Albany Native American Festival wows Chehaw visitors | PHOTO GALLERY

ALBANY — Visitors to Chehaw Park’s Native American Cultural Festival were undeterred on Saturday by overcast skies, turning out instead to catch the sights, sounds and smells of a chapter in American history.

Nestled at the far side of the park was the “Indian encampment,” complete with food booths and sellers of authentic and replicated Native American goods, including bows, arrows, tom-toms, flutes, whistles, knives and tomahawks.

In the show ring, where “edu-tainment” groups like Chippa Wolf and his Warriors on Horseback mesmerized the crowd, the colorful Touch the Earth and Aztec Dancing groups spun to drum and flute. William Taylor from the Cherokee reservation in North Carolina and his 14-year-old associate, Josiah Quevedo, gave a demonstration in the use of bamboo blowguns.

Wolf, who descends from Cajun French and Cherokee stock, said he has lived all over but settled in Georgia after hitchhiking here some 35 years ago. He learned his Native American lore mostly from his aunts and uncles, who also delved in show business.

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“I’m redneck and Indian,” Wolf said. “Part of my family is just hard-working country folks and the other part were Indians. They’ve always been Indians — not just after Indians became fashionable.”

Wolf performs at various shows throughout the year, including many at public schools, primarily to educate through entertainment, with an emphasis on cultural diversity.

“I tell people I’m a showman, not a shaman,” Wolf said. “It’s the same with my horse. I don’t want to make him do things. I want him to want to do those things.”

In contrast to Hollywood tradition, during Wolf’s mock battles with cavalryman John Stikes, Wolf always is the winner.

“John may be bigger than me, but he can count,” Wolf joked. “He’s outnumbered here.”

Aztec Dancers Javier Alfaro, his wife and two young daughters flashed like mobile rainbows in colorful regalia and their headdresses of pheasant, macaw and quetzal feathers. Like other festival performers, they were at the festival to educate and raise awareness. Alfaro said world interest in Aztec culture began to explode in the 1970s when the 14th century city of Tenochtitlan was excavated in central Mexico.

“We found that we had been living atop our own ancient culture,” Alfaro said. “As we continued digging, it created an alert awakening of that culture.”

There were historians, many of them local, like Jeff Parr of Sylvester, who came to share the knowledge of his heritage and his 18th century replicas, including Spanish and French muskets, beads, kettles, fire steels and war clubs, many crafted by Parr or members of his family. Parr’s story of the Creek Nation’s last days in the Southeast coincides with the overhunting of the southern whitetail deer.

“In the early part of the 18th century, a blight wiped out about a quarter of the cattle in Europe,” Parr said. “So deerskins became a big trade item. By the 1760s, about a million skins each year were taken from the Southeast and deer became more scarce. That made it hard for a Creek hunter to make a living for his family.”

Parr said that following the American Revolution, Creeks were in debt to both the English and the colonies and were forced to trade more and more of their land for the debt, marking the beginning of the end for the Creeks.

New to the festival this year is classically-trained violinist Arvel Bird, who because of his Celtic style of playing, describes himself as “Braveheart meets the last of the Mochicans.”

The festival opened at Chehaw on Friday and will end at 6 p.m. on Sunday. Ticket prices are $12.85 for adults and $8.35 for children. Chehaw members can get in for $5 each.