Pow-wows: Southern and Northern
The contemporary intertribal pow-wow has become a major force for music and dance innovation among today's Indian populations, especially those with far-flung tribal memberships. Pow-wows provide a gathering place for Indian people to celebrate their culture through music and dance, and fertile ground for change, as members of diverse tribal groups interact and share music, dance styles, and dance regalia. Traders sell cassettes, CDs, and video tapes featuring the latest in new songs, regalia, and dance footwork, contributing to new cultural mixture of styles, especially in urban areas.
Consequently, a new Pan-Indian culture, with regional music and dance layered upon a Plains Indian framework, is shaping an overarching "Indian" identity for Indians and non-Indians alike. Pow-wows may be grouped into two broad divisions of "competition" and "traditional" events, with competition pow-wows offering prize moneys in various categories.
Historically, events similar to pow-wows existed in many Indian communities long before the advent of European settlement. For example, the Lakota wacipi (dance) was a time when scattered bands of tribal members converged in one location for religious ceremonies, trading, and social interactions including dances. These dances were often the only time that young people from different bands could meet, and young men took great care to look their finest for the female spectators.
Into the Circle: An Introduction to Native American Pow-wows
At times, people would also celebrate successful war parties or horse-stealing ventures with dancing sponsored by various warrior societies. One major difference, however, between old-time events and the modern pow-wow is that pow-wows are open to any (including non-Indians) who wish to attend, whereas pre-contact events were more tribal-specific, and included only members of other tribes friendly to the group holding the dance.
The musical precursors to today's pow-wow repertoire are the songs-and especially the song-forms-of the Omaha and Ponca Nation's Heluska War Dances. The Omaha inhabit a mid-Plains region in Iowa and Nebraska (at one time, the Oklahoma Ponca also lived farther to the north), and their musical style and dance regalia greatly influenced the surrounding peoples. Generally speaking, pow-wow singing is categorized by its practitioners as being one of two styles: Northern or Southern.
The Northern style area included drum groups from the Central and Northern plains, Canada, and the Great Lakes regions, while Southern singing is synonymous with Oklahoma. Singers typically learn their songs from other tribal members, or occasionally, in the case of urban drums, pow-wow musicians currently refer to songs with indigenous language texts as "traditional" or "word" songs, and vocable-only songs as "straight" songs.
Competition singing, known as Inuit throat singing, was done by both men and women in the Northwest Coast and among Inuit and other Arctic peoples.
