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CHAPTER 4

THE MARCH POWWOW

Nearly two thousand Indigenous Americans representing about one hundred different tribes dance out onto the floor of the Denver Coliseum during the Grand Entry of the annual Denver March Powwow, each dressed in clothes significant to them and their tribe. Sitting in the stadium to watch the performers, I feel both profoundly humbled and amazed by the examples of intertribal dancing.

“There are approximately over five hundred tribes that are still here [in America],” an announcer says over the rhythmic beats of drums and music. “At one time there were tens of thousands of tribes. There are now only five-hundred-some recognized tribes—and each of them has a story to tell. The story of their creation and also the story of how we’re to carry on … We choose to live spiritually. We choose to live through humor, to laugh and to carry on because there are generations to come. There are many more generations to come.”

The men, women, and children dance past in a massive procession, their colorful regalia, feathers, and silver bells moving to the sounds of the drums and the dancer’s intricate motions. For forty-five years Native American dancers have gathered in Denver, Colorado, for the March Powwow to celebrate their rich and diverse heritage and to compete in dancing contests.

While the history of Native Americans in the West predates the time of the Old West itself by more than fifteen thousand years, their individual histories played a significant role in the time period for its literature and creation of the myth of the West. In my research I didn’t want to revisit the many accounts from that time period that were largely fictitious, racist, and used to justify war, rampant marginalization, and ultimately genocide against the region’s indigenous people. From the Trail of Tears to the Sand Creek Massacre, the treatment of America’s indigenous peoples is one of the most shameful parts of U.S. history. But Native Americans are also an integral part of the country’s future. The March Powwow is arguably one of the largest gatherings of American Indians in the Front Range area, and I wanted the opportunity to see this example of the modern-day West firsthand. Instead of trying to interpret what I see, as someone with a white-European background, I decided instead to find the event’s longtime executive director to understand more about the importance of the powwow and of one indigenous person’s experience growing up in America.

Hand-in-Hand

I meet Grace Gillette at a Denver restaurant after the powwow and sit down over a couple glasses of ice tea. She has a terrific sense of humor. In her seventies, Gillette can trace her lineage back to the famous Arikara chief Son of Star. Her tribal name is SwaHuux, and she was born and raised on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in western North Dakota, which is home to the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation. Gillette has organized the powwow for the past thirty years.

“When they started doling out the reservations, they put us on the same reservation as the Mandan and the Hidatsa,” Gillette tells me. “They put us on the same reservation … because of the three tribes that are there—Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara. The Mandan were practically wiped out by smallpox. It took a toll on the Hidatsa, and Arikara too. So in battling that disease it kind of pulled those three smaller tribes together, and so the government put them on the same reservation.”

Gillette remembers when her family moved to the community of Mandaree when she was very young. “The school wasn’t even finished,” Gillette says, explaining how new Mandaree was at the time. “I was in the first first-grade class. There were thirteen of us. There was probably seven of them who couldn’t speak English because it was a Hidatsa community and very rural, and so English wasn’t spoken in the home.”

Both of Gillette’s parents were of the generation that was taken from their homes and forced to go to a boarding school where they were punished for speaking their native language. “So English was spoken in our home but when their friends came over, or relatives, they all spoke Arikara. But of course children weren’t supposed to listen, so we were shooed out of the room,” Gillette laughs. “As long as I can remember, my father was a lay minister. He was a congregational minister, and so growing up the Christian beliefs and the Arikara beliefs were just hand-in-hand. There was no conflict, there were no differences; they were just hand-in-hand.”

Gillette said growing up she led what she calls a “blessed life” because she wasn’t exposed to racism as a child.

“I knew no prejudice growing up, even in the surrounding towns. Unlike now where they’re so prejudiced against the Natives they follow them around in stores—I never experienced that when I was growing up,” she said. “It just wasn’t something we thought about.”

The world as Gillette knew it grew larger when in 1964 at age sixteen she got the chance to travel to Kentucky for a scholastic opportunity at the Berea Foundation School. She took a bus to the South in the middle of a time of deep civil unrest in the US, which included rampant segregation and discrimination. As a girl from the reservation, she was unprepared for what she would see. “That first bus stop into Kentucky I got out of the bus to use the restroom, and everything was marked ‘blacks only,’ ‘whites only’—the bathrooms, the water fountains, the counters,” Gillette remembers. She had never seen signs that designated based on race before on the reservation. “And I went in and said, ‘I’m neither one, so where do I go?’”

She noticed both the white and black patrons at a diner wouldn’t make eye contact with her or pretended that she wasn’t there. Gillette ended up going to an elderly woman who seemed approachable and asked which bathroom she was allowed to use. “She said, ‘Honey, if you’re not black, then you are white.’ So I went creeping into the white bathroom,” Gillette says. “She’d been leaving and when I came out she was sitting there, and she called me over and she said, ‘Just what are you?’ So that was my first introduction to discrimination.”

Young women dressed in both old style and contemporary regalia stand on the sidelines during the Denver March Powwow. (Photo by Eva Skye, with special thanks to the Denver March Powwow)

Gillette says that in Kentucky when she arrived on campus, the students were disappointed that she wore only regular clothes and didn’t come to school in traditional regalia of some sort. She soon made friends with both white and black students, but she recalls the locals harassing her for not being white or for associating with anyone other than whites. On one occasion people even threw beer bottles at her and her friends. She wanted to call the police, but her friends stopped her because they said that racism was normal for their community and they didn’t want to draw any further attention to themselves.

“It was really kind of a culture shock for me,” Gillette says.

Conversely, when Gillette came to Colorado in the ’70s she found that Denver had a thriving Native American community. At the time there were about twenty organizations and weekly powwows. “There was so much going on in the community. There was a Native American bowling league, basketball leagues for men and women, there were softball leagues,” she says. Gillette quickly became involved with those activities, including what would eventually become the Denver March Powwow.

“We’re a very social people. We celebrate all life events. Probably the best example of a powwow dance back in the day is when the warriors would prepare to go out to hunt or to attack the enemy,” Gillette explains. “When they came back in victory and just the men would dance … there they would sing, there was a special song to sing. Some tribes called it a calling song. When you hear this song, they’re calling you to the circle, to the center of the camp.” Once called to the circle, the tribe’s leaders would explain why they were summoned and the singing and dancing would begin, while others would get into the center of the circle and reenact what they did through dance.

“To tell their story, they had a buffalo robe and they would paint what their history was, their brave deeds, and how many coups they counted, their game [hunted] and all of that,” Gillette says. “And the women would stand at the outer edges and wear those [robes] to support their brother, husband … but they weren’t allowed inside the arena because that was just the warrior dance.”

She says that in time the women and the children wanted to dance too, so within her tribe they had to be led into the dancing arena by a warrior. “And prior to that, you have to have your Indian name and your eagle feather. So when a song is sung and you’re out there, they can recognize you.”

Gillette tells me about the enduring strength of Native Americans and the role of powwows. “As the wars went away, and all of that, they put us on reservations. We are a very resilient people. Our lifestyle changed as the world around us changed, and then [powwows] became social events like when there was a wedding or if someone came of age—they would have those kinds of ceremonies.”

Voices of the Lakota

Gillette says it was likely in the early to mid-1950s when competition dancing started in the powwows, and it has continued to evolve ever since. Today dancers are given numbers so that judges can watch their performances and give them points.

The powwow’s dancing is divided into a host of categories—which is then further separated into different age ranges. For men and women, the styles of dancing include the Northern Traditional, which she tells me is the oldest of the dances, and the Southern Straight. The women’s dancing styles also include the Jingle Dress and Fancy Shawl dances. For men, there are Grass Dancing and Fancy Dancing, both of which have origin stories.

Gillette explains the origin of the Grass Dance and the deeper meaning behind the movements. “From our region the origin legend for [the Grass] Dance style is there was a young man who couldn’t run, dance, play, and ride horses like the other kids,” she says. “So the family took him to the village healer and he suggested that this young man go fast and pray that the creator would show him the way to where he could do what he wanted. So as he sat on the plains and fasted … [the prairie] grass almost looked like ocean waves. And as he saw the prairie grass moving and swaying in the summer wind, it somehow took the form of a human being.” After the young man finished fasting, he returned to his village and told the healer what he had seen. He was then told that was how he should dance.

“The original outfit for the grass dancer had the long prairie grass tucked around the waistline and around the legs, but now they use yarn, and some use ribbon,” Gillette says to describe how the dance has moved to modern times.

As for the most contemporary of the dance styles, the men’s Fancy Dance, Gillette says it likely had its beginnings in one of the most famous shows of the Old West.

“From the research I’ve done and the elders I’ve talked to, that kind of [dance] comes from the Buffalo Bill Wild West shows,” Gillette reveals. “When he took the Indians touring, not only in America, but in Europe, where they thought the traditional dances and the grass dances were too sedate, they wanted something more exciting.”

As famous and popular Buffalo Bill was then and is today, he gets mixed reactions from historians about the role he played in introducing Native Americans to the rest of the country and world. But Gillette believes his reputation is a positive one.

“He treated them with respect. He saw they were well taken care of and that they weren’t looked at as an oddity,” she says.

She recounts a Buffalo Bill–related experience she and some other members of the March Powwow had years ago, when they and others traveled to Manchester, England. Her group was waiting in the Salford Quays area waiting for their guide when one of their dancers, who was also a spiritual leader, said he could hear voices in Lakota. He asked if he could sing to them and Gillette said he could, and soon an appreciative crowd formed to listen.

“ When we were doing that our guide arrived, and he was just astounded to see [the dancer] doing that,” she says, adding the guide, who was normally talkative, had grown quiet for a time afterwards. He later thanked the dancer and told him about the history of the area where he had been singing.

“Apparently on that very spot where we were was where Buffalo Bill had an encampment, and there were all kinds of teepees and Natives there,” Gillette says. In fact it was the exact site where in 1897 nearly one hundred Native Americans lived in their teepees while traveling with Cody’s show. During their five-month stay in Salford, there was one recorded death of a Lakota warrior who died from a lung infection. To this day it’s unknown where he was ultimately buried. For the Native Americans traveling with Cody, it was an opportunity to get away from an increasingly restrictive American government and a chance to continue to practice their traditions without hindrance. In some cases those who participated in the Battle of Little Big Horn, which resulted in the death of General George Armstrong Custer, were able to avoid the government while traveling with Cody’s show. The significance of the location wasn’t lost on Gillette and the others as they learned about the site.

“I thought that was pretty darn cool,” she says. “It gave me the chills.”

Committed to the Future

Over time a career in office management pulled her focus away from the March Powwow and in another direction, and Gillette found herself less involved with the event and its organization. Then one day while looking at a story on the cover of a Denver newspaper, she read that someone on the powwow’s committee was misrepresenting the importance of the drums and songs used during the dance, calling them essentially meaningless.

“He said, ‘Oh, it’s nothing. Just a bunch of chanting, it doesn’t mean anything.’ And I thought, what the heck? So that really got my attention. This was not right,” Gillette says. She adds that there is a great deal of meaning in the chanting and songs, which are sometimes very old. She tells me the songs are sometimes so old that it is impossible to know when it was first created.

“Our history is oral, so I don’t think anybody can say that song was made in 1955 by so-and-so,” she says. “There are just some songs that have been around forever, and I don’t think any one person can be given a right of ownership.”

Gillette says the person who spoke with the newspaper had “no knowledge” about the significance of the songs and drums. In fact, these were essential to the powwows.

“Each society had different positions and within those societies there was always a drum keeper—and the drums are treated like a human being,” she says. “They are fed, they are given water, they are prayed with, they have a special place in the home of the drum keeper. It used to be not just anyone could go sit at the drum and sing. They had to be part of that drum keeper’s family, and they only sang certain songs at [specific] times of the year or for certain occasions.”

She adds that at the intertribal powwow a lot of the drum groups still respect those ways. People don’t just sit down at a drum and start singing because it’s not respectful.

“The answer this person gave who was a coordinator of the event … to say that they had ‘no meaning, it was just a bunch of chanting’—to me, it just rubbed me the wrong way,” she says. “One of our goals [at the powwow] is to present, is to bring cultural awareness to our people, to provide an event with educational value, and if one of the organizers doesn’t know the educational value, then something’s wrong.”

She read that interview as a call to action, and it led to her becoming involved once again with the organizing of the powwow. She eventually worked her way up into the executive director position, a job she’s happily embraced for three decades now.

“It’s the best way for a Native child in Denver to stay in touch with their roots, even if it is once a year to go out there and take pride in who they are,” Gillette says. “When they’re in there, [they think] ‘I’m just one of another instead of being one in a crowd’—and that’s what I’d like to see more of.”

Deep Pride

As I sit and watch the dancers, the drum keepers, every participant in the powwow, I see the deep pride Gillette speaks of. In a massive clockwise circle the dancers continue to come out onto the floor of the arena as the Denver March Powwow’s drum circle sings “A Living Hoop.” Soon the arena floor is full and the event’s Grand Entry is complete. The powwow’s dance competitions are about to begin. The story of the people of the American West continues. New generations are born to inherit the past, to forge a new future, and to preserve their heritage.