American Indian Culture and Research Journal

POWWOW AND THE PERSISTENCE OF INDIAN ETHNICITY Indians and non-Indians alike have long viewed American Indians’ communal dances as a critical element and index of community solidarity. At the end of the nineteenth century, the US government sought to suppress traditional Indian dances because they were seen “as a great hindrance to the civilization of the Indian.” A century later the dancing continues, particularly in the context of the powwow, an emergent form of social celebration that incorporates traditions of dance, song, and dress from many Indian peoples. Richard Hill, an American Indian scholar, expresses sentiments shared by many powwow enthusiasts: “The dance circle draws us in. The powwow has now spread coast to coast, and while some see it as a pan-Indian fabrication, I now see that it serves a vital catalyst for cultural renewal.. .. No matter how we dance, how we dress, or how we live, for a few moments of the song we stand together as a people, united by tradition and connected in the certain belief that dance is essential to the expression of ourselves. Anthropologists in the 1950s regarded powwow as both an emergent and a dying social institution- a kind of last gasp of communal expression before the final assimilation of Indians into the mainstream. But powwows did not disappear. Instead they have flourished as one of the premier collective expressions of Indian identity amid what Joane Nagel has called the renewal of American Indian ethnicity.