Arts and entertainment  |  UW Notebook

April 8, 2025

UW professors highlight music in powwow culture course

The 54th annual First Nations @ UW Spring Powwow will be held in April.Comanche Mike

Jessica Bissett Perea (Dena’ina) had never heard powwow singing before attending an Indigenous music conference in Toronto in 2008.

She was born north of Anchorage, Alaska, where powwows just started appearing in the last 25 years. At the conference, she was drawn to the singing voice of John-Carlos Perea (Mescalero Apache, Irish, Chicano, German). The pair discovered they had a lot in common, eventually marrying in 2009.

“It’s a beautiful thing, how I’ve learned about powwows through participating with John-Carlos over the years,” Bissett Perea said. “We have invitational dance forms in Alaska. But as more of a newcomer who doesn’t know all the things about powwows, it’s been good for me to be able to ask questions to John-Carlos.”

The pair recently joined the faculty at the University of Washington: Bissett Perea is an associate professor of American Indian Studies and an adjunct associate professor of music history and Comparative History of Ideas; Perea is associate professor and interim head of ethnomusicology, adjunct associate professor of American Indian Studies and Comparative History of Ideas. This quarter, they are co-teaching a new iteration of “Powwow Cultures in Native North America.”

While a powwow course existed in the past, this is the first time it’s an interdisciplinary offering between American Indian Studies and the School of Music. The course will cover historic and contemporary powwow practices through a variety of activities, including participation in the annual First Nations @ UW Spring Powwow and interactions with powwow musicians, dancers and organizers.

“The class changes from instructor to instructor,” Perea said. “Everybody’s going to have their own take on it. We’re looking forward to entering that discussion, especially considering we are still new to town. We want to use this not just to talk about how we’ve experienced powwow music and events, but also to take the opportunity to be able to learn more about how these events have functioned in the Seattle area.”

The class will cover musical elements and style as well as history and context. Both instructors are trained in music — Perea in ethnomusicology and Bissett Perea in music history — and are jazz musicians. Being affiliated with the School of Music at the UW is a milestone, Bissett Perea said, because “for a long time, Native music wasn’t seen as music.”

“It’s important to us that we demonstrate Native ways of doing research and music history and ethnomusicology,” Bissett Perea said. “It’s a different approach, with different kinds of attention paid to politics of citation and presence. It’s intellectual work, but it’s also physical. It’s emotional and it’s spiritual. It will be a tall order, but hopefully by introducing students to powwow — this beautiful structure that is always changing and always reinventing itself — they’ll want to ask more questions and take more classes and continue the conversation.”

Whether the students come from Native American, Indigenous or other cultural backgrounds, Perea said, they’re taking the course because of a shared interest in music and dance. His goal is to foster an appreciation for powwow music, especially in those students who have yet to experience it. He once wrote a book chapter on the different ways people have called powwow noise. In his time as a powwow singer, he’s been yelled at and even had the cops called on him while teaching.

A participant during last year’s First Nations @ UW Spring Powwow.Comanche Mike

“That speaks to a lot of fear in how people get socialized, not just around powwow music but a lot of Native music,” Perea said. “It’s not noise. Hang out with me for 10 weeks, and by the end of it, you’ll be surprised. I can show you that it’s as organized as anything else you’re listening to. But whose organization are we stressing out about? What is it that our ear needs to know? I want students to walk away not just knowing what a powwow is, but also having been changed through learning how they might relate to it.”

When Perea attended the annual UW Powwow last year for the first time, he saw things he’d never witnessed before. That, he said, is part of the greatness of powwows: Something new can quickly become tradition. That’s why the class doesn’t have a textbook, and why it won’t look the same from year to year.

“John-Carlos and I share an endless curiosity,” Bissett Perea said. “We’re always learning. That’s one of things that keeps us in this profession.”

Washington is rich with urban and rural Native communities, Bissett Perea said, and there are specific histories surrounding migration, urbanization, tribal law and federal policies that have impacted Native peoples. Giving attention to how powwow arrived in cities like Seattle is important, especially to Native students who might not know their history.

“A lot of these students are figuring out the specificities of who they are, who their peoples are and where they’re from,” Bissett Perea said. “It’s an invitation to dig deeper, to have permission to celebrate being Native. For non-Native students, it’s an invitation be in better relations with the original stewards of these lands.”

Ahead of the course, the pair built a calendar of upcoming powwows in the area, which students will be able add to. They’ve listed events within a 100-mile radius, finding more than a half dozen in April and May alone. They also plan to encourage students to participate, volunteer or attend the UW Powwow.

“I say to my students, ‘I’m going to tell you this one way, but then you’re going to go to the powwow this weekend and somebody’s going to describe it a different way,’” Perea said. “That’s the point. It’s all the meanings together. It’s holding multiple, sometimes conflicting thoughts at the same time. That’s what it means to do this thing.”

For more information, contact Jessica Bissett Perea at jbperea@uw.edu or John-Carlos Perea at jcperea@uw.edu.