The end of July is a beginning and an ending. It marks the final mop-up of one year's Festival of American Folklife and the start of extensive planning for the next. For us, in the Indian Awareness Program, it marks the time when we can get out into the field once again and renew old friendships, make new ones, and learn more about the tremendous amount of traditional Indian culture still existing within the Indian community.

Indian participation in the Festival of American Folklife is more than a presentation of a colorful but irrelevant past. It is the presentation of modern adaptations of traditional Indian cultures within the context of 1972. The Festival is not a performance out of the past; it is a celebration of the present.

The fieldwork that goes into the Indian participation at the Festival must therefore search out the people who will best represent the living aspects of Indian culture. A potter comes to the Festival because there is still a demand for Pueblo-made pottery, not because pottery is something the Indians used to do.