Native American Performance and Representation (review)

Reading Native American Performance and Representation prompts me to think about our dances at Nambe and dance and performance in broader contexts. As the Eight Northern Indian Pueblos guide states, the dances visitors see us doing at our pueblos are prayer in motion. Hence, applause after a dance is considered inappropriate. Visitors are asked to observe the dances with a quiet regard, "just as you would when attending services at a church, mosque or synagogue."¹

Growing up and dancing at Nambe Pueblo, I know what our dances are about and why we do them. I understood them to be sacred. This understanding comes from years of listening to our elders talk about our dances, but there was another dimension to their teachings. "Don't go tell your [non-Native] teachers" was said again and again. Gradually I came to understand why. Not only were we persecuted for doing our dances, but aspects of our ways were appropriated and used by outsiders, many times for material gain. In my studies of children's literature and textbooks, for example, I have found many examples of appropriation and misrepresentation of Native ways of being.

Within that context I often find myself challenged by work like that in Native American Performance and Representation for several reasons. Specifically, it raises two questions. The first is about the choices Native people make when they create a performance; the second is, whom are they creating it for?

The volume opens with the chapter by Daystar/Rosalie Jones. The chapter title is provocative: "Inventing Native Modern Dance: A Tough Trip through Paradise." It suggested Jones would provide a critical perspective on creating modern dance. She poses several questions: "What does dance and dance performance mean to the American Indian?" "What does it mean to dance traditional or to dance 'modern,' and how do these two seemingly contradictory forms coexist for the Native person?" (20). "Should we be doing such a thing" as Native modern dance (21)? Rather than directly answer one of these questions, she provides her own life story as a practitioner of Native modern dance, and in sharing that life story, she provides the answers. Choosing to take the "almost ceremonial story" (24) of the White Buffalo Calf Woman from print to interpretive dance performed by students she taught at Flandreau Indian School in 1970 tells us that, yes, she thinks we should be doing it. "The elders" (25) helped them, but she does not tell us if there were elders who did not want the White Buffalo Calf Woman story performed as interpretive dance. If we want to, we can all find elders who will endorse what we do, but is it in the best interests of the Nation itself? Jones says that this sort of work can reinforce tribal and personal identity. Perhaps so, but if that identity is based on interpretations of ceremony rather than ceremony itself, might that identity be skewed? As Jones notes, many young people, taken with performances that Jones was involved with, asked where they could go to learn to do these dances. For me, that raises concerns about identity. Does Native modern dance invite young Native men and women to perform rather than be indigenous?

Sarah Bryant-Bertail's chapter gets at the question of audience. She took her class of theater students to Tillicum, where "cultural identity seems to be packaged, bought, and sold" (53). There they learned that Native dances performed at Tillicum are combined with theatrics to "enhance the ethnic and cultural heritage of an exceptional people" (56). Being Native, performing Native dance, was not enough for tourists. The dances had to be reworked according to non-Native expectations. How much, I wonder, of that sort of reworking was done by indigenous people who interpret Native story and history for non-Native audiences? As Anne-Christine Hornborg shows in her chapter, "Owners of the Past: Readbacks or Tradition in Mi'kmaq Narratives," Native people can—and are—very attuned to interpretation. In...