First powwow at Great Northern Fair a great success

Editor's note: This story talks about the first powwow held at Great Northern Fair. See other stories about the fair in previous editions of Havre Daily News and at http://www.havredailynews.com, and see more photos of the last few days of the fair on Page A8.

Northern Winz Hotel & Casino's Powwow at this year's Great Northern Fair has been a success by all accounts, drawing a greater-than-expected crowd despite the heat and giving people a chance to see an in-person powwow in the area for the first time in nearly 17 months.

Loni Taylor of the Chippewa Cree Business Committee said she was pleasantly surprised by how well-attended the event was, even at midday during a very hot week.

She said the event had proceeded without logistical or technical hangups and and it was great to see the participants showing off their styles.

Russell Standing Rock, who master-of-ceremonied much of the event, also said the event went better than he expected, and he hopes it will become a symbol of healing for the Chippewa Cree Tribe, and an expression and exchange of culture between them and the rest of Hill County.

He said events like this can open doors between communities and he's grateful to Northern Winz, the Hill County Fair Board, and those who donated to the event for helping to make all of this happen.

Among those honored during the powwow's second grand entry Saturday were Rocky Boy's veterans, who Standing Rock said served their countries honorably.

"Many (served) voluntarily, many were made to enlist in the armed forces," he said. "Many have not returned to our homeland, many have returned in boxes, nonetheless we honor these veterans for the years they have served."

He thanked veterans of the U.S. Army Andrew Windy Boy, who lead the procession with the crooked staff, as well as Rocky Boy Veterans Center Board President John Gardipee, who bore the American Flag during the procession. He also thanked Gardipee for his work spearheading the creation of the Rocky Boy Veterans Association.

Another man who has seen war in Iraq and Afghanistan Standing Rock honored was Director of Rocky Boy Veterans Center and a founding member of the tribe's American Legion Post Chauncey Parker. He bore the Canadian Flag during the event.

Northern Winz General Manager Jazz Parker, also a veteran, along with Great Northern Fairgrounds manager Frank English were also honored for their work putting things together for the event along with Northern Winz Marketing Director Ree OldBull Gaming Commissioner Rebekah Jarvey and the rest of the casino's team.

The organizers all thanked the attendees, the town of Havre and each other for their work as well.

One participant, Ontaria Arrow-White, a student at Idaho State University and Miss Shoshone-Bannock, said she was there representing her tribe and is glad to be back at in-person powwows after many months of doing online powwows.

She said online powwows, despite involving the added complication of video and audio equipment, have been a worthwhile endeavor, but this return to form is welcome.

"I'm very glad to be back in person, being able to see a lot of old friends and family," Arrow-White said.

Arrow-White said she's impressed by how well the powwow has gone and she's glad to have had a chance to go to a Montana powwow after almost three years away.

She said her position as Miss Shoshone-Bannock requires her to be an ambassador, role model and leader for her tribe and part of that is going to powwows held by other tribes including those as far away as Wyoming and Arizona.

She asked that people stay safe, wear masks, wash their hands, socially distance, and most importantly get vaccinated, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues.

Another participant, Joan Alexis of Vernon, British Columbia, said she was also impressed, not just by the quality of the powwow, but the quality of the fair which she said had a surprising number of rides given the low price of admission compared to fair's back home.

"I'm really enjoying myself," Alexis said. "You guys' live music and powwow is amazing."

Healing in a dark time

While Standing Rock said the lack of powwows in the area over the past year has not been a huge problem for him personally, it did clearly affect the Rocky Boy community in a negative way, compounded by the general stress of living with the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We've been devastated by COVID-19, you, me, everybody," he said.

He said people view these powwows as a method of healing, and their absence has been acutely felt in the wake of the tribe losing many of its elders to the pandemic.

"The people out here are hurting, I'm hurting," he said. "I've lost family, I lost people who led me in ceremony. I lost those people and my community is devastated."

He said the Native Americans and First Nations' people at the powwow haven't just been affected by COVID-19 but continue to face the continuing crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.

Native Americans and First Nation people, especially women, go missing at extremely high rates compared to any other races or ethnicities in the U.S. and Canada and face staggeringly high rates of homicide, abuse and sexual violence, many times that of white women.

This disproportionate rate of violence has been attributed to a number of issues, including the historical legal inability of tribes to prosecute on their own reservation when the perpetrator is non-Native, confusion regarding jurisdiction between tribal, state and federal law enforcement, and a lack of resources on the part of tribal police departments, as well as the general economic and social marginalization of Native Americans and First Nation people.

Accurate statistics on missing persons cases can be difficult to obtain due to the lack or resources of tribal police departments, as well as frequent errors by non-Native police departments, misclassifying Native Americans as another race.

Standing Rock said many people at the powwow have been personally affected by the issue.

But this wasn't the only thing participants were praying for.

Alexis said her husband is a firefighter dealing with the more than 300 wildfires going on in that area of Canada at the moment and she came to pray for him, his fellow firefighters, as well as all the creatures and land affected by the flames.

"I wasn't going to dance," she said, "but because my people are going through such a hard time ... and part of our territory comes into the states, I decided to put my jingle dress on and pray for the fires and the animals and the water."

She said the fires have caused many communities to evacuate including the town of Lytton which was all but burnt to the ground, the smoke choking out the sun.

She she prays for rain in her home as well as the U.S. which is also facing severe drought conditions and a dangerous fire season, which appear to be more and more common.

"My husband, he's been firefighting for over 30 years, and he said it used to be every five years, now it's down to two," she said.

On top of the wildfire crisis she also came to pray for the hundreds of Native American and First Nation children recently discovered, and still being discovered, in unmarked graves at the sites of former residential schools in Canada.

Residential schools like the ones where these graves were found, some of which were run by the Roman Catholic Church, were part of a century-long campaign of forced assimilation which the Historic Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada concluded was cultural genocide.

The residential school system was in place until 1996 and many people still living today feel the effects of that system, including Alexis, whose father was made to attend one such school where bodies were found and helped start the movement to uncover the truth of what happened to them.

"My dad went to that school, and he saw some of those kids getting buried but nobody believed him," Alexis said. "All of our elders knew but the government buried it well."

She said people in her generation, including a friend of hers who's a few years younger than she is, have scars that haven't faded, a result of the physical violence inflicted upon them at the hands of these institutions.

She said this system of cultural erasure and violence has affected generations of Native people and the echoes of it are still seen today in the form of harassment, physical violence and threats of child apprehension by Canadian law enforcement.

Alexis said that same friend endured threats by law enforcement to take her children away for peacefully protesting for the rights of First Nations people, an abuse of power that happened less than two years ago on the Wet'suwet'en nation's ancestral lands during a series of protests against a natural gas pipeline being built in the area.

This also bares echoes of the "sixties scoop" in which indigenous children were taken from their parents, often under flimsy pretenses, and put into the foster care system and adopted out to non-Native families for the purposes of cultural erasure, a practice which began in the mid-1950s and persisted until the 1980s.

This is another area of history Alexis knows quite a bit about, but she said she didn't want to spend the whole day recounting such horrors.

She said despite all of this the powwow has been a time of happiness and celebration, and she hopes to be back next year.