The People Have Never Stopped Dancing: Native American Modern Dance Histories (review)

Jacqueline Shea Murphy takes the title of her examination of Native American modern dance histories from Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Almanac of the Dead and quotes Silko in the epigraph to the introduction, "Dance as Document": "Throughout the Americas, from Chile to Canada, the people have never stopped dancing; as the living dance, they are joined again with all our ancestors before them, who cry out, who demand justice, and who call the people to take back the Americas!" (1). Murphy chooses an apt quotation to describe the political implications of dance for Indigenous peoples in her quest to explore the relationships "between Native American dance and the history and development of modern dance in America" (4). In a well-researched and documented investigation, the author engages with Native dance, always placing her analysis in the contexts of Native sovereignty, land, community, culture, history, politics, economics, spirituality, colonization, and Christianity. Her approach avoids the objectification of Natives and instead focuses on a "dance studies model, with its attention to corporeality and the energies and agencies engaged by bodies moving, within particular frames and contexts, in time and space" (8), allowing her to see Native American dance as a "form of knowledge and history" (9), a document of sorts. Murphy acknowledges her position as a non-Native scholar who presents herself as an expert on Native American dance and realizes that she must address her relation to the subject with integrity, which she does by sharing her research with the Native dancers and choreographers before publication of her book.

The first part of the book, "Restrictions, Regulations, Resiliencies," contains three chapters, and the first, "Have They a Right? Nineteenth-Century Indian Dance Practices and Federal Policy," discusses U.S. and Canadian governmental policies that restricted Native dancing from the 1880s through 1951. In the second chapter, "Theatricalizing Dancing and Policing Authenticity," Murphy shows how the governments contained Native agency by allowing stage representations of Indians in shows like Buffalo Bill's Wild West, in which audiences could see Indians as exciting but safe. Murphy includes François Delsarte's ideas about the body's correspondences between inner emotion and outward gesture, the "real" and "natural," ideas grounded in Christian thought: "as Delsarte promoted it, bodily movement expressed the godlike universal 'truth' of inner selves" (53–54). On the one hand, the staged production created "authentic" Indians for the public's consumption, and on the other hand, the Native performers had control over their own bodies in the arena. Native dancers and the Delsartian theory of Christianized ideals contributed to a "modern dance rhetoric that also saw dance as accessing a natural" (80).

The final chapter of part 1, "Antidance Rhetoric and American Indian Arts in the 1920s," deals with the continued federal efforts to curtail Native American dancing, the Native American dancers' response to the restrictions, and non-Native artists and intellectuals' protests. Murphy researches hundreds of letters and documents in the U.S. National Archives that illustrate how American Indian voices express different worldviews of religion: "These responses indicate conceptions of dance as integral both to religious practices and to land and water rights and link attempts to curtail dancing with desire for Indian land and resources" (82–83). Federal rhetoric labeled Indian dance as "wasteful" and "excessive"; non-Native supporters of Indian rights argued for Native American dance as "art" and "amusement" (83). Neither the federal officials nor the non-Native artists see Native American dance as a fundamental part of religious practice.

The second part of the book, "Twentieth-Century Modern Dance," begins with the chapter "Authentic Themes: Modern Dancers and American Indians in the 1920s and 1930s," that analyzes U.S. choreographers' attraction to Native American dance in the context of federal Indian policies of the 1920s and 1930s—for example, the American Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1935. American Indian dance, like American Indian...