Powwow Regalia in Identity Performance and Authentication

Abstract

Through personal narratives of powwow involvement and motivation for dancing, this essay examines the ways in which regional and personal identities are being formed, adjusted, negotiated, and expressed through dance regalia at powwows in the Midwestern United States. Dancers use clothes as an explicit marker of their Native identity and powwows as a justifying context for their ideologies of authenticity. Powwow involvement is also used to consolidate, reclaim, craft, revive, and create an identity that authenticates one's place in the powwow community in which internal and external roles and rules reinforce each other. Giving voice to different constituents at Midwestern powwows, from Natives to non-Native enthusiasts, the study explores the factors that influence the bases and strategies of such authentication, as well as the rhetoric by which these ideologies are expressed.