Show THE IDEA BEHIND INDIAN DANCING By KARL YOUNG Dancing does not mean to an Indian the same things that it means to a white To an Indian it is vastly more it is a way of a a a symbol of tribal thought and To him it is a means of establishing contact his The Hopi snake dancer strokes anger out of a coiled rattlesnake with a sprinkles sacred meal on and gives him a message to take back to their mutual who lives in the earth telling this god that the Indian remembers the time when he and all the animals were brothers back in their original happy home beneath the surface of the earth and that he respects and honors the his the Deer the Buffalo and the Antelope dressed up to represent these various hearken back to the time when the animals understood man's language and his needs and willingly sacrificed themselves to the hunter for But whether the Indian is thinking of his physical needs of food or of more subtle and less concrete problems such as the demands of character he courts the good will of his animal he shows his esteem for the eagle who is brave and consequently of much help to an earth-bound human by no means are all Indian dances concerned with In- dance a prayer for the germination of the corn at planting and another for rain to keep crops There are a great variety of dances ranging from the most pious and solemn to the merely social or even frankly humorous All of this applies in our day especially to the Pueblo Indians of the Southwest whose lives have had much the same pattern since the arrival of the white man as they had before lie The culture patterns for Plains Indians were broken up when white settlers took their range away from them and confined them to making them dependents on the U. S. But the Indians of the Southwest who had lived in villages and grown their food instead of killing it in the continued to exist in much the same Their tribal traditions of the dance survived because there had been no great break in their way of The teachings of the white missionaries were assimilated and reverenced along with Indian the Indians dance their ancient ceremonial ritual of the Corn Dance In front of a Catholic shrine which they erect for the occasion in the dance They paint sacred heathen serpent motifs on vessels containing holy water blessed by a Catholic Priest in a Christian They use prayer sticks in worshipping their old rosaries in praying to the new |