Photos 100% Mr. NEV. Edits mine. Can’t see the slideshow? Try this.
If you’ve never been to a powwow, it’s something to see — and hear and feel and taste, too. I’ve been to three, two on accident, this one intentional. The accidental ones — I’d been out doing something and stumbled over the event completely unaware in advance. This time, we took the inlaws, they wanted to see. The regalia was spectacular. The drumming and chanting hits you right in the solar plexus. Salmon, well, salmon I can eat all day long and at the Pacific Northwest powwows, well, there’s salmon.
A powwow is an odd thing to attend as a tourist, but I fondly remember the one we fell in to several years back on Lummi Island. We watched the big ocean canoes come in while sharing salmon with one of the tribal elders, a big guy with a raunchy sense of humor and a friendly manner. This year at Discovery Park, when the head of the local Head Start program spoke about how well their kids were doing and how sorry they were that this was their last year — they’d lost their funding — I started to feel very, very sad and wanted to go home.
Sometimes it would be nice to just look at things for their aesthetics and forget about history.