The most distinctive tribal dance customs originated in response to animistic religious beliefs—i.e., that all objects and living things have living souls. The customs changed with prehistoric and historic migrations, with intertribal contact, and, since European contact, with upheavals in the way of life and thought. Although many dances became extinct, some survived European influences; others are amazing hybrids or new creations of the period after European colonization.

To give an accurate understanding of the role of dance in traditional Indian society, it is necessary to examine both dances that became extinct as European influences weakened tribal customs and dances that have survived, with or without European modification.

Eskimo (Inuit)

In some places the traditional shamanistic exhibitions and masked animal rites persist alongside Western-style square dances. The most prominent ritual figure in the former was the angakok, the shaman who communed with spirits by the rhythm of a single-headed drum and by ecstatic dancing, usually inside an igloo.

Formerly, Eskimos held elaborate outdoor ceremonies for whale catches and similar events. In Alaska, preliminaries included the rhythmic mime of a successful whale catch, with a woman in the role of the whale. A sprinkling of ashes on the ice drove away evil spirits, and there were incantations and songs when leaving shore, when sighting the whale, and before throwing the spear, all of them songs that the “great kashak (priest)” sang when he created the whale. As the whale was towed in, Fox Islands men and boys danced, naked except for wooden masks that reached to their shoulders. At Cape Prince of Wales on the Bering Strait, the whaler’s wife came to meet the boat in ceremonial dress, dancing and singing, and boys and girls performed gesture dances on the beach. Then, inside a circle of large whale ribs, the whaler’s wife and children performed a dance of rejoicing. In what is now Nunavut on the west coast of Hudson Bay in Canada, communal feasting, dancing, singing, games, and shamanistic performances took place within a circle of bones or one of stones. The men’s motions consisted of vigorous and angular arm jerking and jumping, the women’s of curving gestures and swaying with the torso and arms, in a seated or standing posture.

Northeast and Southeast Indians

In the area from the Atlantic coast to about the Mississippi River and across the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River, dream, medicine, plant, war, calumet (ceremonial peace pipe), and animal dances predominate. Among the Northeast Indians, mortuary and hunting rites are dominant; among Southeast Indians, corn, bean, and squash rites are most frequent. The recurrent dance pattern is a counterclockwise circling by large groups, with a running step or stomp to antiphonal singing (alternation of two groups or of a leader and a group). Medicine rites are often exclusively for female or male members of a society, but dances for hunting or agriculture admit men, women, and children. During the winter and in war or hunting ceremonies, men are the organizers and leaders; during the summer and in agricultural ceremonies, women are featured performers.

The Iroquois continue to maintain their ancient ceremonies and a large repertory of dances and songs, including rites for crises of life and for animals and plants. They also have acquired steps and dances from other tribes, especially those of formations in two straight lines. The Iroquois bear dance combines former hunting associations both with a clan-origin legend and with a curative society. When the bear spirit is displeased, he causes neurotic spasms in a person and must be appeased in a ritual at midwinter or in private summer ceremonies. The focal personnel consist of the patient and paired conductors, dance leaders, and singers from opposite moieties. Ceremonial songs and ritual offerings are followed by group dancing in which visitors and society members participate.

Although the Cherokee of the Smoky Mountains in North Carolina and Tennessee speak an Iroquoian language and have animal dances, they emphasize corn dance ceremonies. The Creek, Yuchi, Seminole, and other tribes of the southeastern United States greatly emphasize the summer green corn harvest ceremony, or Busk. Before the removal of many of those tribes to reservations in Oklahoma, they acquired a few dances outside their own traditions. They carried the stomp circling to its utmost development by winding the line of dancers into a spiral or even into four spirals at the four corners of the dance ground.

Among tribes of the large Algonquian family, the stomp dances performed until a few decades ago by the Penobscot of Maine and the Narraganset of Rhode Island have experienced a strong revival. Algonquian tribes around the Great Lakes share many of the medicine and animal dance ceremonies known to the Iroquois, and the more southerly groups hold corn dances. The Ojibwa (Chippewa) in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the Menominee and Ho-Chunk of Wisconsin have maintained a hunting dance and a special wild-rice ceremonial danced in September when this crop is harvested. These groups show the influence of the adjoining Great Plains tribes in some of the circle dances, men’s war dances, and buffalo dances.

The Great Plains

In the area extending from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from Texas and Oklahoma into Canada, the dream dance ritual becomes part of a visionary cult associated with boys’ puberty and with a votive Sun Dance ceremony. During the one to four days’ duration of the Sun Dance, usually held during the summer solstice, the participants abstain from food and drink. Dancers paint their bodies in symbolic colours and carry an eagle-wing bone whistle in their mouths. To the beating of a large drum and the singing of special songs, they circle in procession and salute the sun with lamentation. They dance in place facing the sun and continue until falling unconscious or achieving a vision.

The calumet (peace pipe) and peace dance originated in the tobacco rite of such northern Plains tribes as the Crow, Dakota, and other Siouan-speaking groups. Its most elaborate development, however, was in the central Plains ritual of the Pawnee and the neighbouring Omaha, Iowa, Ponca, and Osage. The war dance is organized into male war societies. Women, in turn, have a variety of societies emphasizing fertility and also perform a scalp dance. Animals are associated as tutelaries, or guardian spirits, in the vision, war, and fertility cults. The most spectacular hunting ceremonies, such as the bull dance of the Mandans, developed from the economic significance of the buffalo herds. Buffalo rites merged with sun, war, and fertility ceremonies and spread to tribes in other areas. The individual warrior, his prowess, and dancing skill were extolled as women progressed clockwise in a closed circle, with a sideward shuffle or bounce unlike the running step of the woodlands Indians.

The Northwest Coast

Indian tribes along the Pacific coasts of Washington and British Columbia developed masked medicine dances and elaborate fishing ceremonies, such as that performed for a bountiful salmon catch. Their two most striking types of ceremonies are the potlatch, a feast and a dance for display and distribution of the host’s wealth, and the midwinter initiation ceremony. Lasting several months in a special dance house, this rite initiates young men into a ceremonial society and includes many highly individual masked enactments of totemic spirits.

The Great Basin, the Plateau, and California

Great Basin Indians, such as the Havasupai of the Grand Canyon and the related Yumans, developed agricultural dances. The Yuman Mojave (Mohave) stress cremation processions and ceremonies, but, like the Navajo, they also have curative and animal dances with long song cycles. In this area the vision quest ceremony is at its peak, and in southern California the Diegueño and Luiseño aided the vision by means of a narcotic, Datura. Some tribes, such as the Paiute and the Coast Salish, individually danced themselves into trances. In this area arose the Ghost Dance, a religious movement whose rituals included a hypnotic circle dance that spread to the Great Plains in the 19th century. The ceremonies are frequently addressed to the spirits of the dead. There are also many two-line dances, especially among the Ute and southern Paiute. The innumerable small tribes of California shared some of the preoccupations with vision, cure, and death, as well as the seed and root gathering economy of the tribes adjoining them on the east. They specialized in elaborate masked ceremonies for the initiation of boys and less elaborate circle dances for girls’ puberty rites. The more northerly groups also stressed exhibition of dexterity and costuming.

The Southwest

The semiarid desert country from the Rio Grande west to the Mohave Desert of southern California and into northern Mexico and the southern Rocky Mountains is subdivided into three tribal areas: the Pueblo farmers along the Upper Rio Grande, the Zuni of New Mexico, and the Hopi of northern Arizona; the Navajo nomads, now turned shepherds; and the desert tribes that include agriculturists such as the Pima, Tohono O’odham, Yaqui, and former nomads, such as the Apache. The pueblo dwellers of New Mexico and Arizona perform medicine rites and many winter animal and fertility dances. But the cycle of summer corn ceremonies and continuous prayers for rain form the core of their ceremonialism. The dances, organized by a male priesthood, are mostly well-practiced collective performances. Summer and winter clan or moiety groupings dominate ceremonies in alternation rather than through interaction as among the Iroquois. The most characteristic step is a stamp followed by a foot lift in a stationary line. This predominates especially in the very sacred dances held in the kivas, or sanctuaries. Semisacred dances in the village plaza add other steps and formations such as double lines, circles, and interweavings.

Aztec round dance
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The most spectacular public dances of the Pueblos are the corn dances, or tablita dances, named for the women’s tablet crowns with cloud symbols. They recur at various times during the spring and summer, with most pageantry after Easter and on the pueblo’s saint’s day. The people pay homage to the patron saint in an early morning mass and a procession to the plaza carrying the saint’s image, followed in the evening by a recessional to the church. By tradition each performance of the corn dance includes a slow and a fast dance. In the slow dance for entering the plaza, a chorus of 7 to 70 older men shuffles across the plaza, singing and invoking the rain gods. A banner bearer leads a double file of 12 to 200 dancers, with a pair of men always ahead of a pair of women. For 10 minutes they trot counterclockwise around the plaza. Following a pause, the singers form an arc, and the dancers line up face-to-face in two or four long files. They cross over, circle, and interweave in elaborate formations. Clowns meander in and out among the lines. The entire set is repeated at the other end of the plaza, and the group retires. The two moieties make alternate appearances. On the last appearance they combine, with the two choruses singing simultaneously.

One of the most famous ceremonies is the snake-antelope dance of the Hopi in Arizona, a rite in which snakes are released in the four directions to seek rain. It includes swaying dancing to rattles and guttural chant, circling of the plaza with snakes, and ceremonial sprinkling of corn meal on the principal dancers by women of the snake clan. Masked dancers are a striking feature of Pueblo ceremonialism. The kachina dancers are sacred and represent the rain gods. Clowns with various names represent an ancient ritual heritage; in their black-and-white striped disguise of paint, they are eerie and also comical. Pueblo masking influenced neighbouring tribal dances such as the curative yeibichai of the Navajo. Curative ceremonies, with long song cycles, are emphasized by the Navajo, along with circular social dances, recalling those of the Great Plains tribes. The Apache have developed a spectacular masked dance, called the gahan, to obtain cures but chiefly to celebrate a girl’s coming of age. They also have rites for vision and divination, sometimes with the aid of a vision-inducing communal drinking ceremony. The male dance style is strong, angular, even acrobatic, while the women’s style is subdued.