Putnam’s Wappinger Past

The 9th Annual Daniel Nimham Intertribal Pow Wow beat its way through Kent last weekend.

Gil “Cryinghawk” Tarbox organized the event at Veterans Memorial Park. A member of the Nimham Mountain Singers, who promote Native American music and spirituality, Gil surveyed the scene on Sunday and said, “I’m tremendously proud of what is happening here.”

The Intertribal Pow Wow serves several functions in the community. It raises money for veterans’ causes, for educational sites and materials related to Native Americans, and it educates the Hudson Valley community on the history of the Wappinger tribe, which populated the area from Putnam through Dutchess counties.

On Saturday, dozens of representatives and members of the Children of the American Revolution attended the morning Prayer Ceremony at the Wappinger Memorial. The Children of the American Revolution raised funds for the Chief Daniel Nimham Memorial, and for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

(Top) Local girls Svetlana (left) and Tammy (right)wave an eagle feather outside the dance circle; (above) Two Tremendous Tipis flank the hillside in Veterans Memorial Park. “It has taken a long time to get the story even halfway straight,” Gil Tarbox said of the Wappingers. “It was a culture that was handed down, not written down. And so you have to talk to the descendants of the Wappingers to get the story. Our language tells us a lot.”

Throughout the weekend Veterans Memorial Park was filled with the tents of vendors selling Native American jewelry, clothing, arrows, and feathers. At the top of the hill was a dance circle in which different tribal members danced to the steady pounding of Native American drums, calling out their prayers, and instructing onlookers in the meaning and history of Native American practices and beliefs.

Michael Brendan Dougherty Gil “Cryinghawk” Tarbox The Pow Wow aims to debunk stereotypes about Native Americans, though it also serves as a reminder of the complicated history of interaction between natives and the American Republic. For years, Americans have held conflicting ideas about their land’s native peoples. Statesman such as Theodore Roosevelt and even Winston Churchill used to boast of their partly Native American ancestry. Americans have by turns admired Native Americans for their stoicism, or caricatured them as firewater-drinking buffoons. They have been used as models of “noble savages” in the literature of James Fenimore Cooper, and hailed as proto-environmentalists by modern environmentalists.

The Pow Wow, with its nods to tribes from around the American nation, seems to demonstrate that native peoples were as diverse in their practices, attitudes, and beliefs as we are.

Highlights of the weekend included not only demonstrations of Native American dancing and drumming, but also a brief seminar on birds of prey from Green Chimneys. Representatives from tribes came from Pennsylvania and Massachucetts, and representatives from the descendants of colonial groups came from as far away as Virginia for the event.

Tarbox hopes that events like these “can let people know more about their history, and make them aware that our history can bring in money for the county.” Tarbox plans to make the Daniel Nimham Memorial into an outdoor classroom available to the public school students of Putnam County.

One member of a tribe from Pennsylvania who did not identify himself accosted this reporter at the event to say, “People should know how tireless this man is,” referring to Tarbox, “he has arranged for all these people, the food, even the small things like garbage pickup, almost all by himself. I wish we had ten of him from my own people. He is an asset to the community.”

As Gil “Cryinghawk” Tarbox entered the dance circle one more time as emcee on Sunday, sweat dripping from his brow, and a smile stretching across his face, he cut the perfect figure of the noble native, working to preserve his culture in the face of ignorance, sentimentalism, and mythology. With men like Gil Tarbox, Putnam County will never forget its Wappinger heritage or the legacy of Chief Daniel Nimham.