Marti Attoun interviewed UCLA Ethnomusicology associate professor Tara Browner in the October 7, 2007 online edition of AmericanProfile.com. In it, she gives us a history of the powwow.

What’s a Powwow?

American Indians have held ceremonial gatherings since ancient times, but intertribal powwows—in which members of several tribes convene to socialize and exchange cultural traditions—are a more recent practice.

“Everyone claims that their powwow was the first,” says Tara Browner, 43, associate professor of ethnomusicology and American Indian Studies at the University of California in Los Angeles and author of Heartbeat of the People: Music and Dance of the Northern Pow-wow.

Contemporary intertribal powwows began in the 1880s with the establishment of Indian reservations, but whether it was the Poncas in Oklahoma or the Winnebagos in Nebraska who first welcomed all tribes is debatable.

“The concept of powwows goes back before European contact, but they were strictly clannish,” Browner says. The word “powwow” is derived from the Algonquian word “pau wau,” meaning “he dreams” and is associated with medicine men and healing.

[...]“What’s important about powwows is the sense of community,” says Browner, who is Choctaw and a dancer. “You feel strong and proud of who you are, and there’s a comfort level there for just a weekend. All families have stories of sadness and displacement, and you’re with people who understand your background and how it shaped who you are.”

Finding a powwow isn’t a problem, Browner says.

“I tell my students that there’s a powwow within three hours’ driving distance of anyone in the United States.”

This year’s Gathering of Nations Powwow is scheduled April 28-30. For more information, log on to www.gatheringofnations.com, or to find a powwow near you, visit www.powwow-power.com.

Marti Attoun is a frequent contributor to American Profile.

Tara Browner is the author of Heartbeat of the People: Music and Dance of the Northern Pow-Wow (University of Illinois Press, 2002). She is currently completing the critical musical edition, ” Songs from ‘A New Circle of Voices’: The Sixteenth-Annual Pow-Wow at UCLA” with the help of Ben Harbert, a graduate student in the department. This edition is scheduled to be released soon in the series *Music in the United States of America* (MUSA), a project of the American Musicological Society. As a critical/scholarly edition of a musical event, recorded live during the process of fieldwork, this volume is unique in its combination of ethnomusicological field method combined with interpretive practices more common to historical musicology.