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

Jacqueline Shea Murphy's recent book on Native American dance traditions within the modern context is one of the few academic publications that addresses American modern dance and its relationship to Native American traditions and history. The People Never Stopped Dancing is in three parts and focuses on how traditional Native American dance influenced the field of American modern dance as well as commentary on contemporary Aboriginal/Native American modern dancers and choreographers.

I found the book to be a bit unfocused, but also containing relevant and important factual information, including historical references to how Aboriginal peoples/Native Americans were mistreated due to genocidal events and government policies, such as outlawing of dance and religion, and the overarching theme of "cleansing" tribes of their histories, cultures, and aesthetic practices. The author attempts to address the above within the framework of twentieth-century modern dance, from the Ruth St. Dennis and Ted Shawn Indian-inspired creative works to contemporary Native American dancers and choreographers such as Rosalie Jones, Red Sky Theatre/Sandra Laronde, Alejandro Ronceria, and others.

The three main sections of the book include an initial section on the painful genocidal nineteenth-century policies and war on Indigenous peoples in both the United States and Canada that attempted to eradicate Indigenous languages, religion, and dance practices. The section is a bit disjointed in some aspects, but certainly the author is deserving of the fact that she recognizes the colonial period as destructive. Murphy mentions specific laws and identifies the racist rhetoric behind the doctrines that outlawed Native American culture. My critique of this section is that she does not acknowledge the diversity of Indigenous peoples, languages, religions, and dance/ music practices. Murphy paints broad brushstrokes, so that it appears that Aboriginal peoples/Native Americans were and are monolithic. It tends to maintain the idea that Native Americans can all be lumped together under one rubric, defined and understood by one perspective. This, as most experts on Indigenous history realize, is a common mistake. However, in the area of dance history, this is one of the few books that acknowledges the genocidal histories of the United States and Canada.

The second section of Murphy's book is on modern dance in the twentieth century and how Martha Graham, Ruth St. Dennis, Ted Shawn, and other non-Indigenous dancers/choreographers acknowledged the aesthetics behind Indigenous dance forms and how they were influenced by them. Ruth St. Dennis and Ted Shawn in particular choreographed work based directly on Native American dance forms, always performing the pieces themselves, or by their all-white dancers dressed as "Indians." The irony that the governments of the United States and Canada were doing everything they could to eradicate Indigenous communities, while white artists were enamored of the "tribal" aesthetics and spirit found in Indigenous communities, is not adequately addressed here.

The third section, which should be the largest of the book and the main focus, is on Aboriginal/Indigenous choreographers in the United States and Canada. The author mentions in her introduction the amount of fieldwork she conducted, the interviews with Native American choreographers such as Rosalie Jones, and her attendance at various events that highlighted Aboriginal and/or Native American contemporary performing arts. This section of the book is less than seventy pages, whereas the first section is over one hundred pages (including the introduction) and the second section is almost eighty-five pages. The author, in her last page, gives a running list of contemporary Aboriginal/Native American choreographers, with a suggestion that readers can do online research if they want more information. I would suggest that this be the first part of the book, and that it be greatly expanded and placed in the context of the material in her first two sections.

Overall, Murphy addresses the issue(s) of how white or Anglo American dancers have "played Indian" on stage, the detrimental and racist government policies that labeled anything non-Christian and non-white as...