Wearing a family-made Southwestern-style T dress adorned with pictures of elk teeth, 21-year-old Kylie Saal arrived early to Saturday’s Balboa Park Powwow with her parents to secure a shady spot with a great view of the arena.
There, with help from her mom, the UC San Diego student applied the finishing touches to her tribal regalia and hair — the latter braided, banded and decorated with real otter skins — in anticipation of the day’s events.
“I’ve always been to powwows, as long as I can . (My parents) have always taken me,” said Saal, whose family is from the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes. “We’re here to dance.”
More specifically, Saal was there to dance in the southern women’s traditional style as part of the Grand Entry and the ensuing intertribal dance sessions. The Grand Entry is the powwow’s featured, ceremonial procession where groups of dancers, arranged in a specific fashion and accompanied by drums, follow the color guard and Eagle Staff Carrier into the arena and form a large circle.
Now in its 37th year, the Balboa Park Powwow is a showcase of traditional Native American g and dancing. The cherished community gathering takes over the lawn just west of Park Boulevard and south of Presidents Way, this year with 45 arts and crafts vendors and eight food vendors lining the grounds.
The heart of the powwow is the arena, a circular area surrounded by pop-up tents, portable bleachers and onlookers. Here singers, dancers and honorees, most dressed in regalia or traditional tribal attire and some barefoot, perform throughout the day.
Saturday’s event kicked off with Kumeyaay Bird Singers performing spiritual songs, accompanied by rattles, which were described as having been ed down from generation to generation. The singing was followed by Gourd Dancing, a men’s dance that originates from the Kiowa tribe and starts out soft and slow but picks up in rhythm and beat over an hour.
The Grand Entry came next. Then, unique to this year’s powwow, a ceremony honoring military .
“My favorite element is the element of togetherness and happiness and joy, blended with spirituality,” said Randy Pico, the event’s master of ceremonies.
Pico, 64, is Luiseño and grew up on the Pechanga Indian Reservation. He now lives in Liverpool and traveled to the powwow to reunite with family .
“You’ll see many tribes and bands represented here … When you see them all dancing in the arena and ing one another in that good way, and hearing those songs go to the Creator. It’s just a beautiful thing,” he said.
The Balboa Park Powwow is hosted by the San Diego American Indian Health Center, a nonprofit organization that provides medical, dental and behavioral health care services to all San Diegans at its Bankers Hill facility, and uses a mobile medical unit that travels around town. The organization stepped in to put on the Balboa Park Powwow 11 years ago, in part, because of Board Chair Paula Brim’s first-hand appreciation of their significance.
“I grew up in Oklahoma in the 1950s, and I still vividly those powwows that we went to when I was a kid,” Brim said.
Organizers expect between 2,000 and 3,000 people to attend some portion of the two-day affair, which continues Sunday at 10 a.m.
