Munsee

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Thousands of people are gathering in New Mexico for a celebration showcasing Native American and Indigenous dancers, musicians and artisans from around the world.

Billed by organizers as the largest powwow in North America, the annual Gathering of Nations festival kicks off Friday with a colorful procession of dancers spiraling into the center of an arena at the New Mexico state fairgrounds. Participants wear elaborate regalia adorned with jingling bells and dance to the tempo of rhythmic drumming.

The event also features the crowning of Miss Indian World, as well as horse parades in which riders are judged on the craftsmanship of their intricately beaded adornments or feathered headdresses and how well they work with their horses.

Powwow roots

Powwows are a relatively modern phenomenon that emerged in the 1800s as the U.S. government seized land from tribes throughout the Northern and Southern Plains. Forced migrations and upheaval during this period resulted in intertribal solidarity among Plains people and those from the southern prairies of Canada.

This image provided by the U.S. Postal Service shows one of the postage stamps in a new series commemorating Native American powwows. (U.S. Postal Service via AP)

Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS/U.S. Postal Service

Alliances were formed, giving way to the exchange of songs and dances during gatherings between different tribes. In the decades that followed, powwows were advertised to pioneers heading westward as “authentic” Native American dance shows. For some, it was an exploitation of their cultures.

The word powwow was derived from pau wau, an Algonquian Narrtick word for “medicine man,” according to the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Scholars say English settlers misused the word to refer to the meetings of medicine men and later to any kind of Native American gathering.

Today, some…

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Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples living along North America’s eastern seaboard knew about earthquakes long before Europeans appeared in the region, according to an expert.

Tribal nations like the Seneca and Cayuga of the six-nation Iroquois Confederacy (also including Mohawk, Tuscarora, Onondaga and Oneida) as well as Algonquian peoples like the Natick (Massachusetts Indians) and Mi’kmaq of Atlantic Canada all have a word for earthquake, according to Boston College seismologist John Ebel.

Researching which tribes in the region have a word for earthquake could be useful, “because that would suggest that earthquakes were a rather repetitive thing,” Ebel noted in a recent talk at the Seismological Society of America’s Annual Meeting.

Seismic East Coast

A statement by the Society noted that while northeastern North America might not feel like earthquake country compared to California, the region has a long record of witnessing large quakes. Since the past 400 years (coinciding with European colonisation), there have been written records that have documented these quakes.

However, according to Ebel, the record can be extended into the past with the help of Native American knowledge and can help scientists better understand earthquake hazard in the area.

He cited two instances. Ebel pointed to Moodus, Connecticut. ‘Moodus’ comes from an Algonquin dialect and means “place of noises.”

“For hundreds of years, people have heard “booms”—as if echoing in an underground cavern—in the area. Ebel said the Moodus noises are similar those he heard as a graduate student camping in the Mojave Desert following a magnitude 5.1 earthquake,” the statement observed.

“The Moodus noises sounded like distant thunder of a boom coming up from the ground, very similar to what I heard from the California aftershocks several years before,” said Ebel, who noted that modern seismic instruments have recorded earthquake swarms in Moodus. “So the ‘place of noises’ means that they were…

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