Clyde Ellis, professor of history, presented the results of his two most recent projects at conferences in Maryland and Oklahoma.
His paper “‘This Music Means A Lot to Us, Too’: Plains Influences in North Carolina Powwow Culture” was presented at the annual meeting of the Southern History Association Oct. 29 in Baltimore, Md. Based on extensive fieldwork with singers from Indian communities in southeast North Carolina, this research examines how powwow singers here have borrowed Plains songs forms and used them as the basis for new singing traditions. This research was supported in part by a National Endowment for the Humanities 2011 summer seminar on the ethnohistory of Southern Indians sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
A second paper, “‘We Fancy Danced Just Like the Men, and We Wore the Same Outfits Too’: Young Women and the Changing Nature of Southern Plains Powwow Dancing,” was presented at the 9th annual Native American Symposium at Southeast Oklahoma State University in Durant, OK, Nov. 4. This work is based on more than a decade of fieldwork in the Oklahoma powwow community and explores some of the ways by which young women have challenged the gendered boundaries of powwow clothing and performance.