Powwow13

Adrianna Rouillard was a slender, serious eleven year old Native American girl when I first met her during the Northern Colorado Intertribal Powwow in the small town of Loveland. She wore a colorful Jingle Dress, decorated with metallic cones that made happy jingling sounds while she danced, and on her head she wore a crown that had been carefully beaded by her mother, Iris Rouillard.
Adrianna, who can trace her lineage to the Oglala, Lakota, Santee and Sioux Indian tribes, had been chosen Powwow Princess, and thus would represent this powwow for a year at other ones all over the United States.
A powwow is an event for Native American people to meet and sing and dance to the music of a ‘Drum’, to socialize, and honor their culture. There is a dancing competition, often with significant prize money awarded.
“The powwow is a way to celebrate our culture and keep it alive,” Iris Rouillard explained. “Especially for our children, many of whom grow up in the city these days. And with it, we show non-Indians that we are still there.”
Iris found it important to bring up her three children, Adrianna and the boys Tylor (7) and Teak (1), with American Indian values. She taught them how to dance as soon as they could walk. “We are so few,” she said. “It is important to pass on the stories, morals, customs and ancestry. It affords a basis.”
Ten years later I meet Adrianna (21), her mother, a new stepfather, two brothers and grandmother again during the annual three day Denver March Powwow. It is one of the most important events on the Indian calendar. Native Americans from all over the U.S. gather there to meet family and friends. I want to hear if her American Indian heritage and traditions still play a role in Adrianna’s life. She studies psychology and is training to become an officer with the U.S. Marines Reserve. She also has become one of the better Jingle Dress dancers, regularly winning prize money.
“Dancing is like breathing to me,” she says. “Every time I get on the dance floor and I hear that drum beat, I just feel elation. And I go with it. It’s a part of who I am.”
Being a Native American is at the basis of her existence, she explains. All her decisions and plans for the future derive from that. Her choice of wanting to be in the military stems from the Native American warrior culture. “I love the discipline. The respect that you have to give, just like with the Native tribes, to older people, or people in a higher rank, and to yourself.
“I take pride in being part of a people with an important heritage. One of my great great uncles is Crazy Horse. I know what I am, where I come from. I have many friends that don’t know exactly what they are. Yes, Irish or Polish, but they don’t have a bond with their people anymore. I feel bad for them. They are only Americans.”

Photographer and writer Ellen Kok works since 1996 on the book “American Moments” with photo stories about young people in the United States. By photographing them in their daily lives, she is looking for an answer to the question: What does it mean to be an American? The young people in her photos are after all still finding out for themselves how to become a member of American society. “Powwow” is one of the stories from the book. A longer narrative is available with the photos.