Although 17-year-old Catherine Coleman grew up immersed in her Native Hawaiian culture, until recently she knew little about her family’s other native ties.

When she was trying to come up with a project to earn her Girl Scout Gold Award — the highest award a Girl Scout can attain — Coleman decided it would be interesting to dig deeper into her family’s past.

"I’m Native American from my mom — Cherokee — and then Native Hawaiian from my dad," the 12th-grader at Kame­ha­meha Schools’ Kapa­lama campus said Friday while taking a brief break from working in a hot Kalihi kitchen to help make 350 pounds of traditional fry bread dough ahead of this weekend’s 39th annual Hono­lulu Intertribal Powwow at Thomas Square.

"I thought maybe I’ll try to like use this (project) to find out more about myself," Coleman said. "We met with our old friends who we used to go to powwow with, and they gave me a whole bunch of ideas, and one of them was creation stories. So I was like, ‘Oh, how better to, like, find out about myself than through creation stories?’"

Coleman, who is also a member of the Indigenous Education Institute’s Youth Council, said she’s interviewed about six people on camera for her project, including Native Americans and Native Hawaiians, and spent the past two weekends running an informational booth at the powwows on Hawaii island and Kauai. Her goal is to highlight oral history and the importance of perpetuating native culture.

"I interviewed this one Native American, and she was telling me, like, the creation story, and she said it would take 13 days to tell because it’s like a story, and other stories come in it, so she gave me, like, the shortened version," she said.

The teen later recalled another interesting tidbit: finding out that Native Hawaiians used coconuts as puppets to help tell stories.

"I learned a lot like in these past two weeks, (more) than I have in, like, my whole life," she said.

Coleman plans to spend today and Sunday continuing her work at the Thomas Square powwow. She said attending the Kauai powwow last weekend was especially fulfilling because of how people reacted to her booth.

"People (were) coming up to me and asking, ‘How do I find out more?’ Like, ‘I want to know about my genealogy,’" she said. "That was kind of like what I wanted from it — for people to like get inspired from it and be interested."

The organizer of the Hono­lulu powwow, Mae Pri­eto, who helped make fry bread with Coleman on Friday, said Native Americans in the isles number about 33,000, according to the 2010 census.

Prieto said many Native Americans in Hawaii are members of the military, but others — like her family, which identifies with the small Otoe-Missouria tribe in Red Rock, Okla.— set down roots long ago. Her grandfather, who was full Native American, came to Hono­lulu in the early 1920s working on a U.S. Merchant Marine vessel and married a Native Hawaiian woman, she said.

Prieto said the theme of this year’s powwow is "Healing Our Spirit, Healing Mother Earth," and the event will feature a medicine man, flute players and a California group known as the Morongo Bird Singers, in addition to many traditional dances.

"Every year we attract new tribes, groups that come down from the East Coast, Canada," she said, because Hawaii, given that it doesn’t have any Native American reservations, is a unique location to hold a powwow.

Coleman said part of the fun of her project has been learning about all of the different Native American dances featured at powwows.

"There’s like a dance for softening the grounds to get it ready for the dancers to come, and then there’s like dances that they would teach young boys and young girls to interact with each other because they would be shy, and there’s like war dances," she said.

"It’s definitely been a very eye-opening experience."