My first American Indian Pow Wow

I attended an American Indian Pow Wow tonight for the first time.  The event is the largest annual gathering of American Indians in my town, and is organized by one of the very few American Indian teachers in my school district, on the campus of the high school where he teaches.

I don't want to somehow diminish the meaning of this community event by trying to describe it.  There was very little of it which I understood, as a matter of fact.  I will only say that I was moved, and plan on attending the event annually in the future.

As a result of the cultural assemblies that I have been managing for my elementary school, I have been thinking a lot lately about the collision of European explorers with the native Indian populations of North America.  This particular visual that I found was a real jolt to me:

 

This is a map that represents the dispersal of Indian tribes all across North America before European explorers arrived.  I had never seen any such map in my entire years of schooling, including college.  In any textbook I have ever seen, all maps of the early United States (e.g. the thirteen colonies, the Louisiana Purchase, Lewis and Clark's journey) portrayed vast American land as empty and unoccupied.  In fact, there was an unbelievably amazing tapestry of Indian civilization that existed.  What a different perspective we would all have as Americans if our textbooks had properly layered our colonies, our land grants, our trails, and our westward expansion on top of this tapestry.