Cohesive Pieces: Arlee Powwow 2010

Last week was the 112th annual Arlee Powwow Celebration.

As I was looking through the pictures I took over a few days, it seemed like there were a few clear catagories of reasons why Powwow week is a good week.

Food

Of course we had frybread, but with a few big rows of vendors there are just so many choices, we seem to spend a lot of time making sure we try a handful of different things.

One of the kids' favorite was sno-cones. They thought they needed one every time we were there. Israel was especially pleased when he ran into his Salish teacher and he bought him one after Israel was able to offer up some Salish on the spot. (I think he only had to tell him a half a dozen words. I should probably tell him to raise the bar.)

The Couture stand...with Gwen & Paisley & Kanana hard at work. Of course this is where we get most of our food. Really, who makes better frybread than Janice?

And Huckleberry ice cream. This was definitely one of my favorites this year.

Shopping

It's always fun to wander through and see what new treasures you can find. And, I kind of like it so much of what is there is the same every year.

Of course Azia found all sorts of jewelry she thought she needed.

The kids like finding all their favorite random things. The past few years that list seems to include: extra large pixie stick things they fill up with the sugary stuff themselves, water balloons on strings, all sorts of musical instruments and superhero finger puppets.

of course there's the

the Dancers...the Dancing

Paisley and Zoran finding their places for Grand Entry.

The line they're navigating through.

Dev and Lex watching the dancers. (This may be the first photo I've seen were you can clearly see Dev has removed all of his hair.)

Zoran was having some issues with his bandanna and he didn't want help re-adjusting it. With this slouching over the eyes things and his jersey, it looks like he is trying for some gangster look.

\Zoran heading in for Grand Entry.

Zoran was annoyed when he didn't have his outfit Friday night, but it didn't stop him from dancing.

He was much happier when he had all his stuff, but it was stressful for him to have to take of his basketball clothes to put on his dancing ones. (He saw the hoopfest still going Friday night at 10:30 when we were leaving and was upset we didn't get to stop. I think he wanted to be prepared just in case he got a chance to play. He did swap out the tennis shoes for the moccasins, but left his basketball shorts and jersey on. Just in case.)

I finished Paisley's dress to go with the shawl I gave her for her birthday. It was pretty fun to watch her enjoy dancing so much.

Getting Ready to Dance

So getting everyone ready isn't actually one of my favorite parts, but it does occupy a chunk of time. Even though Israel doesn't dance, I still can't ever seem to keep track of all the stuff for the other three all at once. We always get there without a few pieces (like one moccasin and a set of bells and Azia's hair wraps on the 4th) and it takes awhile to get everyone changed. I suppose any of them that keep dancing will be able to do it themselves in a few years.