Native American Dance Steps

This well-researched book provides details of the varied steps Native American groups have used to express ideas — from skips, jumps, and hop steps, to an Indian form of the pas de bourrée.

This is a new release of the original 1931 edition.

Colloquially the term “powwow” refers to a meeting where important matters will be discussed. However, at the thousands of Native American intertribal dances that occur every year throughout the United States and Canada, a powwow means something else altogether. Sometimes lasting up to a week, these social gatherings are a sacred tradition central to Native American spirituality. Attendees dance, drum, sing, eat, re-establish family ties, and make new friends. In this compelling interdisciplinary work, Ann Axtmann examines powwows as practiced primarily along the Atlantic coastline, from New Jersey to New England. She offers an introduction to the many complexities of the tradition and explores the history of powwow performance, the variety of their setups, the dances themselves, and the phenomenon of “playing Indian.” Ultimately, Axtmann seeks to understand how the dancers express and embody power through their moving bodies and what the dances signify for the communities in which they are performed.

Tracing the development of tap dancing from ancient India to the Broadway stage in 1903, when the word "Tap" was first used in publicity to describe this new American style of dance, this text separates the cultural, societal and historical events that influenced the development of Tap dancing. Section One covers primary influences such as Irish step dancing, English clog dancing and African dancing. Section Two covers theatrical influences (early theatrical developments, "Daddy" Rice, the Virginia Minstrels) and Section Three covers various other influences (Native American, German and Shaker). Also included are accounts of the people present at tap's inception and how various styles of dance were mixed to create a new art form.

Even as contact with European cultures eroded indigenous lifestyles across North America, many Native American groups found ways to preserve the integrity of their communities through the arts, customs, languages, and religious traditions that animate Native American life. While their collective struggles against a common cause may create the semblance of a shared past, each Native American community has a unique heritage that reflects a singular history. The ancient cultural legacies that both distinguish and unite these diverse tribes are the subject of this engrossing volume.

Includes an access code for online materials.

This edition explores the history of musical contact, interaction, and exchange between American Indians and Euramericans, as documented in musical transcriptions, notations, and arrangements. The volume contributes to an understanding of American music that reflects our cultural reality, depicting reciprocal influences among Native Americans, scholars, composers, and educators, and illustrating consequences of those encounters for American musical life in general. Culled from a published record of over 8,000 songs, the edition contains 116 musical examples reproduced in facsimile. Included in the volume are the earliest attempts to represent tribal music in European notation, archetypal transcriptions in the scholarly literature of ethnomusicology, and recent contributions by contemporary scholars. Some of the notations shown here inspired composers in search of a distinctively American musical idiom to write works based on American Indian melodies. Others captured the imagination of American school children, whose concept of cultural and musical identity came to be linked with American Indians. Indigenous notations, the work of native scholars and educators, and recent compositions by native composers working in the classical vein also appear in this volume. As a compendium of historic materials, the edition illustrates the development of Euramerican attitudes and approaches to American Indian musics, the infusion of native musics into American musical culture, and native responses to and participation in the enterprise.

"A dynamic collection of twenty-four social songs and dances, flute songs and guided listening experiences, as well as instructions for making present day instruments. Representing the music of the Pueblo, Lakota, Kiowa, Nanticoke, Hidatsa, Haliwa-Saponi, Seneca and other peoples, [the book] includes in-depth cultural and historical background"--Back cover.