> Looking at an ad regarding a powwow that occurs in Topeka,
> KS at Lake Shawnee on Sept 1-3,1995, I noticed that the head
> dancers are Citizen Potawatomi and Kickapoo.
as many of us who do even a limited amount of "PowWow Circuit travelling"
know, that location of a tribe has little if anything to do with with
the location of a PowWow where is honored Head Male & Female dancers
are to appear. For example, the PowWow at UC Santa Cruz this past
spring had a Head Dancer who was Chippewa -- are Chippewas "From" California?
Yeah, if they were born here; No, if you are looking at Tribal history.
It generally has to do with the preferences of the PowWow Committee (as with
the vendors they choose to admit) and who they think MIGHT bring in the
most visitors (on occasion), or, in some cases, a particular family/grop
the PowWow Committee chooses to honor.
For reasons I will NEVER understand, many PowWow Committees choose to
have as their Head Dancers members of tribes who are NOT Native to the
locale of the PowWow itself ... perhaps the impression that you can see
"locals" any time. Another way Head Dancers have been chosen is a
particular groups impression of whichever tribe THEY FEEL has the
flashiest dancers ... which is, of course, a personal taste preference,
in that what I might feel is a "really HOT" style of dancing might not
appeal of any of the other people who have sat down (often for hours at
a time) to try to make some choices that the majority will be happy
with. I might prefer a Northern California "big head" dancer over a
plains-style Eagle dancer ... who knows ... but if I can pursuade the
other members of the committee who has the task of making the choice, you
might see a Native California bias ... which would be highly unlikely in
California -- a state dominated by "relocation natives".
Hopefully this will shed some light on Timothy's question ... without
offending anyone else. Although some of my ancestors migrated to Kansas
from the East Coast after the Civil War, I wouldn't even try to guess
who "belongs there" and who doesn't ... most of us are seldom where we
started out, thanks to the US Gov't, and economics... my mom was born in
Potlatch, Idaho ... & her dad literally "owed his soul to the company
store" as the song goes .... so they migrated to Iowa; my father was
born in Bozeman, MT where his father taught at the Univ., but on sabbatical
lv one year they came to California to escape extreme weather conditions,
and chose not to go back to Montana ... settling in BLITHE, on the Colorado
River was better? Go figure! ... The point being that many of us have
moved around for hundreds of yrs for bizarre reasons, so its not safe to
make any assumptions about very many groups ... except MAYBE that group
in Arizona ... no ... well, maybe that group in North Dakota? ... no
well, maybe the Seminole? Definitely not ..., etc., etc. Hope you get
my "drift" ... that you can't generalize -- except about the lack of
wisdom in making assumptions.
lyn
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"We did not weave the web of life. We | Lyn Dearborn; Naturalist/Person
are merely a strand in it. Whatever | Turtle Clan Ojibwe
we do to the web, we do to ourselves" | Basketry Instruction
--"Walk gently on Mother Earth" -- | dearborn@anchor.engr.sgi.com
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