We Are Dancing for You: Native Feminisms and the Revitalization of Women's Coming-of-Age Ceremonies by Cutcha Risling Baldy (review)

Indigenous scholars and activists are frequently confronted with the narrative of the vanishing Indian, a story that has been told by anthropologists, linguists, and archeologists whose main goal was to document what they believed was a disappearing and dying culture. Through processes of assimilation, eradication, and multiple federal Indian policies, American Indian communities have lost part of our culture, traditions, and belief systems. Many communities were forced to adopt white, heteropatriarchal structures of hierarchy and gendered roles in communities. Indigenous scholars and activists currently face the challenge of how to revitalize and reclaim these histories that have been erased by Western anthropological narratives of our culture, histories that are often dictated and recorded through a non-Indigenous lens.

In her first book, Cutcha Risling Baldy (Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk) uses the revitalization of Hoopa Valley Tribe women's coming-of-age ceremonies as a point of intervention into anthropological narratives of California Indians. Risling Baldy argues that "anthropologists, archeologists, linguists, and other scholars became interested in documenting Indian life to preserve what they perceived as a 'dying culture'" (5). As resistance to this cultural narrative, Risling Baldy argues that Indigenous people can learn from and pull from those archives in ways that (non-Indigenous) scholars often cannot: while scholars document what they see from an empirical perspective and an objective point of view, Indigenous people can look at these same archives through a different lens, pulling out histories and stories left by our ancestors. Risling Baldy uses Mishuana Goeman's framing of (re) within parentheses, where Goeman (Tonawanda Band of Seneca) states that she uses "the parentheses in (re)mapping deliberately to avoid the pitfalls of recovery of a seeming return of the past to the present" (Goeman 2013, 4, cited in Risling Baldy, 7). Risling Baldy extends this use of (re) to argue that she is looking at "how revitalization ceremony is a (re)writing, (re)righting, and (re)riteing of Native feminisms" (7). She also argues that the revitalization of women's coming-of-age ceremonies is a form of tribally specific decolonial praxis.

Risling Baldy begins by addressing the adoption of misogynistic views within her own community, and also in many other Indigenous communities. She recalls a conversation with her Auntie in which her Auntie said, "I think our cultures have become imbalanced in a way that looks, walks, and quacks like misogyny, but it is something that is learned" (29). Risling Baldy analyzes narratives around ceremony, women's regalia, and the justifications for why women are supposed to behave in specific ways. For example, women were required to wear skirts during their ceremonies so as not to be distracting to the men. This expectation pulls from a heteropatriarchal mode of thinking that has been imposed onto Indigenous communities from the settler state's gender constructions.

Similarly, white male anthropologists documenting ceremonies often recorded these dances and ceremonies from a white settler colonial lens. Risling Baldy criticizes the use of salvage ethnography to reexamine the accounts of the ceremony, elders' stories, and other sources to put together different pieces to revitalize the ceremony. For example, she describes Alfred Kroeber's Handbook of the Indians of California (1976), stating that Kroeber "felt particular discomfort in writing about women's ceremonies and women's cultural practice" (83). She argues that "his scholarship is deeply ingrained with a Western patriarchal belief that menstruation is dirty and polluting" (83). However, it was impossible for Kroeber to avoid the ceremonies altogether because of the vital role they played in the community. Kroeber and other anthropologists' inability to recognize the significance of coming-of-age ceremonies caused an erasure of the roles of women and cultural practices within communities that honored and respected women. Whereas anthropologists recorded ceremonies and their observations from a Western perspective, applying an Indigenous lens...