American Indian dance

American Indian dance: Encyclopedia - Indian dance

Please remove this notice after the article has been expanded. Details are on this talk page or at Wikipedia:Requests for expansion. Indian dance usually refers to traditional dance from India, such as Bharatanatyam, Kathakali, Kathak , Kuchipudi, Odissi, Mohiniattam or Manipuri. Indian dance is based on the treatise Natyashasthra by the sage Bharatha, which explains the Indian art of acting. Acting or natya is a br ...

American Indian dance: Encyclopedia - Circle dance Circle dance, is the most common name for a style of dance usually done in a circle without partners to musical accompaniment. It became popular in the alternative, feminist and new age aspects of western culture in the 1980s and 1990s and continues today. The circle is probably the oldest known dance formation. It is found in the dances of many cultures, including ancient Greece (chorea), African, Eastern European, Irish Celtic, Catalan (sardana), South American and North American Indian. Circle dance mixes traditional folk dances, mainly from European or Near-Eastern sources, with recently choreographed ...

Including:

Circle dance - Sacred Circle Dance

American Indian dance: Alternative Health Dictionary on Medicine dance

medicine dance: A ritual dance performed by some North American Indian peoples. Its purposes include eliminating disease, inducing rainfall, and getting supernatural help.

American Indian dance: : Spiritual Retreats - A retreat for Enlightenment

Presentation of the Spiritual Reatreats in The Golden City.

American Indian dance: Encyclopedia - Blackfoot mythology

The Blackfoot are a tribe of Native Americans who currently live in Montana. They lived west of the Great Lakes and lived in Montana and Alberta and participated in Plains Indian culture. Blackfoot mythology - Cosmology. In Blackfoot mythology there is also a supernatural world, dominated above the natural world by the sun, and below by the beaver. The sun is sometimes personified by the part human Napi, or Old Man. The area in which the Blackfoot lived was created by Old Man exploring the area on his way n ...

Including:

Blackfoot mythology - Cosmology

Blackfoot mythology - Misc

Blackfoot mythology - The Buffalo Dance

Blackfoot mythology - Source

American Indian dance: Encyclopedia II - Marvin Opler - Publications

Marvin Opler was a prolific writer and some of his publications are listed below. Marvin Opler - On Anthropology. With R. Linton, Acculturation in Seven American Indian Tribes, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1940. Opler, Marvin K. The Integration of the Sun Dance in Ute Religion. American Anthropologist October-December, 1941 Vol.43(4):551-572. Women's Social Status and the Forms of Marriage. American Journal of Sociology. Spring, 1943. See also:

Marvin Opler, Marvin Opler - Biography, Marvin Opler - Publications, Marvin Opler - On Anthropology, Marvin Opler - On Social Psychiatry, Marvin Opler - On Japanese Internment, Marvin Opler - Other contributions, Marvin Opler - Papers and Correspondence

American Indian dance: Encyclopedia II - Into the West miniseries - Episode 6 - Ghost Dance

Ten years have passed since the end of Episode 5. Robert and Clara Wheeler return home, disillusioned by the school they have been hired to run, and Clara begins to teach Native American children on the reservation. Loved by the Buffalo (Joseph M. Marshall III) believes he has found the foretold prophet when a mysterious Indian named Wovoka (Jonathan Joss) inspires his people with the Ghost Dance and a vision of their restored land at a Paiute reservation near Yerington, Nevada. But the ritual stirs up more fear among those who wish to conta ...

This dance was similar to both older Paiute traditions and an earlier regional movement, the Plateau Prophet Dance, but it addressed very present conditions of deprivation resulting from white incursions into tribal territories. It spread to California, Oregon, and Idaho but, with the death of Wodziwob and the nonfulfillment of his prophecies, died out within a few years. The Shoshone and Bannock of Fort Hall, Idaho, however, continued to perform the Ghost Dance at least intermittently up to 1890.

The Ghost Dance of 1890: Wovoka (ca. 1856-1932), a Paiute Native American prophet, inaugurated the Ghost Dance of 1890 on the basis of a vision he had received during a total eclipse of the sun. His message was in direct continuity with the 1870 dance: there was to be an immanent renewal of the world in which dead Native Americans would be resurrected and the living would no longer be subject to sickness and old age, game animals would be restored to their former abundance, and the old way of life would once more flourish. Euro-Americans, by this time firmly in control, would be eliminated by supernatural means, such as a flood or earthquake. It is uncertain whether Wovoka announced a specific date for these events, but many expected them in the spring of 1891.

Wovoka's message also contained ethical admonitions (e. g. , members of different tribes should live in peace with each other; they should cooperate with, not war against, the whites). In anticipation of the great event and to speed its arrival, Wovoka instructed his followers to perform circle dances periodically. They did so in large numbers, and (especially among Plains tribes) dancers often fell into trances, subsequently reporting that they had visited the spirit world and spoken with dead relatives, who were living a life like the one that had flourished before the coming of the whites. The 1890 dance spread mainly eastward along the length of the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains. In some tribes (e. g. , Paiute, Cheyenne, Shoshone, Pawnee) acceptance was almost unanimous; in others (like the Sioux) only segments of the population became believers. No Pueblo (except at Taos) or Navajo accepted it, the latter because of a culturally conditioned aversion to ghosts. As news of the Paiute prophet Wovoka began to spread, tribes sent delegations to the Walker Lake Reservation in western Nevada to see him. They returned with versions of his teachings that were sometimes shaped by the particular needs of their tribe.

Among the Pawnee, the dance provided the basis for an important cultural renewal, for the visions of the dancers made possible the revival of old ceremonial activities that had fallen into disuse because knowledge of their correct performance had been lost. The Sioux, who had a number of current grievances against the government (e. g. , loss of reservation lands, cuts in rations), altered Wovoka's message in the direction of greater hostility toward the whites. Delegates like Short Bull and Kicking Bear advocated the use of "ghost shirts" (special garments that were supposed to make the wearer invulnerable to bullets) and spoke of the possibility of armed conflict with the government soldiers.

During 1890, newspapers around the country carried often sensational stories about the "messiah craze" (Wovoka was often called the "Indian messiah") and the possibility of renewed warfare with the Sioux. Violence did erupt in December: during an attempt to arrest him, Chief Sitting Bull was shot to death, and Chief Big Foot and almost three hundred of his band were massacred by the cavalry at Wounded Knee. These events were more the result of government blunders than of a Sioux outbreak. Following the violence among the Sioux and the failure of the expected transformations the next spring, the popularity of the dance began to fade. However, it did not die out altogether.

Wovoka remained active, but shifted his message in the direction of ethical admonitions. As late as 1896 some Kiowa were still dancing, and one of the early Northern Cheyenne delegates, Porcupine, led a brief revival of the dance in 1900. The movement continued elsewhere in a more substantive way. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Fred Robinson, an Assiniboin who had been instructed in the Ghost Dance by Kicking Bear and had corresponded with Wovoka, brought the dance to a small community of Sioux living in Saskatchewan. Combined with a traditional Medicine Feast, apocalyptic elements disappeared and the themes of ethical admonition and community solidarity predominated.

Among the Wind River Shoshone (Wyoming), the Ghost Dance apparently combined with an earlier ceremony (the Father Dance) of thanksgiving to God for food. As a result, the annual renewal of nature took on a cosmic dimension: shamans reported dreams in which they saw the dead assembled in heaven waiting to return to earth at some unspecified time in the future. The people on earth anticipated this event and performed a dance thought to imitate that of the dead. In both these places the Ghost Dance continued to be performed into the 1950s.

In the 1970s the dance was revived by the activist American Indian Movement. Even among persons and groups who no longer practice it, knowledge of the Ghost Dance has not died out and lessons are still derived from it. Thus ca. 1970 the Sioux medicine man Lame Deer reinterpreted an old Ghost Dance song about straightening arrows and killing and butchering buffalo to mean that individuals must live upright lives in order to help bring about a new earth.

American Indian dance: New Age Spirituality Dictionary on Ghost Dance

Ghost Dance

A new religious movement among Native Americans of the western United States.

The Ghost Dance had two distinct phases, both of which originated in the visions of a Paiute shaman living in western Nevada.

The Ghost Dance of 1870: Wodziwob (d. ca. 1872), the prophet of the 1870 dance, proclaimed that the world would soon be destroyed, then renewed; the dead would be brought back to life and game animals restored. He instructed his followers to dance a nocturnal circle dance.