Putting on the Dog by Melissa Kwasny

Author:Melissa Kwasny [Kwasny, Melissa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781595348647
Publisher: Trinity University Press
Published: 2019-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

Spirit

We arrive at Crow Fair with plenty of time before the grand entry. Promoted as the “Teepee Capital of the World,” Crow Fair, held on the Apsáalooke, or Crow, reservation in southeastern Montana, is the largest powwow in North America, annually attracting thousands of people of all races and from many countries, especially Native Americans, who come to visit with old friends and family and to compete for prize money in traditional dances: Fancy Dance, Grass Dance, Jingle Dance, Shawl Dance, Traditional Women’s, and Traditional Men’s. Right now the dance pavilion is almost empty. People are at their campsites or straggling home from the parade, a spectacular affair where fine horses, which the Crow are known for, and pickups alike are adorned with Pendleton honor blankets, beaded saddles, and antlers of animals killed in the last hunt. It is only eighty degrees, unusually cool for an August day on the plains. My friend Jo, who spent twenty-five years working to protect the Medicine Wheel, an ancient spiritual site high in the nearby Bighorn Mountains, sits on a bench while I go to one of the many concession stands to get us a Navajo taco to share. Jo is eighty-eight. I am so grateful that she felt strong enough to join me.

I bring back fry bread smothered with onions, chili, and cheese, and we eat with our hands. A drum circle wanders in, five or six men of varying ages, one or two carrying a large round wooden drum stretched with elk or buffalo hide. The hide needs to be strong as the men—and sometimes, though rarely, women—will be pounding hard on it with sticks as they sing the hypnotic, powerful songs that sound like eagles crying.

The dancing here, as at many other traditional powwows in the northern states, takes place in a circle surrounded by the audience and drum circles, who are in turn encircled by concession stands, and ultimately the encampment itself. The circle, for many indigenous people, symbolizes the unity of all life. (As a friend of mine quips, “We Indian people have the Round Dance. White people have the Square Dance.”) Perhaps a thousand perfectly erected canvas tipis are pitched in rows on both sides of the Bighorn River, on hilltops and in nearby draws, the crisscrossed tops of their peeled lodgepoles visible in every direction. (The lodgepole pine, which grows thick on the slopes nearby, was named for its value as a tipi pole.)

Apsáalooke does not mean “crow.” The misnomer may have come from French traders, who might have heard it from a neighboring tribe. Plenty Coups, the last hereditary Crow chief, told Frank B. Linderman that Absanokee means “descendants of the Raven” or “children of the Raven.” Born in 1848, Plenty Coups recalled his childhood roaming the plains of what is now Montana before his people were forced onto reservations: “We followed the buffalo herds over our beautiful plains, fighting a battle one day and sending out a war-party against the enemy the next. My heart was afire.

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