Published: July 12, 2008 09:25 pm      

Powwow participants exhibit skills

DANVILLE — Saturday morning’s rain did nothing to deter visitors to National Powwow 14.

Inside the exhibit building, craftspeople from all over the country and of varying experience levels laid out pieces they had been working on for the past year. The items ranged from cradle boards to clothing.

Local host Barbara Dreher showed the Crow elk-tooth dress, which she discussed in a seminar earlier in the week. For Dreher and her husband, John, the weekend has been full of additional responsibilities.

"I’m extremely tired," she said "but it is very exciting."

As local hosts, the Drehers are in charge of on-site preparation, trash removal and the coordination of other various local resources. "We’ve really been working on this since they announced National Powwow was coming back here."

John Jones, former resident of Decatur and current citizen of Chattanooga, Tenn., displayed his Sioux war shirt, which was in the style typical of the period between 1840 and 1880. The shirt was tanned using animal brains in the traditional manner, and Jones covered it in ermine tails.

"The ermine signifies ferocity in battle,” he said. “They are one of the hardest animals to kill, so if you have them on your shirt, you will be harder to kill."

The shirt took him about three years to complete, with work on each individual square of beading taking 10 hours.

"I did everything on this shirt except for the beading on the porcupine quill, which was actually done in Europe," he said. According to Jones, there is a strong European interest in Native American culture dating back to the colonial times.

The coloration of yellow on the bottom and blue on the top are also typical of the Sioux style.

"However, a lot of this stuff is dependent on time period, tribal or family affiliations," he said. "The interesting thing to me is the diversity. We are interpreting the dynamic history of a dynamic art."

Also taking part in the exhibition, Nathan Brown from Cedarburg, Wisc., showed his otter bag.

"They aren’t very common," he said. "They are primarily used as medicine bags and you don’t dance with them. I made it as art. It hangs in my house."

He modeled his after those he found in pictures dating to the 1880s, but the beaded design was completely original.

"I just laid it out and put it together in about four days," Brown said.

Finding the actual otter pelt was a considerably harder feat.

"I had wanted one for a long time,” he said, “but it was hard to find a good otter. You want it to have paws and a face. So when I found this once I just grabbed and didn’t even ask how much it was."

In addition to beading on the tail, the otter also had bells around its paws and in its eye sockets.

Visitors could also see a Lumbee style dress, the formal attire for Lumbee women, a tribe from "down East South Carolina" known for its pinecone quilting. This process entails the layering of 4-inch pieces of fabric folded in various ways, giving the quilting a puffy quality. Constructed by Linda Shahbas of Greensboro, N.C., the dress and apron took her three months of work and is her first entry into this type of competition.

"This is one of the few tribes to always use rickrack," she said as she folded squares of fabric to demonstrate how she made the dress.

Her husband has been a Boy Scout leader for many years, which leads to her making a good number of other articles of clothing.

"I have made many ribbon shirts and fancy leggings, but no one wanted to do fancy dancing this year, so I got to make something for myself," she said.

The powwow drew to a close on Saturday, the participants bidding farewell to old friends leaving early while making plans to meet up at future powwows in other cities and states. As "Teed" Howard remarked the previous day while looking around the arena, "There are people who touch it and people who live it. Here you are seeing people who live it."