Summary
"My young students at IAIA don't sit in front of a crackling fire while they do their beadwork -- they listen to iPods, and some of them are incorporating aspects of hip-hop into their beadwork." -- artist and beadworker Teri Greeves
It was 7 p.m. - still early in the one-evening powwow - and K.D. Edwards hadn't joined a singing circle yet. He sat on a folding chair behind the first row of portable bleachers. From there, he couldn't see the gourd dancers honoring veterans in the arena, but Edwards could hear the drums. Their beat bounced off the high ceiling, filling the Genoveva Chavez Community Center's gymnasium and making it hard to hear anything else. Edwards' drum sticks, still in their cloth pouch, rested on his knees, and a steady stream of dancers, drummers, and spectators stopped to greet him as they entered or left the gym. One woman said she had bought 8-track tapes of his songs decades ago at a trading post on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming.See the full content of this document
Extract
Like a Rhinestone Powwow
K.D. Edwards was born in 1923, one year before Congress passed the Citizenship Act, which allowed Native Americans in some states to vote for the first time. He has attended powwows for as long as he can remember and began dancing with a Wild West show in 1928. Powwows have grown and changed a great deal over the past 80 years, Edwards said, but the songs and drumming have evolved far more slowly than the outfits and dances.
"Indian culture has never been static; it has always changed," he said. "But th...See the full content of this document
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