Tribal celebration
Hundreds of visitors sample culture and learn about heritage at Maritime Center festival
Grace Beahm
The Post and Courier
Angel Moore, 8, dances the Fancy Dance at the American Indian Expo on Saturday at the Charleston Maritime Center. The festival offered traditional dancing, drumming, craftmaking and health screenings provided by the Medical University of South Carolina.
Grace Beahm
The Post and Courier
Winnie Mraz, a Cherokee who lives in the Dorchester community, blesses a circle in a purification ritual Saturday at the American Indian Expo. The inaugural festival drew hundreds of visitors.
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American Indian Expo
The American Indian Expo offered traditional foods, dancing, drumming, craftmaking and health screenings provided by the Medical University of South Carolina on Saturday at the Charleston Maritime Center.
Five-year-old Alex Davis couldn't get over the wild turkey talons. He went back and touched them, asking what they were. He rubbed his hand on the rabbit fur and said it was soft. He just saw two American Indians, and he was a little in awe.
"I've never seen one," he said. "Now I've seen one."
Across the artifact exhibit table, Lee Scott smiled from beneath his coyote head cap. Scott of Summerville is an Edisto, or Natchez-Kusso, a member of the Ridgeville-based tribe reclaiming its heritage after generations of wrongly being considered remnants of the lost Edisto tribe.
One child had asked him if he rode a horse. Another asked, "Are you an Indian? Do you have a black-and-white television?"
That's what the first American Indian Expo was all about — separating the heritage from the cliche. It was a sampling of cultures and traditions of a half-dozen or more Carolinas tribes as deeply reverberant as the beat of the drum.
As many as 30 American Indians took part, including Lowcountry tribes such as the Natchez-
Kusso, Santee and Wassamasaw. Hundreds of visitors stopped by to sample traditional foods such as sweet corn chowder and gape at tools such as a huge buffalo knee joint and leg bone fashioned as a mallet and used to tenderize meat.
A circle of drummers beat a big skin drum in the middle of the field by the Charleston Maritime Center, piped and sang, "Wen-dayaho," a purification song. In full white buckskin regalia, Winnie Mraz of Dorchester stepped into a roped-off circle and burned sage smudge weed and corn pollen. She spread the smoke with a fan of red-tailed hawk feathers.
The ritual created a sacred circle for dancing by each tribe.
"We want it to be clean when we go in, clear the energy out to go in the circle and dance with new energy," she said later. Sage is burned for blessing and corn pollen for fertility.
"It's so natural. I don't know why people stray from it, don't practice it."
The festival was held Friday and Saturday and was put on by the Morgan Allen Platt Foundation, a nonprofit agency established to research, educate and archive the historical and contemporary contributions of American Indians native to South Carolina. It's expected to be a yearly event.
Reach Bo Petersen at 745-5852 or bpetersen@postandcourier.com.
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