The term pow-wow is obscured in myth, legend and historical fact.  It is relatively clear that despite several ways of presenting the term (pow-wow, powwow, pow wow, etc.) it is an adaptation by Europeans and later Americans of an Indigenous term.  There are several Nations who claim to have started the gathering that has become known as pow-wow in today’s American culture.  In the northeast, the Algonquins have claimed that the term comes from their language that became written as pau wau which loosely translated to an important gathering of clans to exchange information, celebrate, etc.

From Oklahoma, there are the Osage, Poncas, and Comanche who all claim to be the ones who brought  pow-wow into the twentieth century.  In the oral tradition of the Poncas, they tell of passing down their form of gathering clans from the turn of the 19th century to many of the Nations in the Midwest including the Osage and Omaha, eventually reaching the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota Nations. Almost all oral traditions that include pow-wow agree that family pic-nics turned into what is now the current incarnation of powwows after WWII.

There are two styles of pow-wow with their own etiquettes and styles of clothing:  Northern and Southern.  There are commonly six styles of dancing that has subsets for Northern and Southern variations.  They are Men’s Traditional (Northern), Men’s Straight (Southern), Women’s Traditional (Cloth and Buckskin), Jingle Dress, Grass Dance, Fancy Dance and Fancy Shawl.  These categories are further broken down into age categories for contest dancing.

Wild West shows integrated the sport of male challenge dancing into their shows.  These shows changed many dances that were previously ceremonial in nature into secular forms of dance for entertainment of the dancer and spectator.  From the Omaha oral tradition, it has been said that their challenge style of dancing was the predecessor of the very popular style of Grass Dance.
 

Women were not able to dance in the circle until the 1960’s when they started pressuring the men to allow them to participate.  Previously they had been outside the circle moving in small steps rhythmically to the beat of the drum and the singers voices.  The real challenge to male dominance into the pow-wow circle came when the surge of popularity among younger women for the Jingle Dress Style and the even bolder challenge of the Fancy Shawl Dancer Style.

There is no known exception in the oral histories of any First Nation peoples that do not declare the drum the heartbeat of their people.  Several oral histories (including Cherokee) have legends that declare if their people stop dancing and singing to the drum, their people will cease to exist.  The most common drums used in today’s pow-wow circuit are parade bass drums (typically Northern) and wooden drums carved from trees covered with skins (typically Southern).  Do not believe that during removal or on reservations when drums were banned for various reasons that the “People” did not improvise.  In museums, there are chairs that had hides stretched over them that people used as drums when they were banned.  There are also pots that could be quickly covered with hide to form small drums as well as other instances and artifacts where the cultures adapted to adverse situations in order to “keep the heartbeat going.”    Many oral histories talk about those as “the dark times when our heartbeat was small and could barely be heard.”  With the move of many First Nation peoples to urban settings, pow-wows have become the cultural lifeline for them and the sharing of culture between First Nation peoples.

This is by no means a complete history but a short thumbnail sketch.