Spurred West. Ian Neligh

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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.”