BY C E C I L E R . G ANT E AUME C
Yup’ik dancers at the Camai Dance Festival in 1998.
onsistent across time and cultures is the use of the body to communicate and express – to tell stories, participate in the cycles of nature, mourn, pray and celebrate. Throughout the Americas, music and dance have always been an essential part of the spiritual, cultural and social lives of Native peoples. The ancient Maya maize god was a god of dance. And, to this day, unique forms of ritual, ceremonial
and social dancing maintain a vital place in contemporary community life. Everywhere dance is found in Native America, it is accompanied by distinctive Native musical styles. Rich music and dance traditions create deep ties that bind American Indian communities to all living things – to the earth, to the spiritual world and to each other. Music and dance also bind communities to the past when people
have deep ancestral claims, as they often do, to their dances. Even where songs and dances are borrowed from neighboring groups, as they sometimes are, they play a central role in people’s lives. And so too do ritual dances that combine Christian and indigenous know- ledge. Indigenous ceremonial dances are dynamic events that allow Native peoples to maintain old ways and introduce new ones while expressing and celebrating their strongly felt tribal, village, clan, soci- ety and individual identities. Often the time of a performance, direction of a dance, number of
dance phrases, musical instruments, words of songs and ceremonial dress are highly symbolic and are tied to a community’s cosmology and most deeply held beliefs. For well over 50 years in the United States and Canada – and for centuries in Latin America – church and “civilization” regulations discouraged and even outlawed many indigenous dances. Deemed dangerous, offensive and prohibited in the late 19th
century, the Ghost Dance and Sun Dance are perhaps the best known of these ceremonies. But many other traditional American Indian ways involving dance were discouraged or disallowed by Indian Agents and missionaries in Native communities across the Americas. Deeming such ways an impediment to conversion and assimilation, Canada, for example, also prohibited Native societies from performing their ceremonies. Most notable was the potlatch that, on the Northwest Coast, involved gift giving and impressive oratory, as well as dramatic dances. Not until the second half of the 20th
tions fully reversed. Today, in the second decade of the 21st
many Native communities continue to preserve their traditions in- volving dance. Some of these traditions had gone underground for decades. Others, owing to particular historical contingencies, have only recently been revived by tribal members. And still others contin- ued unperturbed throughout the 20th
century. Today these social, ceremonial and spiritual dances, involving
whole communities, are considered essential not only in affirming Native cultural autonomy, but, more importantly, in maintaining spiritual, physical and emotional well-being. The harmony of body and mind comes about in continuous movement set to the rhythm of turtle-shell, gourd and deer-hoof rattles; conch shell trumpets; raw-
century were such prohibi- century,
SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 33
SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 33
PHOTO COURTESY OF JAMES BARKER
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