This weekend, Estes Park will be the host of a new event: the First Peoples Festival Friendship Pow Wow and Indigenous Art Market, one of a series of pow wows that take place statewide.
The first-time free event, which starts Friday and ends Sunday, happens at Estes Park Events Complex. It will feature a musical performance as well as a film symposium, traditional dance competitions, a talk by Jeremiah RisingBuffalo Maybee — a Rocky Mountain National Park district supervisory park ranger — and a fashion show.
Penny Singer, a self-described Urban Navajo who makes traditional ribbon shirts and other Indigenous clothing, will travel from the New Mexico/Arizona line to Estes Park for the first time to show some of her fashion at the event.
“It’s a good way for myself to show people how my garments can be worn — you can dress it up, dress it down,” she said, adding that her items range in price from $450 to $950. “And showing it this weekend, this is going to be like a preview of what’s going to be coming up for the next year.”
She said she makes blazers as well as ribbon shirts, using applique techniques she learned from her Navajo elders. “It’s Navajo-themed, with some bold, geometric designs; that’s my style,” said Singer, who turns 55 soon and who has been making a living selling her clothing and handbags, of which she’s sold out, for the past 20 years.
“My inspiration behind this is a lot of what I grew up visually seeing with my grandmother,” she said in a virtual interview from her home on the reservation about twenty miles east of Shiprock.
“I was never vocal with her. I don’t speak fluent Navajo. So everything that I think I’m doing now in my collection is more of a visual learning and telling a story …. It’s wearable art and some of it has stories,” she said.
Also expected are owners of Eagle Plume’s, a shop that sells Native American art in Estes Park, and a color guard by the Indigenous Veterans of Colorado, established in 2018. That part of the event involves Indigenous men who are veterans carrying flags, as the group does at other pow wows and gatherings, as a way to give honor to the event.
The veterans and other dancers, filmmakers and lecturers participate in pow wows like this one as part of a series of other pow wows in Colorado.
For Singer, traveling around to pow wows and art markets is a regular thing. “I travel a lot,” she said. “Most of my business is at the art markets that I go to now that fashion has emerged for the past maybe six, five years.”
For the veterans, the same is true: The group participated a few weeks ago in the Mile High New Year’s Eve Pow Wow at Lincoln High School in Denver and in the pow wow at the Denver Coliseum last March.
On Feb 15, they’re scheduled to be a part of another pow wow in Thornton that will feature a dancing competition and a spiritual adviser, one of many such events around Colorado each year.
