My First Powwow.

This past weekend a few of my girlfriends and I went to an actual Native American Powwow! Seriously. It was great! 

One of the girls I went with, Sarah, has a birthday coming up and wanted to do something fun to celebrate. She also has Lumbee Indian heritage and happened to know about a Lumbee powwow going on this past weekend in Lumberton, NC. She asked if we'd like to go and off we went! 

After several wrong turns and after about 2.5 hours--we made it to the powwow. We were so pumped! It was a beautiful day and we were looking forward to being culturally inspired and finding some pretty jewelry...duh.

The powwow was full of dancing, tributes to loved ones that had passed away, competitions, crafts and other amazing handmade goods. We browsed through LOTS of jewelry and other fun things and all went home with quite a few amazing souvenirs. I found these gorgeous feather earrings (what else would I buy? hello???) with yellow leather embellishment.  And I bought them from the friendliest little man! We actually as a whole probably gave him 80% of his business that day....haha.

We also watched lots of dancing and it was fun to see all of the beautiful costumes and all the ridiculous beadwork/quilting/feather work/etc. I mean I think the most talented people in the world make these costumes. We couldn't get enough of them. I want a full-out Native American get-up!!! The dances were cool and it was interesting to see the similarities in their culture and in hawaiian culture. I felt strangely comfortable there and I think it was the whole tribal thing...

   

The music that accompanied the dancing was...genuine. It was pretty chanty/screamy, but so cool at the same time. And the drums!! Ah. What a fun time. We sure made it fun. And we got some good sun! 

We also made some native friends. We really wanted to pose with some of the coolest costumed individuals, and mission accomplished! This guy's headdress was nothing short of the most amazing feather ensemble I have ever seen. Like Lady Gaga worthy. We asked him and his half-dressed friend (part of the warrior dancers) if we could take a picture with them and the feather-headed man agreed but only if we would all kiss his nephew on the cheek for his 21st birthday. So, I kissed another man...sorry Stu ;)

We all left feeling culturally enlightened and happy with our finds :) We also had a great time as girlfriends out on a random outing. You know you have great friends when we can go to any kind of outing and make it a blast! Here's to next year's Lumbee powwow!

Here's a video of some of a war dance: