by Michael Glazner

Know your roots. Dig up your bones and discover where you came from. Don't steal another group's identity because you feel you don't have one -- and don't borrow it either. Find your own bones, your own roots, and cover them with your own skin.

Vince Bland delivered this message to me while we talked about the 7th Annual Austin Independent School District Powwow and American Indian Heritage Festival scheduled for November 7, 1998 at the Berger Center, 3200 Jones Road.

He and Barbara Woelk are founding members of the AISD Native American Parents' Committee. Bland has a Creek Indian and Scots-Irish background. Woelk is almost full Kiowa Indian. Both are people that know their bones, where they come from, where their people come from, and who they are.

They, like the other Indians they work with, love their heritage and culture and want to share it with people, to show them how the Indians lived and survived. But they don't want people becoming Indians, don't want them taking on the way of Indians for lack of any other connections. They walk a fine line between sharing their culture and preserving it.

"When people come along and want to be an 'Indian,' you have to ask, 'why?'" says Bland.

Once, Bland went to his elders and asked them what to make of non-Indians trying to adopt Indian cultures. His elders told him, "They don't have any bones to fall back on. When people in America start soul searching, they fall back on the Indians."

Bland is identifying a lack of connection that people in America feel towards their past. Because they don't know where they come from and who their people were, they want to take on the connection of the Indians. I think I began to understand this lack of connection, or a self-imposed lack of connection, two summers ago, when I was Mexico. My host family asked about my family, how many brothers and sisters I had, who my parents were. They wanted to know more, to know who my people were. When I couldn't tell them, couldn't articulate where the blood in my veins came from, they were almost aghast, saddened that I didn't know more about my people. Of course, I had told them I was "white" and that I was probably a mix of Western European blood. But I still couldn't tell them and still don't know who my people are.

Vince Bland reminded me of this. "Know your bones! I think that's going to be my message for the next fifty years," he said. Bland recently turned 50 and wants to urge people to learn where they came from and who their ancestors are.

His idea that everyone should know their bones, their roots, comes in part from two experiences he has had as an Indian. One is knowing his own heritage and where he came from. Although he is not full Indian but rather a mixture and Scots-Irish and Creek Indian, he celebrates and remembers his Indian heritage, because that is where he comes from. Sure, he also comes from a Scots-Irish people, but that world, that culture, is around him all the time, every day. The Indian in him has to come out.

The other force motivating him to urge people to know their bones are non-Indians that come to him and want to learn the ways of Indians and their "spirituality" -- people that are looking for answers to life, a better way to live, or some connections to the past.

Once a young woman called Bland and told him she wanted to learn about Indians, how they lived and what their beliefs, religion, and philosophies were like. Instead of taking her under his wing and teaching what it was to be Indian, Bland turned her wish around and asked her who her people were.

She thought they were Anglo and Saxon but she wasn't sure, so he told her to research her people, to find out where they came from, and what they were like. Six months later she called him, excited and thrilled with what she had learned.

She did come from Anglo and Saxon roots. It turns out the Anglos and Saxons are both descendents of different nomadic tribes that wandered the land and fought each other. "Sounds like Indians, doesn't it?" said Bland to the young lady. And she agreed, happy to know her bones and where she came from.

The point of all this is not to admonish those that wish to take on a new form of thought and life in lieu of their set culture. Madonna practices the Kabalah, although she came from Catholic roots. And Richard Gere is a personal friend of the Dalai Lama (or at least got to meet him in a rather spiffy ceremony), although he wasn't born in the East. Rather, the emphasis is on knowledge of one's self and where one's self came from. Before you begin taking on a new culture, a way of life that comes from a different ethnicity, take a look at your own cultural roots, or bones, as Bland says.

Seems a lot of people are confused about where they fit in the world because they cannot see their past, and they realize how heavy it weighs on the present and that it just might determine the future.

Woelk went on to stress the importance of connections and knowing your bones. When she meets another Kiowa Indian, immediately she starts asking who they are related to, and soon enough she knows how that person fits into her Kiowa world. Woelk grew up with a strong Kiowa identity. Her emphasis on connections and familial knowledge comes out when she talks about the Powwow.

"The Powwow means a lot of things to different people," says Woelk. "Intertribal powwows in urban areas give [Indians] a chance to join together and celebrate and fulfill a sense of community. The Powwow gives them a time for gathering, renewal of old friendships, time for healing, teaching, and spiritual refreshment."

Although the Powwow exists in part for the education of people, it also works as a means of keeping Indians together, of keeping the bones fresh, and bringing the past into the present.

The 7th Annual Austin Independent School District Powwow and American Indian Heritage Festival is the largest single-day Indian powwow in the Nation, and the last major powwow before winter sets in. Indians from all over the country will be attending and participating. Some will dance, drum, and sing. Others will vend arts and crafts outside. There will also be an Outdoor Contemporary Stage, a forum for artists who express themselves with a fusion between Indian and Modern American aesthetics. Last year's festival had one performer doing spoken word with tribal jazz-reggae. Another group, known as Indigenous, is a blues quartet from Marty, South Dakota.

Austin's Powwow is part of the AISD Native American Parents' Committee, which was founded in 1991. Bland's history of the AISD Native American Parents' Committee goes back to a decades-long schism between the reservation Indians and the urban Indians. The reservation Indians didn't recognize the urban Indians, and the urban Indians didn't want to associate with the reservation Indians.

"In 1991 President Bush held the first White House conference on Indian education," said Bland. "What came out of that conference was a new thinking. They realized the reservation Indian needed the skills, information, and what the urban Indian had gained. And the urban Indian learned maybe they needed to retrace, to rethink their heritage, their background they may have lost somewhere."

After that conference a university class at L.B.J. School of Public Affairs discovered that under the Title V Program of the U.S. Department of Education any school district with 10 or more American Indian students could form a parents' committee that could apply for federal money for the school district. Although the money would go directly to the school district, the parents' committee would appropriate the money, deciding how it would be used.

In Austin, a parents' committee formed but they opted to wait until 1992 to apply for recognition and money. Somehow, though, teachers found out and started calling Bland and others, asking them to send someone to their class to teach them about Indians and their lifestyles.

"About the first of October we started getting six to ten calls a day from teachers who had found us. And they said, not 'can you?' -- but -- 'when will you come dance for my second grade class?' There was just no way we could fill all the requests we got the first year. But Indian people, feeling very open and sharing and giving what we can, we thought we could put together an event in November," said Bland.

So the Parents' Committee decided to have a powwow in the MacCallen High School Gym. They invited all the teachers and librarians that had asked them to perform, put together 12 dancers, invited the Austin School Board of Trustees and expected 200-300 people. They figured everyone could come to them, they could do some dances, and then talk about Indian culture.

"By 2:00 o'clock that afternoon we had over 2,000 people and had to shut the doors. We raised over $1,200. All the press was there, TV, the Austin-American Statesman, we got media coverage and we made the Sunday morning front page," said Bland.

The school board loved the event so much they asked the Parents' Committee to do it again the following year, which they did. The second year they had 100 dancers with 6,000 people attending. The third year saw 200 dancers and 10,000 people in attendance. Last year, there were 400 dancers and arts and crafts vendors, and 25,000 - 27,000 spectators.

The Powwow and Heritage Festival is not the only event the Parents' Committee sponsors. Throughout the year they hold classes teaching people about Indian dancing or singing. They try to enrich people's lives and teach them about Indians, in a way that is often different from what we get in school.

By bringing the past into the present, the American Indian people of Texas and the nation continue to make the past fresh and remember their ties. For people like me, who aren't too sure where they came from before the New World was colonized, the Powwow can have a powerful effect. If anything, it can motivate me and others to find our blood.