America's festival celebrations usually represent a long historical tradition, often rooted in premigration cultures. The very name Easter (from the fertility goddess Ishtar) and its attendant symbols (eggs and rabbits) leave little doubt about the origins of that now-Christian holiday.
We think of Thanksgiving as a distinctly American celebration, but the Pilgrims were only continuing a tradition they had long known in England - Harvest Home.
The Fourth of July? It is a date with potent historical significance, of course, but peoples all over the world celebrate with fireworks, food, and picnicking at roughly the same time. Not because of America's patriotic observation but because it is the approximate time of St. John's Day, the summer solstice. No matter how insistent we are that this is an American holiday, we must recognize that we are behaving within a much larger human framework.
There is one distinct, unique, perhaps unlikely American festival, however - the tribal powwow. Most American Indian groups that have managed to maintain cultural vitality gather once a year to recharge their cultural batteries, to sing and dance, to eat and laugh, to celebrate family and community, to remember and renew. Tribes that have fragmented and weakened sometime join with other tribes to ensure that they will continue to play a role in the annual celebrations, whether or not they are specific to their own origins.
On the Plains, powwows (and similar celebrations under other labels) usually occur from mid-summer to mid-fall and therefore are probably recognitions of the autumnal equinox, a worldwide phenomenon. In the Southwest it may be the Corn Dance, a midwinter ritual, that serves as an annual gathering time and thereby serves as an observation of he winter solstice, but the particulars of such events, whatever solar events they may celebrate, are distinctly American.
Powwows are generally ignored by academic anthropologists and historians, and that's not surprising. Last August I spent several days at the Omaha Indian Powwow, and as I looked around me I tried to imagine what conventional students of culture would see and think.
Cultural decay or dynamic change?
Omaha Indians who work each day as hard-hatted laborers, bureaucrats in three-piece suits, or nurses in white uniforms dress up on this occasion in feathers, beads, and bells and dance to songs they are also tape-recording on Sony portables tucked under the dancers' bench. Over a sophisticated sound system an announcer urges the dancers to do their best because seated in the bleachers are white folks who have driven all the way from Omaha and have paid five dollars at the gate to see the wild Indians dance. The powwow seems impossibly far form aboriginal antecedents. It all seems so contrived, so cluttered with anachronisms, so…so impure.
The air at the powwow is filled with the smell of cotton candy and the grinding sound of the snow cone machine, all located on the Midway outside the powwow arena - very much like the carnival setting at any small-town festival. Indian families camp around the grounds in nylon and aluminum tents, cooking over Coleman stoves and
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