It’s getting close to Makah Days up here, on Labor Day. So all the Makah and their relatives and in-laws are beginning to either pool in town, if they’ve been living outside, or heading up directly to Neah Bay. Dances have to be practiced, displays put into place, everything for the pow-wow. We try not to miss it.
If you’re going to come up for the celebration, wear “Makah fancy”: your best clothes down to the waist, then your rattiest old jeans and shoes. That’s if it’s raining; you’ll be sloshing through the mud-puddles on the way between the school gym, the midway and the community center. If it’s nice, bring flip-flops, but keep a hoodie near; you never know if it will cloud over. Always bring one of those fold-up champ chairs for everybody in the group.
Fry bread, tribal dancing, whaleboat and canoe races, (“We be strokin’”), fireworks and one event we never, ever miss; bone-gaming.
Note: the best frybread is served by the elder ladies across from the senior center. It just IS. The razor-clam chowder with frybread dippers ain’t bad, either. There’s smoked salmon all over for sale. Who makes the best smoked salmon? “Everybody!”
MMmmm frybread. Our State Fair is coming up, and there’s always the “Indian Village” that has The Six Nations (Iroquois, Seneca, Oneida, Onondaga, Tuscarora and Mohawk) represented (but they never represent our tribe, the Alogonkins, or the Hurons, or any of the “enemy tribes” LOL) with dances, traditional food, etc. It runs 10 days and I always make a point to at least go there once every year. There used to be a pow-wow here but for some reason, they either aren’t doing it anymore or they have it and don’t advertise it, because I never see it.
At Paganfest, they have a Native American Foods tent – it’s where I always eat. Elk burger, fry bread, etc. The best.
Shhhhh…. never point out that Frybread is just doughnuts without the sugar or hole. Hackles go UP at the suggestion that grandma’s frybread ain’t the BEST.
Nearest is 1/16th Wyandot, never thought of it before coming it up here, where every native recognizes that it’s not local, but wants to know what it is.
(Had to sign up as non-user. Wordpress being stupid AGAIN.
LOL, I make a rather mean frybread myself, but I’m not allowed to make it anymore.
There used to be jokes between my friend George “Big Bear” and I about me being on enemy territory; he passed away a couple of years ago – to the disease that tends to strike Natives when they go off their ancestral diet; diabetes.
Yeah, I’ve noticed that WP seems to be hiccuping more lately. Dang computers.
I need to write an article with my weird diabetes-is-natural theory. No, don’t go ballistic on me; wait until I put together the thoughts of Me Wandering Mind. WP may be messy because they’re trying to improve so much. Or because we are! Dave is working on a lot of programming stuff — which I steer as clear of as I can, because programming is like Gaia: mess up only one bit of code or kill off a species and watch the whole system start to collapse).