So yesterday, I was walking up the stairs of Blair Arch with a few friends when we started hearing strains of drumming and yelling in the distance. There was cheering and some singing, and I could definitely feel a heavy bass.

But it was also 6 p.m., pretty early for anyone to start pregaming (not that we expect anyone to, since Newman’s Day on Sunday should be more than enough for everyone to handle this weekend). Preview ended last week, so it couldn’t be the band trying to impress the prefrosh. Was there some kind of carnival we didn’t know about? An early soundcheck for Communiversity/Lawnparties/REUNIONS (!)?

Nope. “Surprised” barely captures how I felt when we finally made it through the arch and saw this:

Sophomore passerby: "Whoa, I should ask them to help me dress for the Cap theme tonight!"

We’d walked in on an apparently newly-formed spring tradition, the Princeton Powwow! Native Americans at Princeton (NAAP) set up the event, complete with two hired drum circles, smoke dancing, Iroquois jewelry, crafts and free Native American stew with fried bread. There was a guy on a mic calling everyone to jump in the tent and get in on the circle dances, a few stalls selling handicrafts, and a bunch of intrigued bystanders. The closest I’d ever been to a powwow before this was basically when I watched Peter Pan as a kid, so I took the chance to ask the powwow people (powwowers? powwowians?) what all this meant.