ROCKY BOY, Mont. - It's been 11 years since Margarita Hawley has been to the annual powwow on Montana's Rocky Boy's Reservation.

She left Wednesday after reacquainting with friends and relatives during the annual event near the Bear Paw Mountains. The celebration attracted some 400 dancers from across the U.S. who competed for $180,000 in prizes.

Hawley long has been part of a powwow community, an appreciation of dancing instilled by her father, the late Pete Hawley. Her dad always encouraged the whole family to participate. And he routinely took his grandchildren to powwows across the West.

"My dad said, 'Never take them out of the powwow circuit,'" she said. "When he got sick and died, we start doing it all ourselves."

The powwow season is in full swing across Indian Country, giving family separated by distance a chance to reconnect. Margarita and her husband arrived in Rocky Boy with their children, Ramona 17, Mario, 15, and Manny, 7.

As her children danced, Margarita Hawley watched with others from chairs beneath a branch-covered arbor, once the norm among Great Plains powwows. The green leaves from the shade remind me of a generation that has passed by.

My late Lakota grandmothers, Eunice, Helene and Alberta Dupris, of the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota, would regularly arrive each summer for the annual powwow in Mandaree, N.D., on the Fort Berthold Reservation. My grandmas always said the Mandaree singers were their favorite drum group.

My grandmothers are gone, but I can still see them sitting around the powwow camp in their cotton dresses and nylon knee-highs.

It was comforting to be around them. And they were never short of dollar bills pulled from their purses for us kids.

I met Hawley at the Eagleman family camp at the Rocky Boy powwow. She doesn't have a whole lot of memories of elderly relatives from Rocky Boy. That's because her father was born with red hair, pushing his birth father to wrongfully disown him. Pete Hawley was sent away to boarding schools, and he left the reservation for good as a teenager.

Pete Hawley spent time in California before moving his young family to Seattle. Margarita Hawley, now 37, has been in that city since she was 4. Despite losing a connection to his biological family, Pete Hawley never lost touch with his Indian roots. He was adopted by a Yakima family in Washington. And he wrote a book called "Born Cree: The Life of Pete Hawley of Sitting Horse Drum."

He was 47 when Margarita Hawley was born. She was a fancy shawl dancer until her first child was born in 1989. She started to make dance outfits for them as soon as they could walk. Ramona started dancing at age 3. Her first outfit was a pink Minnie Mouse dress. Mario first danced at 4. And Manny at 1.

When Margarita Hawley was younger, she would help her aging father work on her dance regalia. She would sort tiny glass seed beads by color for his aging eyes as he beaded designs on her moccasins.

Margarita Hawley recently quit a job on Pier 91 in Seattle, which freed her to attend the Rocky Boy Celebration.

"I've been missing too many powwows with the kids," she said.

When the weekend's dance competition ended, her boys each placed second in their grass dance categories.

It was nice to be back, she said. It provided an opportunity for her family to be included in tribal ceremonies after the dancing ended.

Although Margarita Hawley hasn't been at the powwow in more than a decade, she did return to the reservation in 1999 to bury her father. He'd discussed his death with his family. He talked about where he would be buried.

"I'm not going back to Rocky Boy," he told his family.

But it was his tribe, the land of his birth.

"OK, I'll go back," he said. "I'm going to go home."

(Jodi Rave covers American Indian issues for Lee News Service. She can be reached at 800-396-8537 or jodi.rave@;lee.net.)