In our cultures, dancing itself is an art form.
It’s also an integral, elemental component of our traditions themselves. In many cultures, dance is widely regarded as a partnered activity, one that involves a couple following certain steps, or simply moving together to music either up close or apart. For us, dancing is an activity that manages to be simultaneously highly individual and wholly communal, a form of collective expression carried out through the bodies and skill of individual dancers.
For today’s post, we’re going to proceed a bit differently from our usual approach. With the exception of art manifest as actual dancers (which, generally speaking, is usually largely limited to a couple of forms, the graphic arts and katsinam or other carvings) most allusions to dance will be primarily symbolic. To that end, today’s post will serve as a bit of an overview of Native dance, illustrated throughout by works of indigenous art that embody or otherwise make metaphorical reference to dancing as an activity, art form, or spiritual practice. Below is shown the example of a dancer that speaks to me most personally: Wings’s recent mixed-media figure, an elder, a dancer, a spirit being unto himself — given the name, simply, Kachina.
Native dance tells its own stories, and they are legion. It serves many purposes, some intensely practical, others oriented toward enjoyment, and still others whose goals are nothing less than sacred. We dance to express joy, to come together as a community, to share culture. We dance to honor those among whose deeds and lives merit great respect, to honor the spirits and make our steps an offering to them, to honor Mother Earth herself. We dance publicly, at powwows and other open events; we dance privately, in ceremony and for healing. And as I wrote here previously:
Sometimes the most beautiful, most exciting traditions arise out of stories of pain and exile.
Dancing is no exception.
We dance for all sorts of reasons: celebratory, ceremonial, honorific, memorial. Sometimes it’s historical and very, very contemporary simultaneously.
Some of the most popular Native dances were originally summoned from the depths of great suffering. Such is the case with the hoop dance, to which I referred in the passage above. It is also the case with the jingle dance, one that has grown immensely popular on the powwow circuit, and is now similarly claimed by numerous nations. Then, too, there are the many traditional dances that are now guaranteed to be a part of virtually any intertribal powwow: men’s and women’s traditional, with northern and southern variations; men’s fancy; women’s shawl (also sometimes called women’s fancy or women’s fancy shawl); the chicken dance (which refers to the prairie chicken, not to domesticated chickens, hence the headdresses that include the “crest” found on prairie chickens and quail); those events where the dancers are segregated by age, ranging from “Tiny Tots” to “Golden Age”; and, of course, the jingle dance I mentioned above. These are only a few.
While many of these dances that the outside world is privileged to see at powwows and other events are variations on a round dance, in which many people come together to move to the beat of the drum, following specific steps around a circle, there are others that are less obviously communal. The Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee perform a Smoke Dance that is hi
ghly individual, one I have been told is designed to honor the work of warriors and scouts and to showcase their courage and strength and stamina. Extraordinarily fast-paced, and requiring dancers to be able to stop, as the saying goes, on a dime, it is by far the best cardio workout I have ever seen, in any context. Among some of the nations of Northern Plains, warriors dance to honor their fallen horses. Then there is the Forty-Nine, which is a social dance, and one that has become known as an activity for finding/dancing with a potential romantic partner. Another dance popular with children is one known as the Horsetail Dance, in which the dancers attach horsetails (horsehair) to the back of their waists and dance honor and evoke the spirit of this animal that has become such an integral part of so many of our cultures’ very existence. Wings paid tribute to it with a relatively recent entry in his new collection of coil bracelets, actually entitling it Horsetail Dance; it’s shown immediately above at right.
Here in this part of Indian Country, many dances take specific forms, and are performed to honor specific spirits. Many are tributes to specific katsinam, and play equally specific roles with regard to community needs and traditions. One universal to the Pueblo peoples is the Corn Dance, which honors the corn itself, and also the Corn Maidens, female spirit beings who are credited variously with bringing the corn to the people, with nurturing it and ensuring an abundant harvest, and with representing it, in a manner of speaking, among the beings of the spirit world. The Corn Katsina above is carved in the traditional manner out of cottonwood root, and embodies the spirits of both the yellow corn (on the front) and the blue corn (on the back).
Wings has long found inspiration for his own work in the Corn Maidens, and in the plant they personify. He has developed several signature series based upon their form and spirit: The Mona Lisa On the Rio Grande, a series of spectacular ne
cklaces that combine silver and stone to create the head of a Maiden, the gemstone forming her face and the sterling silver setting serving as her traditional carved tablit
a headdress. An example of a Mona Lisa, one from about a decade ago, is shown immediately above.
He has also produced a collection in miniature of Maiden pendants with fully defined hair and features and highly stylized bodies, an example of which appears at left. It’s a motif he revisited recently in a new form: the pair of earrings shown at right, entitled The First Sisters, a reference to Corn’s status as first among what our peoples call the Three Sisters, corn, beans, and squash, who have sustained us since time immemorial. And finally, he reconceived both the Corn Maiden and the spirit of the corn entirely with a whole new work, one very recently sold to a client for whom the work held special resonance: Indian Corn Spirit, shown below:
All of the works which center around the Maidens, and the corn, hold the appearance of dancers. More, each work appears itself to dance, even
as it is worn. This, of course, is true of many of Wings’s works.
Some of Wings’s works are designed to honor less obvious spirits. Sometimes they are less obvious only because they are small and relatively unobtrusive, such as wh
en he launched a series of necklaces several years ago in the form and shape of Dragonfly. Because of Dragonfly’s ability to dart rapidly and fly in any and all directions, he named each work in the series some variant of “Dancer”: Fire Dancer, Twilight Dancer, etc. Most took their names, in part, from the color and type of gemstone he chose for their eyes. The one shown at left, however, included no stones, but rather, eyes made of two sterling silver ingot beads; it was named Wind Dancer.
Speaking of wind, other “dancers” assumed a less stereotypical form because their identities were wholly elemental. An example is one of his current necklaces, Dance of the Whirlwind Spirits, shown at right. It’s a tribute to the power of the Four Winds, emanating from the Four Sacred Directions to form a vortex of power at the center.
Then there are those that honor animal spirits in a particular manner, such as the Deer Dance, the Turtle Dance, or the Buffalo Dance, found throughout the Pueblo nations with some variation. At Hopi, they hold the Snake Dance, which was once opened to outsiders but I believe has since been closed (and properly so). At Zuni, they perform the Eagle Dance, and Eagle Dancers begin training at exceptionally young ages, even as toddlers. The Diné have a variety of specific dances, and an exceptionally skilled community of dancers across Navajoland. South of here, the Mescalero Apache are best known for their Apache Crown Dancers, who wear complex regalia with heavy headdresses that are the “crowns” to which their name refers. They carry wooden swords that they wield throughout the dances, which are performed to drum and complex songs and (at least among the Western Apache), a device known as a bull-roarer, which is whirled at high speed from a length of twine or hide to produce a powerful (and powerfully intimidating) sound. Here in this region, there are dancers known as the Matachines, who dress in a combination of traditional indigenous regalia and Roman Catholic iconography; the dance is a localized hybrid of Pueblo and Hispanic traditions that arose after colonial invasion, a way of pacifying the priests and nobles whose roots lay in Catholic Spain while still holding onto the indigenous traditions that informed more ancient dances. And throughout Indian Country, intertribal social dances such as gourd dances have become a popular opening feature of many events, although among some communities, gourd dances are restricted to members of specific clans or societies, such as warrior societies.
Then there are the ceremonial and sacred dances. Most of these remain unnamed for the public, and that is as it should be. They are closed to outsiders, and are danced for specific purposes within a given nation or culture. Some may be ceremonial in nature, honoring particular spirits, for example, or for healing, but would not be described as “sacred.” Others are expressly sacred, danced for Medicine or spiritual purposes that have neither meaning nor efficacy for those not of the blood. And then there are two such that have become widely known (and, sadly, now widely stolen, as well). Perhaps the most famous is the Sundance, practiced by the Oceti Sakowin (otherwise known as the Council Fires of the Great Sioux Nation, which includes the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota peoples), and by some other tribal nations in the same broad geographic region, such as the Apsáalooke (often known as Crow) and Northern Cheyenne peoples, among others. The form it takes varies, but usually involves advance preparation that includes prayer and fasting and a broad base of physical and spiritual support from relatives. The most extreme versions involve a piercing of the flesh, which carries sacrificial aspects, as well as what some aspects of Christian tradition might refer to as the “mortification of the flesh,” effectively offering one’s own body, in a sense, as an offering.
Sundance, along with other culturally important dances, were until relatively recently outlawed entirely by the U.S. Government, who feared that such dances were precursors to “Indian uprisings” and attempts to exercise sovereignty that might result in gaining back their land and their rights at the expense of the invading and occupying culture. One of the most powerful such dances that was outlawed in the Nineteenth Century was the Ghost Dance, a dance of prophecy led by Wovoka, a spiritual leader and prophet of the people known today as Northern Paiute. Thanks to the invaders’ wanton wholesale destruction of the buffalo, his people were decimated, living in circumstances of harsh privation, famine, and starvation, and the disease that accompanies all three. To Wovoka was given a vision that prescribed that the people should join together in a new and highly specific dance called the Ghost Dance, along with changes to their way of living life that were said to require a approach of universal love and peace and cooperation. If they did as instructed, Spirit said, they would be freed from the white man’s control and persecution, able to resume control of their lands and their lives and return to the old ways, free of disease and pain and death. The Ghost Dance spread across the Plains peoples, each adapting it to their own ways.
It was, of course, put down quickly and violently by the U.S. Army, an event of needless, heedless, monstrous slaughter. Among those who had adopted it were the Lakota, for whom it would become one piece of the larger rationalization of the U.S. Government and its army for its 1890 massacre of Native men, women, children, and elders at Wounded Knee.
It is against this backdrop that the contemporary practice of Native dance must be understood. As I said at the outset, dance is wholly a part of our cultures, inseparable, at least for many (most? all?) of our peoples. As was the case when government agents outlawed the drum, long hair, braids, traditional dress, traditional languages, all the other aspects of our very selves that made us who we were, outlawing dance stripped us, body and spirit, and stole a fundamental piece of our existence and identities. Given that history, it’s today impossible to understand the role dance plays in our cultures, including our arts — even those dances born out of pain and suffering far older than that which accompanied and flowed out of the arrival of the Europeans — without first comprehending that today dance is an act of resistance and existence, an overt expression of indigenous sovereignty and survival.
As I said above, Native dance is itself art. The music of voice and drum, the complicated steps, the ornamental regalia, the symbology of the dance itself . . . all combine to create their own full-fledged art form, comprising many constituent art forms. This is nowhere more true than of the regalia. The clothing runs a large gamut: dresses of silk, satin, velvet, muslin, cotton calico, and other fabrics, as well as buckskin and other hides; war shirts, ribbon shirts, and other shirts made of similar materials; loincloths, wraps, breeches, and leggings; and moccasins that range from the simplest of plain hides to those with high accordion-style legs to elaborately beaded moccasins bonded onto high-tech outsoles that permit those who dance the powwow circuit to spend long hours executing high-impact steps upon hard arena surfaces. Other accessories include shawls, which, for dance purposes, are often brilliantly colorful and accented with complex designs. Some of the most beautiful dance shawls I’ve seen are those made by artisans at Acoma Pueblo, which feature woven or painted patterns in the same flowing, geometric shapes of that Pueblo’s famed black-on-white pottery. The line drawings immediately above, by Frank Rain Leaf, depict a Taos Pueblo man and woman in their finest traditional dress, aspects of which may be found in the regalia used in traditional dancing.
The ornamentation of such regalia is often truly spectacular. Many powwow dancers create their own regalia, investing long hours in sewing, beadwork, and other creative tasks to produce a from of dress that has very special meaning for them personally. Accents include beadwork in an extraordinary array of styles, from the geometric designs popular here to the complex floral patterns indigenous to the Upper Midwest and Northern Plains. Jingle dresses feature, of course, jingles: These were originally beads and shells; then, once metal fabrication became more accessible, bell-like accents; and by the time colonial invasion and occupation were well under way, Natives had repurposed the lids of tobacco cans to this use. The top of the lid, which pulls back and peels off, naturally begins to curl; Native artisans coiled them more tightly into cone-like shapes, and attached them from the narrow end to traditional regalia. A jingle dress may have hundreds of such jingles attached, and the the word perfectly describes the sound they make as the dance moves. Wings evoked the image of the jingle dress, perhaps inadvertently, with the earrings shown at left: Entitled Rain Women, they represented female figures, spirit beings who dance to bring the rain. The tiny stamped circles that adorned the front of each earring looked to me for al the world like the jingles on a jingle dress.
Speaking of things that jingle, some regalia features actual bells. An old style involved little more than a metal shell with a clapper of sorts, but many contemporary dancers use what the rest of the world recognizes as sleigh bells, because of he clarity and volume of sound they produce. Such bells may be attached directly to clothing; often, particularly with certain types of male dancers, the bells will be strung on a thong that is wrapped around the leg just below the knee, so that they jingle with every step and movement.
Bone and antler are also used. For some peoples, antlers form part of the overall dress for specific types of dances (just as the buffalo’s horns are worn as part of the head and mane by a Buffalo Dancer). But dancers of many nations and traditions frequently use bone in their regalia, particularly a type of elongated bone bead called “hairpipe,” for its thin shape. Such beads are used to make chokers, wristbands, breastplates, and other ornamentation. Sometimes they are combined with shells, such as abalone, as in the choker shown at right. In other instances, the shells (such as out miigis shell) are strung from a shirt or dress in layered fringes of beads that may not precisely jingle, but do make a soft percussion-y sound when the dancer moves.
Many dancers also wear feathers in one form or another. Most have at least a single feather or plume, usually an eagle’s (although in theory, nearly any sort of feather could be used), attached to their hair at the back of the head. You can see an example of the eagle plume at the back of the dancer’s head in the painting at the very beginning of this post. At left is an example of a powwow hairpiece made with turkey feathers.
Some wear the feather(s) along with a roach (or wear a roach only). It’s a style of headdress that derives from men’s traditional hairstyles of nations of the Northeast, where the hair is often shorn into what is known now as a “Mohawk” or similar style, with the hair arising out of the middle of the scalp in a stiff, spiky pattern. In the old days, hair roaching was often used to denote warrior status, and the hair might by dyed crimson or other colors to signify that the wearer had engaged in acts of bravery and honor. Today, roach headdresses are made generally from stiff animal hair, such as porcupine, deer, elk, or moose, or from certain types of coarse feathers. Some dancers wear only a small patch-like roach atop he head; others choose long, flowing versions that resemble a slender, spiky warbonnet.
And speaking of warbonnets, you will see some dancers wearing them, particularly among military veterans marching with the color guard at a powwow’s Grand Entry, and among the “Golden Age” male dancers from those tribal nations of the Northern Plains for whom warbonnets are an indigenous style. These are not a part of ordinary regalia, and, when handled properly, their use is tightly controlled. Only a relative few tribes even use warbonnets as a part of their traditional dress, and they are a sacred privilege, earned through courage and service to the people. They are never given to outsiders to wear, and women also do not wear them (although, at least in some nations, it is the women elders who have the power to “de-bonnet” a man who has transgressed so badly that he forfeits his right to wear one). Some male elders who dance in their bonnets have earned the right to wear ones so substantial that they nearly trail along the ground.
Feathers are also carried, sometimes singly, but more often in the form of a fan. Such fans can, technically speaking, be produced of nearly any kind of feather, but for powwow dancing, the most popular are the honor fans made of eagle feathers. An example appears in the painting at the top of this post, featuring a Comanche woman dancer with a shawl over her arm and an honor fan in her hands. There are also peyote fans, made of the feathers of the Northern flicker, that are used in the rites of the Peyote Way, and which we have covered here before. And for some tribal traditions and dances, men carry fans, as well. Depending on the type of dance, some dancers may hold other items, such as the wooden swords mentioned above, used by the Apache Crown Dancers, and among certain Plains peoples, coup sticks.
Finally, feathers popularly appear in regalia in a couple of other forms. One is called a “bustle,” a large hoop-like attachment in the shape of a circle that does not quite close. Some male dancers wear them on the back at the waist; others wear a pair, one fastened at the shoulders and one fastened at the waist or hips. They may be relatively small, or very large and trailing feathers like a train on the ground. Today, many modern dancers create bustles using brightly-colored synthetic feathers, which give them a wider array of colors from which to choose, are more economical in terms of price, and prevent the possibility that eagle feathers might touch the ground. Then there are those forms of regalia that personify a particular spirit being, in which the feathers are part of that being’s identity. This occurs in symbolic form, of course, with some of the dancers who personify certain katsinam, but in places like Zuni, there are actual Eagle Dancers who dress as Eagle himself. Their regalia includes a heavy case mask in the form of an eagle’s head, complete with feathers and beak; their dress includes an elaborate pair of wings created from feathers fastened tightly together with straps underneath, through which the dancer places his arms. He is then able to extend his wings outward, his arms and hands fully concealed.
In the same vein, dancers who personify other animal spirits will often wear or otherwise incorporate a part of that animal in their regalia. Buffalo Dancers wear the head and curly mane of a buffalo over their own heads and shoulders, to honor the spirit of the great animal. At left is one of Jessie Marcus’s traditional micaceous mugs, the far lip of which rises into the form of the head and shoulders of a traditional Buffalo Dancer, complete with head, horns, and mane over his own head. [As an aside, we were privileged to see video footage of a Buffalo Dance from one of the other Pueblos, which was a stunningly beautiful 
event. However, we are confident that it was never meant to be recorded — such events are not performances, and part of showing proper respect is witnessing them in the moment, but not attempting to capture and commodify them in any way, and so I will not link to it here. I’ve written previously about proper etiquette and powwows and other such public events, which you can read here.] In instances where the dancer does not personify the animal spirit, but merely dances in its honor, he may carry an object that is adorned with parts of the animal. An example may be found in the instance I mentioned above of warriors who dance to honor their fallen horses: The warrior carves a “dance stick” out of wood in the shape of a horse, then paints it in traditional patterns, accents it with bits of his own horse’s mane, tail, and hooves, and carries it while he dances to honor the spirit of his late fellow warrior and friend. an example of such a horse dance stick, this one by Marlin Kills-in-Sight, is shown at right.
The dances themselve
s are as much an art as the dress the dancers wear. It is no easy feat to keep perfect time to the drum, and when a dance involves executing complex steps and often hand or arm motions on the honor beats, the degree of difficulty increases rapidly. For some of the women’s dances, such as the traditional and jingle dances, it is tradition for the woman to keep one foot in contact with the earth at all times. For the women’s traditional, a step dance, this is not so complicated, but for the jingle dance, one that is rooted in prayer and supplication and healing and joy, the energy that goes into the steps makes the on-foot-in-contact tradition a matter of great skill and practice.
This brings us to rootedness of another sort: the sources of some of these dances. The jingle dance, in particular, holds resonance for me, coming as it does from my own people (although I am equally sure that many of the other nations and cultures who engage in this dance have their own origin stories about how it came to be). In our tradition, there are a couple of versions, with only slight variation between them. In one, the central figures of the story were a grandfather and granddaughter; in the other a father and daughter. Within these two version lies one other variation, which we’ll get to in a moment. I’m going to use the former example, of the grandfather, for purposes of telling this story:
In a village of the people, a very, very long time ago, so the story goes, an old man lived with his small granddaughter. They loved each other dearly, and she was the center of his life. One day, she fell ill, and could not be healed. While she hovered near death, her grandfather, in desperation, went out to pray to the spirits to seek her healing. As he prayed, an answer came in the form of a vision: The spirits told him to make her a dress of a kind that had never been seen before. He was to sew it out of beautiful hide, and then he was to attach shells to it to make it jingle. When he was finished, he should dress the child in it and have her dance a specific dance, one that was as new as the dress. The spirits would hear the jingling, would know that it was the granddaughter of this devout man, and would heal her.
And so the old man set to work, sewing a beautiful dress for his granddaughter, attaching the shells that would make the jingling sound. When it was finished, he dressed the little girl in it, and helped her rise to dance. As she danced, the spirits heard her, and they healed her fully and completely. They then told the man and his granddaughter that she should teach the other girls and young women of the people how to make this dress and dance this dance, so that the people would leave well and in harmony, and so they did.
In the other major variation of the story, the entire village fell ill, including the grandfather. It was the little girl who was spared the illness, and who prayed for the spirits to heal her grandfather (or father) and her people, and it was the little girl to whom the vision was given. In this version of the story, she sewed the dress herself, attached the shells to make it jingle, and danced the dance for all of her people. The spirits heard, and were moved by her devotion, both to them and to her people, and healed the village. She then did as she was bid, and taught the other girls and young women how to fast for a year (free of sweets), to spend the year learning the dance and sewing the dress, and then dancing the dance. As I wrote once before of the jingle dance:
It was a dance of Medicine and healing, one given to the people by the spirits, and one of the prerequisites for it, in addition to a very specific, spiritually-prescribed traditional dress made by hand, was the act of fasting.
That’s not merely “dance.” It’s ceremony.
The latter version is the one to which I incline; it speaks with the same voice as so many of our peoples’ stories, one that focuses on the welfare of the entire community and the importance of ceremony and spiritual practice — and, as is so often the case, one that works through the open innocence of a child to effect change.
There is one final dance I want to address before we close, and it’s the one with which I opened: the hoop dance. This is a dance rooted in old traditions, but one that is today danced in a very contemporary form. To reiterate what I wrote above, and earlier:
Sometimes the most beautiful, most exciting traditions arise out of stories of pain and exile.
Dancing is no exception.
We dance for all sorts of reasons: celebratory, ceremonial, honorific, memorial. Sometimes it’s historical and very, very contemporary simultaneously.
So it is with the hoop dance.
It’s actually a tradition that is very old, but it’s undergone a revival over the last generation of so, one that has swept Indian Country.
I have no doubt that numerous traditions have origin stories claiming credit for it. In my own, it arises from the story of one of the spirit beings, outcast as a child. His great crime? Preferring the company — and the teaching — of the animals to that of his fellow spirit beings.
Reduced to a human level, I understand the impulse even now; I understood it at a visceral level as a child.
The child found his name changed to reflect his outcast status, and so he elected to live up to it, refusing to participate in the activities expected of him, going instead to live among and learn from his animal brothers. It was they who revealed to him the knowledge that life is a sacred hoop, cycle and circle alike, infinite, with neither beginning nor end.
Eventually, he sought ways to manifest and transmit this knowledge, and he settled on the notion of dancing. He fashioned a hoop of willow and began to work with it. He made another, and added it to his practice; and another; and then another. Soon, he had a collection of willow hoops, each exemplifying the very nature of existence, and he began to use them to tell the story (or, more accurately, these stories, plural), to pass on this wisdom from the animal world, through dancing.
He lived a solitary life, if one defines community as existing only in the company of one’s peers. The old stories are rife with incidents between him and his brothers, an endless hoop of tricksterism and practical jokes and angry responses. In this way, he seems to have played a role similar to that of the sacred clowns found in many other Native traditions, a being possessed of spiritual powers whose function is to tweak our humanity and deflate our egos when required.
In the process, he also gave our peoples a beautiful tradition, a dance known for its technical complexity, its dazzling spectacle, and its beautiful storytelling. In most traditions, hoop dancers are male, although today you will occasionally see young women enacting the old stories, as well. They wear colorful regalia, which includes a number of hoops that are incorporated directly into the dance itself. Beginners start out with one hoop; once they’ve mastered that (no easy task itself), they gradually add hoops one at a time until they have enough to perform a dance that tells the stories properly. I’ve seen hoop dancers using a dozen or more simultaneously, and I’ve seen reports of dancers who can use as many as 45 at once without a misstep or a single dropped hoop.
As always, it’s tradition, lesson, reminder, celebration, all rolled into one.
Wings paid tribute to the story, and the dance, with the ring above, entitled Hoop Dancing: a pair of sterling silver hoops melded together, then stamped on either edge with numerous tiny hoops.
Like the jingle dance, the story of the hoop dance is a story rooted in pain, but it similarly ends in healing and harmony. Its more modern story, that of its contemporary spread across Indian Country and its evolution into a spectacular display of athletic prowess and talent, is one that holds for our peoples as a whole: a story of adaptability, of a willingness to hold to the old ways and still change and grow — a story of our triumphant ability to survive and thrive.
It is the story, too, of our indigenous arts: art that is a dance of the spirits.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2016; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
