Native American dance

Extent of dance forms

Many themes, typically the celebrations of life transitions, developed in the Americas during millennia of residence, migration, and exchange. These were most prominent in the marginal cultures of western North America (particularly in what is now California, U.S.), Venezuela, and Tierra del Fuego in the southernmost reaches of South America. Mortuary rites were prominent in the northland and the deserts. War and hunt dances have had different degrees of prominence, their greatest development being among the hunters in the Great Plains of North America (see Plains Indian). So-called animal dances varied according to the local fauna, a tiger mime belonging to tropical peoples and a bear cult reaching across the northern part of North America and into Siberia.

Religious magic, or shamanism, practiced by societies or individual priests, is somewhat similar to some practices among such Siberian peoples as the Evenk and the Chukchi. Variously practiced and used for healing the sick and communication with the spirit world, shamanism extends to southeastern Brazil but is most potent and most trance-oriented among the Arctic peoples. From Mexico, and probably earlier from Peru, agricultural rites fanned out into the southeastern woodlands and the Southwest. More recent than the other rites, agricultural dance forms show enrichment from Iberian rituals.

Patterns of participation

A distinction between performer and spectator has long existed in American Indian dance, though it is not the artificial separation that characterizes much of Western stage dancing. This latter condition has occurred only with the performance, largely in North America, of dances for tourists and during indigenous participation in folk dance festivals or regional powwow gatherings.

Spirit impersonations, including maskings and noise, were used in widely separated areas to frighten nondancers. Specific instances of such practice included the puberty rites of the Yámana and Ona of Tierra del Fuego; among the Kwakiutl Kusiut of British Columbia in Canada, similar ceremonies were held in dance houses with a definite performing area. Except for a few specialized rites like the eagle and False Face dances, the change of roles among spectators, dancers, and musicians is characteristic of the sacred ceremonies of the Iroquois longhouses of the Northeast Indians of North America. Outsiders are welcomed, especially into such dances for the Creator as the great feather and drum dances; and all, from the aged to mothers with babies in arms, are expected to join in.

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Among the Pueblos of the U.S. Southwest, the dancers remain separate because they require special rehearsals and ritual blessings. When they emerge from their sanctuaries, or kivas, onto the dancing plaza, they dance to invoke rain, health, and other blessings for the people from the supernatural spirits. After the ceremony, they often join in less-formal social dances that unite all participants and observers. Though these dances have religious connotations, as among the Iroquois, they are secular, and anyone may enter or drop out at will.

Socially determined roles in dance

Visitors may not perceive the patterns of social organization reflected in the dances. It is clear that men or women alone begin some dances and the other sex may then join in and that men monopolize some dances, women others. Less clear are the relations, especially complex in the longhouse dances of the Iroquois, between the moieties, the complementary divisions of the tribe based either on kinship or on ceremonial function. In all Iroquois dances, specific traditions decree the nature and degree of male and female participation and whether they dance simultaneously but separately or in pairs or other combinations. The leader of the dance and song and his helper, however, must be of different moieties, whether they lead from the floor or from the sidelines. When women enter a dance line, singly or with another, they must pair with a moiety opposite, or “cousin.”

The Iroquois moiety pattern is crossed by another comprising various public or secret societies whose members are bound together for life, often joining the society during illness or other catastrophe. These societies perform such dances as the False Face curative rites, the female mortuary dances known as ohgiwe, and the dances of the sexually integrated Bear and Buffalo medicine societies. Elsewhere, religious dance societies were based on age grades, as in the male warrior societies of the northern Plains.

Some of these societies crossed local and even tribal boundaries, as in the extremely complex organization of Mexico’s concheros, whose intertribal hierarchy runs from a capitán general de la conquista de Tenochtitlán through various local commanders and military ranks with specific duties to the attendant devil, sorcerers, and mythological figures. The concheros’ claim to an Aztec heritage is given considerable credence despite some Spanish mixture.

In the organization of, and participation in, dance according to priestly or social status, the earlier Aztec dances were images of the completely theocratic government. A far cry from the democratic customs of the Iroquois, the circumscribed ceremonial roles of Aztec actor-dancers reflected the social structure comprising priests, nobles and warriors, commoners, serfs, and slaves. The priestly and noble-warrior classes took active roles in the many festivals of the Aztec calendar, and the priests trained noble youths for the priesthood or in dancing and singing. Warrior youths performed ceremonial combat, and the warrior orders of the eagle and of the ocelot fought captive slaves during certain festivals. Both commoners and serfs constituted the audiences, the former sometimes doing serpent dances with the nobility, the latter sometimes ceremonially attacked and routed by the priests. There were age roles and gender roles as well, but the slaves, captives of sacred war with other city-states or purchased in the marketplace, as victims, had a passive role in the ceremonial activities.

Opposites played dramatically against one another in these rites: nobles and commoners, old and young, male and female. The warrior orders symbolized the clash of the sky and light with the earth and darkness, and, as aggressors against poorly armed captives, they enacted the drama of sacrificer and victim. It was the priests and the passive slaves, however, who played the supreme moment of the ritual. The circle of social gradations was closed as the highest and the lowest ranks performed together the most crucial act of the Aztec dance-drama, human sacrifice.