Powwow blends sacred and secular: thousands attended the first powwow on the National Mall to celebrate the National Museum of the American Indian and to immerse themselves in cultural traditions

Insight on the News, Oct 29, 2002 by Stephen Goode

It was the first powwow ever held on the National Mall. Thousands of American Indians representing 223 tribes gathered in Washington in September to celebrate the National Museum of the American Indian, now under construction, which will be the newest addition to the Smithsonian Institution when it opens in the fall of 2004.

This was Washington's first, but these modern powwows hardly are something new. Each March, America's powwow circuit begins n Denver. In April, there's "The Gathering of the Nations" in Albuquerque, and so on across the country from border to border until late fall when winter closes the season.

It may have been only a new addition to an already established tradition, but the Washington powwow tried hard to make up for lost time and largely succeeded. "We didn't have a precedent to rely upon and had to do a lot of guessing" a powwow official tells INSIGHT. The biggest problem: The crowds attending the event were two to three times bigger than expected.

Many of the powwow world's biggest talents were on hand. Smithsonian officials tapped veteran emcees Wallace Coffey, a Comanche, and Dale Old Horn, a Crow, to be masters of the ceremonies that took place over a two-day period, a hot and sometimes-rainy Saturday and Sunday.

The event included three Grand Entries, two on the first day and one on the second, in which hundreds of men and women attired lavishly in American Indian regalia entered the powwow arena to the sounds of an Indian drumbeat and chanting voices that could be heard blocks away.

Those who led the Grand Entries were Indian warriors who had proved themselves in combat. Patriotism was very much on display. "We are a people with a warrior tradition who think that service to one's country is a great honor," explained one powwow speaker. There were older veterans from World War II, a Navajo code-talker among them, veterans from the Korean and Vietnam wars and men and women who had served in other places. They carried American flags and the black and white prisoner-of-war/missing-in-action flag.

Alongside the flags, Glynn A. Crooks, vice president of the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community of Prior Lake, Minn., carried a feathered lance, a traditional symbol of their warrior past. Crooks told INSIGHT he had been chosen to carry the ceremonial lance by accident: He happened to be one of the very few, perhaps the only man there, who had brought a lance along with him to Washington. He nonetheless was proud to join the flag-bearers in the first line of the Grand Entry, he said.

The powwow blended the sacred and the secular. The emcees cracked jokes, some of them self-deprecating. "How do you know if you're an Indian?" Answer: "If there's no elastic left in your underwear." And married-to jokes: "What do you get when a Mohawk marries a Huron?" Answer: "A moron." Coffey explained, "We thrive on humor. We heal ourselves and our souls in this way."

But there also was a very serious side. Each Grand Entry was followed by an invocation and honor songs, when cameramen were asked to take no pictures. An opening prayer by an elder gave thanks for the new museum, "a showplace for the Indians in the greatest nation of the world." Said Coffey, "Prayer is like food. You have to have it every day, and sometimes you have to have it more than three times a day."

Sometimes what the speakers had to say was triumphant: "We're no longer the vanishing American. We're everywhere." The most serious point made during the two-day event, and the one that always elicited the strongest response, concerned the bodies of the dead that don't rest on tribal land: "There are 100,000 remains in museums and universities," one speaker said. "We don't want science studying them time and time again."

The powwow's most colorful events were the dances and the drumming and singing that went with them. The men competed in such contests as Northern Traditional and the Grass Dance. For the women, the competitions included Fancy Shawl and Jingle Dress dances. There also were contests for kids.

When do American Indians learn their traditional dances? Richard Wilcox, a Narragansett from Rhode Island, tells INSIGHT that asking an Indian when he learned to dance is "like asking anyone else if they remember when they started walking." Dancing "is a part of life," he says.

Drumming groups came from all over the United States, but the powwow's Host drummers were the Black Lodge Singers from Washington state, a Blackfoot group, and the Cozad family from Oklahoma, who are Kiowas.

The Cozad drums got started 70 years ago by paterfamilias Leonard Cozad Sr. He still drums and chants with the group that now includes nine of his sons (four of whom were in the nation's capital), along with grandsons, grandnephews and a few Cozad family women.

His son Larry Cozad tells INSIGHT that the family attends powwows throughout the year. "There are only two or three weekends we don't powwow," he says. He points out about the Native American songs that "nothing is written down. It's mouth to ear."