establish family ties, and make new friends.
In this compelling interdisciplinary work, Ann Axtmann examines powwows as practiced primarily along the Atlantic coastline, from New Jersey to New England. She offers an introduction to the many complexities of the tradition and explores the history of powwow performance, the variety of their setups, the dances themselves, and the phenomenon of "playing Indian." Ultimately, Axtmann seeks to understand how the dancers express and embody power through their moving bodies and what the dances signify for the communities in which they are performed.
Powwow Ellis, Clyde; Lassiter, Luke Eric; Dunham, Gary H
2005, 2005-12-01
eBook
This anthology examines the origins, meanings, and enduring power of the powwow. Held on and off reservations, in rural and urban settings, powwows are an important vehicle for Native peoples to ...gather regularly. Although sometimes a paradoxical combination of both tribal and intertribal identities, they are a medium by which many groups maintain important practices.   Powwow begins with an exploration of the history and significance of powwows, ranging from the Hochunk dances of the early twentieth century to present-day Southern Cheyenne gatherings to the contemporary powwow circuit of the northern plains. Contributors discuss the powwow’s performative and cultural dimensions, including emcees, song and dance, the expression of traditional values, and the Powwow Princess. The final section examines how powwow practices have been appropriated and transformed by Natives and non-Natives during the past few decades. Of special note is the use of powwows by Native communities in the eastern United States, by Germans, by gay and lesbian Natives, and by New Agers.
Ho-Chunk powwows are the oldest powwows in the Midwest and among the oldest in the nation, beginning in 1902 outside Black River Falls in west-central Wisconsin. Grant Arndt examines Wisconsin ...Ho-Chunk powwow traditions and the meanings of cultural performances and rituals in the wake of North American settler colonialism. As early as 1908 the Ho-Chunk people began to experiment with the commercial potential of the powwows by charging white spectators an admission fee. During the 1940s the Ho-Chunk people decided to de-commercialize their powwows and rededicate dancing culture to honor their soldiers and veterans. Powwows today exist within, on the one hand, a wider commercialization of and conflict between intertribal "dance contests" and, on the other, efforts to emphasize traditional powwow culture through a focus on community values such as veteran recognition, warrior songs, and gift exchange.InHo-Chunk Powwows and the Politics of TraditionArndt shows that over the past two centuries the dynamism of powwows within Ho-Chunk life has changed greatly, as has the balance of tradition and modernity within community life. His book is a groundbreaking study of powwow culture that investigates how the Ho-Chunk people create cultural value through their public ceremonial performances, the significance that dance culture provides for the acquisition of power and recognition inside and outside their communities, and how the Ho-Chunk people generate concepts of the self and their society through dancing.
The Sexy Health Carnival is a peer-developed Indigenous health initiative designed to provide culturally-relevant health information for Indigenous youth. The Carnival takes a strengths-based, ...holistic approach to address topics in fun and interactive ways. As part of the study described here, the Carnival was taken to 6 First Nations, 3 Métis, and 2 Inuit cultural gatherings in Canada. Due to complex histories of colonialism, bringing sexual health and harm reduction programming to cultural gatherings remains controversial. Interviews were conducted with 10 Carnival leaders. Transcripts were transcribed verbatim and inductively coded using NVivo. There was strong support for bringing the Carnival into cultural spaces because (a) teachings on health, sexuality, and reproduction are sacred and belong in cultural spaces, (b) doing so was requested by the communities themselves, (c) the Carnival holds potential to challenge harmful stigma, and (d) the Carnival supported a peer-led initiative. Facilitators also described several challenges encountered including (a) resistance to discussing stigmatised subjects, (b) issues of safety and (c) the intensive physical and emotional demands of the Carnival's implementation. The Carnival aids in re-imagining what culturally safe health promotion can look like when it is led by and for Indigenous youth. While the Carnival contributes to Indigenous cultural resilience and resurgence, further support is needed to enhance sustainably.
Rachel Buff's innovative study of festivals in two American communities launches a substantive inquiry into the nature of citizenship, race, and social power. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork as ...well as archival research, Buff compares American Indian powwows in Minneapolis with the West Indian American Day Carnival in New York. She demonstrates the historical, theoretical, and cultural links between two groups who are rarely thought of together and in so doing illuminates our understanding of the meaning of home and citizenship in the post-World War II period. The book also follows the history of federal Indian and immigration policy in this period, tracing the ways that migrant and immigrant identities are created by both national boundaries and transnational cultural memory. In addition to offering fascinating discussions of these lively and colorful festivals, Buff shows that their importance is not just as a form of performance or entertainment, but also as crucial sites for making and remaking meanings about group history and survival. Cultural performances for both groups contain a history of resistance to colonial oppression, but they also change and creatively respond to the experiences of migration and the forces of the global mass-culture industry. Accessible and engaging, Immigration and the Political Economy of Home addresses crucial contemporary issues. Powwow culture and carnival culture emerge as vital, dynamic sites that are central not only to the formation of American Indian and West Indian identities, but also to the understanding modern America itself: the history of its institution of citizenship, its postwar cities, and the nature of metropolitan culture.
Indianthusiasm refers to the European fascination with, and fantasies about, Indigenous peoples of North America, and has its roots in nineteenth-century German colonial imagination. Often manifested ...in romanticized representations of the past, Indianthusiasm has developed into a veritable industry in Germany and other European nations: there are Western and so-called "Indian" theme parks and a German hobbyist scene that attract people of all social backgrounds and ages to join camps and clubs that practise beading, powwow dancing, and Indigenous lifestyles. Containing interviews with twelve Indigenous authors, artists, and scholars who comment on the German fascination with North American Indigenous Peoples, Indianthusiasm is the first collection to present Indigenous critiques and assessments of this phenomenon. The volume connects two disciplines and strands of scholarship: German Studies and Indigenous Studies, focusing on how Indianthusiam has created both barriers and opportunities for Indigenous peoples with Germans and in Germany.
The Afterlife Neely, Nick
The Kenyon review,
07/2016, Letnik:
38, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Neely talks about the salmon. Salmon stop eating when they enter freshwater. Their whole purpose is to flash upstream, and their intestines shrivel inside their massive bodies to make room for ...swelling gonads. The feast is over, the ocean becomes a memory. As they push on, they lean on their reserves. Become lean. By the time they reach their natal waters, salmon give "running on empty" new meaning. The jaws of the male elongate and hook, becoming a "kype" that broadcasts his prowess. A female excavates a redd in gravel with her tail and deposits her eggs, which, at that same moment, are met by a cloud of milt, his offering, a cloud settling and dissipating in a blink of current. She guards her brood until she has no strength. Then her body releases to the current and drifts, already disintegrating, to an eddy or shoulder of mud where its essentials are reabsorbed.
North American powwows are presented by organizers and presumed by society at large to be Native events. Research has rarely considered the processes by which powwows become places or the role of ...territorialization in that process. This article examines the socio-spatial practices powwow organizing committees employ to construct powwows and their arts and crafts markets as places from undifferentiated space and the responses to these practices. I suggest that powwow committees construct powwow space as a form of sovereign political space from which they can manage relations with multiple constituencies and in which contemporary conceptions of Nativeness are negotiated. Les powwow nord-américains sont présentés par leurs organisateurs, et sont perçus par la société en général comme des événements autochtones. La recherche s'est rarement attardée aux processus par lesquels les powwow deviennent des lieux, ou au rôle de la territorialisation dans ce processus. Cet article examine les pratiques socio-spatiales utilisées par les comités organisateurs pour construire les powwow et les marchés d'artisanats et d'art qui s'y rattachent, en les distinguant de lieux indifférenciés, et les réactions à ces pratiques. Je fais l'hypothèse que les comités de powwow construisent l'espace des powwow comme une forme d'espace politique souverain, à partir duquel ils peuvent gérer leurs relations avec de multiples entités politiques, et au travers duquel il est possible de négocier les conceptions contemporaines de l'identité autochtone.
