Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Red Paint PowWow

After going through Las Cruces yet AGAIN (we stopped and had dinner with my parents) we made it all the way to Silver City, NM that night. The next morning (Sun, 1/21/07) we went to the Red Paint PowWow. The Red Paint tribe are the Warm Springs Apache that live in southern NM. It started out with a gourd dance which was rather ho-hum as it was very repetitive so we did some shopping in the morning amongst the Native American handmade jewelry. I bought a beautiful silver necklace from this artist.Some beautiful arrows that were for sale.This little girl was getting ready in the hallway. Her whole family had on traditional dress and was preparing for the contest.
During the 'Grand Entry' all the groups came onto the main floor one by one, until everyone was dancing and whirling around the center of the gym.We were invited to join in one of the dances. Petra was dying to try some of the moves she'd seen earlier but we just kept it to a step-slide-step-slide like everyone else.
Our only complaint of the day was that it really started so much later than advertised so we ended up spending most of the day there. We wanted to get out because there were predictions for MORE snow!

2 comments:

Nichole said...

Very Cool and very colorful. Michael and I attended a pow wow once and it was something I was grateful to have gotten to go. I love that you guys got up and danced too!

Michelle said...

I really enjoyed it, it's unfortunate that it took so long for the interesting stuff to get started because that made it take up an entire day, which was not intended. I thought it was really worth while but I think Petra was disappointed. Oh well.