Personal Narrative: The Eve Of Nation

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I originally attended the Eve of Nations event at Lloyd Nobel to support my friends in the Indian Student Association and their dance routine. However, I was pleasantly surprised that students from the Comanche Nation had their own traditional dance reflecting their culture. The Eve of Nations’ decorations transformed the Lloyd Nobel Center into a surprisingly elegant and beautiful location. With the lights having been dimmed, so that the candles set up around the room would give it a very pleasant atmosphere. There were two types of seating, general and VIP. If you payed regular price then you had to be seated in the bleachers, but if you payed for VIP seating you could sit on the main floor, where dining tables were set up and you got a …show more content…
Three young women, were wearing brightly color dresses, intricately detailed with various designs which stood out against their, blue, pink, and green dresses. Seeing their dresses, I was reminded a lot of my Mexican culture. Their dresses were very reminiscent of the Mexican Huipil which is a brightly colored tunic dress commonly worn by indigenous women of Mexico. My grandmother always wore one whenever we visited her in Mexico over the holidays. They also carried a shawl very like a rebozo which is a type of Mexican shawl. Instead of using the music being played from the speakers they had a man come up on stage playing a drum as they showed off their dresses. He kept a slow tempo, while also chanting, until all four of them left the …show more content…
With there being many more empty rows of seats for toddlers to chase one another between. Instead of being dimly lit like the Eve of Nations it was instead much more brightly lit, but all the main action was still occurring on the floor. Upon finding my seat, below me I could see the drum circle formed, it mainly consisted of older men, with other people dancing outside the drums with rattles. There even some kids in the rattling, with some women off to the side dancing in sort of a two-step fashion. What surprised me is how young some of the children involved were, with one rattler dressed in blue appearing to be around five. The MC announced that it was his birthday also. It took several tries for me to hear what the MC was calling this type of dance, until I eventually heard “Gourd Dance”. I am not entirely sure if this is typically part of the Gourd Dance, but at one point, they began dropping what looked like money into a pile and dancing around it. I am not sure about its significance but it seemed like an important part of the dance. I speculated it had something to do with prosperity for the tribe, but was uncertain. They usually dropped it in front of the little boy in blue whose birthday it was, I could not tell if there was a correlation between the two or if it was simply a coincidence. There was a wide variety of people involved of different ages, I noticed that there were veterans involved too,