When he was eight Ansel Deon was just like the other kids at the powwow, running around, tossing back Cokes, and getting in the elders’ hair. When he turned nine, he turned serious. He asked for lessons in traditional-style singing, and plenty of elders, starting with his father, were happy to teach him. “We call ’em our powwow dads, or uncles. There’s a bunch of them.”
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Most of the gigs are small. The work pays, but not well. “If you get invited to a powwow you get a hotel room, they’ll pay for your gas, and sometimes you’ll actually turn a profit,” Deon says. “But not all the time. What I’m doing here is sharing.”
“Whenever you would go to make peace with another tribe, we don’t know each other’s tribe’s language, because everybody’s different. You couldn’t just go up there and start singing a word song in your language to another tribe, so we had to find a way to communicate with each other.”
The words to “Mighty Mouse” go “Oh my gosh, it’s Mighty Mouse.” (Check out canyonrecords.com for snippets of these songs–you won’t be disappointed.)
“I like it because we’re singing for the family, the people. You’re not supposed to be singing for yourself, ’cause the way you’ll be singing is probably going to heal somebody–it’s that connection to the past. You are living in this contemporary world, but we have to remember our past, and you can remember that past by singing.
