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Mid-Missouri Family Carries On Pow Wow Tradition

Sara Shahriari

Last weekend, a small group of men circled a drum inside a building on the Missouri State Fairgrounds while  women, men and children danced a clockwise loop.

Bob Woolery Jr.’s family has been putting together this pow wow since the early 1990s, after a Sedalia organization tried to host one. According to Woolery, nobody showed up.

"They thought all they had to do was put on a piece of paper that there was going to be a pow wow and all these Indians were going to show up out of the closet," he said. 

Woolery, who is part of a large Native American family, offered to step in with his parents – and a family tradition was born. He says the pow wow is growing, and estimates more than 1,000 people came through this year.

William Branson was the head man at this year’s pow wow.

"It’s a family gathering," Branson said. "We see these people almost every weekend during the pow wow season, which starts in March and ends in November.  So every weekend we’re excited to come back and dance with the same people. The family camaraderie, having dinners together and that type of thing, and continuing our culture."

Credit Sara Shahriari
Bob Woolery Jr. at the 2015 Robert Woolery Sr. Memorial Pow Wow in Sedalia, MO.

Dolores Woolery was cooking. Surrounded by cousins and her own children, she rolls out pieces of dough and tosses them into a fryer.

"Right now I’m making Native American frybread," she said. "It’s a Native American food staple, and no matter where you go everybody makes it different."

Woolery says getting this pow wow together every year is a family affair.

"Not only have we got out kids, we’ve now got out grandkids, our nieces, our nephews, you know it’s a big family event. If it weren’t for our family we probably wouldn’t be able to do it, and that’s the truth."

Anyone can come to this pow wow, and admission is free. That means  money is often a bit tight - but the family is determined to continue.  Tamara Parker is Bob and Dolores’ daughter. She and her siblings are already talking about how the next generation can carry the torch.

" We’ve had a discussion this weekend. It has to go on," Parker said. "My parents are starting to turn over some of this roles to my siblings and I, and to some of the grandkids who are a little but older. But it’s almost scary – they’ve done such a great job, how do you follow what they’ve done up to this point?"

One of Parker's experiences with a teacher back in grade school ­- roughly around the time the family started the pow wow ­­- sparked another Woolery family project: presentations on Native American culture in schools. 

"We were talking about Indians.  And she was talking about things being extinct, and that means there are no more, and we talked about the dinosaurs being extinct, and she said the Indians were extinct." Parker said of that conversation with a teacher in school. "And of course growing up in that culture I said, that’s not true, because I’m Indian – I’m Native American. And she told me to stop lying, that that was not true – that they were all dead."

Credit Sara Shahriari
Marcus Tso in his regalia and prepared to dance in the Northern Traditional style.

Today Tamara is a kindergarten teacher who makes sure her students know that Native culture is very much alive, and her mother estimates the family did ten presentations in schools over the past year.

Alongside socializing, there’s another side to any pow wow. Ed Smith is a Mizzou grad who’s been dancing here for more than 10 years.

"That arena is a circle and it represents the world, and in some instances the universe, so when we enter that dance arena we are becoming part of everything, part of creation," he said. "And in that arena, in that sacred space, there is our people. And not just the people today, but the people tomorrow, with the little ones, and the people that have come before us. So when I do that dance I am dancing that dance with my ancestors."

Sara Shahriari was the assistant news director at KBIA-FM, and she holds a master's degree from the Missouri School of Journalism. Sara hosted and was executive producer of the PRNDI award-winning weekly public affairs talk show Intersection. She also worked with many of KBIA’s talented student reporters and teaches an advanced radio reporting lab. She previously worked as a freelance journalist in Bolivia for six years, where she contributed print, radio and multimedia stories to outlets including Al Jazeera America, Bloomberg News, the Guardian, the Christian Science Monitor, Deutsche Welle and Indian Country Today. Sara’s work has focused on mental health, civic issues, women’s and children’s rights, policies affecting indigenous peoples and their lands and the environment. While earning her MA at the Missouri School of Journalism, Sara produced the weekly Spanish-language radio show Radio Adelante. Her work with the KBIA team has been recognized with awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and PRNDI, among others, and she is a two-time recipient of funding from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.