The Public’s Radio South County Bureau Reporter Alex Nunes spoke with Narragansett Chief Sachem Anthony Dean Stanton and his aunt Mary Starlight Stanton Brown about the two-day event at the tribe’s reservation in Charlestown. Listen to the interview or read the transcript below.
CHIEF STANTON: For the native people, it’s been a gathering that’s been going on since time immemorial. This is our 347th recorded [annual August meeting], but we did it long before then. We’ve always managed to keep our pow wow and our celebrations going.
NUNES: And what’s the significance of the pow wow?
CHIEF STANTON: Historically, this is our green corn festival. This is the moon of the green corn, sixth moon of the year. This is when our green corn is growing and everything is in abundance–we’re going to have a harvest, usually the gardens will be growing, the hunting would be good, fishing would be good. Everything is at its peak right now for us. And just having family reunions and we organize and we talk to each other about what’s transpired over the past year or past several years, and it’s just a get together for us.
NUNES: What type of events or ceremonies take place?
CHIEF STANTON: We have dancing in a cultural, ceremonial spiritual sense. We also have contest dancing, because some pow wows, well most today, have gone more pan Indian. They’ve gone more commercial. So we do some of the contesting. But we also do some more traditional, cultural things. We have our pipe ceremony; we have things like that; we acknowledge and recognize the government, the chiefs, the elders. We do things along that line that most pow wows don’t do anymore.
NUNES: Typically speaking, how many people come out each year for this?
CHIEF STANTON: Oh, I would say at any given [year] we have 5,000 to 10,000 people over the course of the weekend. And I’d like to let my aunt address the church board and what they do, and how vitally important they are in what the tribe does. I’ll turn it over to my aunt.
NUNES: OK.
STARLIGHT: Yes, Starlight’s my name. I’ve been here for 87 years going straight on with the pow wow every year, except the COVID. And we’re going to have a celebration Sunday at two services; one is at 9:30, and the other one is at 11. People are invited, of course, and it’s going to be outside on the drum near the church. It’s a nondenominational [service] for the outside people, but it’s the traditional service of our own type. We have prayers to the Great Spirit, and we sing, chant. Someone plays the drums and flutes, and the children are there also to take part. And it’s a good time.
NUNES: Is the annual meeting an opportunity for older and younger generations to come together and share the traditions?
CHIEF STANTON: Yes, yes, it always has been. We don’t have heroes. But we do have legendary people in just about every family that have done things above and beyond, done extraordinary things. And years ago, you’d sit in a circle and the old timers would explain about certain activities and about certain times of year, and they could talk about what they did, their exploits. And a lot of that stuff was spot on true. Those people were incredible. But they gave us the strength to stand today. Without the prior generations, we wouldn’t be here. But the fact that they upheld the traditional culture, it’s our job now to maintain it.
NUNES: The annual meeting, has it always been open to the broader public, people outside the tribe?
CHIEF STANTON: What most people fail to understand is this: Europeans have been here since the 1500s, OK? They’re not our people. But some of them married into us, some of them are adopted into us, some of the people we work with, and some of the people like to live amongst the tribe, even back then. So there’s always been different people from different places that have worked with us. But they’ve been welcome. But they’ve also recorded what they’ve witnessed and what they saw over the years, and that cannot be denied. I’d like to make one key point here. For the two years of COVID, we didn’t open our pow wow to the general public. But we still did our cultural and traditional ceremony, so there was never a break in the chain. We still did what we had to do to keep our culture and tradition going. That has never stopped. And that will never stop.
NUNES: My understanding from speaking with the Medicine Man and Historic Preservation Officer for the tribe, John Brown, is that the annual meeting also had some significance or importance when the tribe sought federal acknowledgement [from the U.S. government, which was gained April 11, 1983].
CHIEF STANTON: Yes. But that was one of the key things as part of being part of the process, because that was documentation that showed from pre-contact to present day we had a form of government, we had a form of chiefs, medicine men, we had a form of culture and tradition we’ve managed to maintain for those 300 plus years.
NUNES: And the meeting itself being part of that continual organization.
CHIEF STANTON: No doubt about it.
Alex Nunes can be reached at anunes@thepublicsradio.org
