“Indian Ballerinas Toe Up”: Maria Tallchief and Making Ballet “American” in the Tribal Termination Era

Onstage Maria looks as regal and exotic as a Russian princess; offstage, she is as American as wampum and apple pie.

(“American as Wampum,” Time, February 26, 1951)

On October 11, 1954, American ballerina Maria Tallchief made the cover of Newsweek magazine accompanied by a headline that read: “The Ballet’s Tallchief: Native Dancer.” In the foreground of the image, the dancer appears in regal profile, gaze inclined slightly upward, neck gracefully elongated. Crowned with a silver tiara, Tallchief’s jet-black hair is pulled back in an elegant chignon, accented by delicate diamond drop earrings. All of these elements bring her radiant face into focus, with its high, prominent cheekbones, luminous light-olive skin, and full lips. As if the headline and stately portrayal of the dancer were not enough to convey the ballerina’s poise and stature in the world of dance, in a blurry background are what appear to be Tallchief’s legs and feet. Shown from the mid-thigh down, their elongated muscles sheathed in light pink tights, they hold a fourth position en relevé, legs and feet slightly apart, the dancer balanced securely on satin pointe shoes. Objects of both envy and desire, with their sinewy tone, oval-shaped knees, and dainty ankles, these shapely legs and sculptural feet clearly have been earned through a lifetime of classical ballet training (Photo 1).¹

Newsweek’s “crowning” of Tallchief, a dancer of Anglo-European and indigenous heritage who had spent her early childhood on an Osage reservation in Fairfax, Oklahoma, as America’s most heralded prima ballerina stood as a paramount accomplishment by any measure. Perhaps Tallchief best captured the magnitude of the honor herself in her autobiography when she wrote: “[T]o have my picture run on the cover of a national news magazine with a profile inside—space that was usually reserved for national politicians and world figures—was remarkable” (1997, 197). Tallchief took great pleasure in the article “dubbing me American’s Native Dancer, the finest American-born ballerina the twentieth century had ever produced, saying I was equal of Margot Fonteyn in England and Galina Ulanova in the Soviet Union” (1997, 197). Seen in the context of Tallchief’s meteoric rise in the world of professional ballet during the 1940s and 1950s, Newsweek’s laudatory treatment of the dancer was wholly consistent with her achievements thus far. Within a decade, Tallchief had catapulted from a member of the corps de ballet in Sergei Denham’s Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, for which she was hired in 1942 at the age of seventeen, to prima ballerina with the New York City Ballet by the late 1940s.

Photo 1.

Maria Tallchief on the cover of Newsweek. From Newsweek, October 11, 1954 © 1954 IBT Media. All rights reserved.

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Tallchief’s elevation, both in the ballet world and in the eyes of the public, was not happenstance. As I will argue here, narrative and iconographic portrayals of Tallchief’s rise by popular magazines in the early 1950s advanced an account of ballet’s Americanization during the postwar period that placed the dancer front and center stage. What is more, when seen in the contemporaneous contexts both of the formation of ballet in the U.S. and debates over Native American citizenship during the Tribal Termination Era, these portrayals of Tallchief take on greater significance—as signifiers on several registers of the meanings of “assimilation” in mid-century America.

My argument has two parts. First I investigate how photographs of Tallchief gracing the covers of mainstream magazines between 1952 and 1954, including Holiday, Newsweek, and Dance Magazine, fed a story told in words and in images of ballet’s cultural assimilation, or, to borrow the parlance of the time, of the successful “transplantation” of what most Americans considered a foreign dance form into “native” cultural soil.^2...