Black Hills Powwow Dance Styles | Visit Rapid City

The reasons for our powwows, you know, and our wachipi, is what we say in our language, is to bring people together, to make people feel good, carry on the traditions, to bring good feeling and life, to be part of other experiences with other fellow human beings. Just a disclaimer, when I talk about the history and origin, you'll hear something different from every person you ask when you talk, because everyone is taught something different. There are generalities when it comes to the origin and history of dances. The drum represents the heartbeat of our people. They say when the baby is in the mother's womb, the first sound, obviously, that it hears constantly is the mother's heartbeat. When the children come out, when they hear that drumbeat, they just have this innate ability to want to dance or want to, you know, be drawn to that sound. The women traditional dance, that's representative of our grandmothers, our mothers, our aunts, our life givers, and the beautiful integrity. It's a graceful, methodical, they connect to the ground, the grandmother earth, and they find their spot that they want to dance, and they stay there. There's also other tribes that the dancers move across the arena floor, traditional dancers, so there's a wide range of styles, but I think more from what I've learned and my experience has been with more of the northern women's traditional, buckskin or cloth, and it just depends on their style. But nonetheless, the women's traditional style is really graceful, and, you know, it brings us to our traditional values and virtues. So the male style of traditional dance, just similar to the women's traditional, represent, you know, what our wecha, wechasha, the wachee wechasha is what we say for male dancers. They represent really what it means to be a provider, a protector, a lawyer. The integrity and the honor of being a traditional dancer is you, when you dance, your steps are a certain way, maybe two steps on one foot, two steps on the other, and you copy what you do on one foot, you do on the left foot, so two steps on one side, two steps on the other as you're going around the floor, and then you do that because that represents the balance of what it is to try to walk in balance and share in balance. And then eventually, dancers once again started to break the mold and have different styles, and it all represents the individuality and the custom nature of each dancer and their inspiration and what they want to share with the people. So the grass dance style, there's different origins, but nonetheless, the connection to the grass dancers is because long ago, when there was 30 to 60 million bison, the buffalo grass was tall, as tall as humans or even taller, just waving in the prairie. And so a lot of times, there would be some representatives that would go in front of the camp, and before we put up tipis and maybe set camp as we're following the bison, and they would flatten the grass. And so that's why you see the style, usually the old original way was with yarn on the regalia to show that to look like the grass, and then eventually cloth also was newer style. But the matatako dance that the grass dancers dance, it's like they're moving in the wind, just like the buffalo grass or the grass really in the prairies. The jingle dress dance is often referred to as the medicine dress, but what I was taught is this dance came through a dream when there was sickness amongst the Anishinaabe, Ojibwe people. In a dream, the women were wearing this dress with this sound of these ornaments, or in essence, today, they're cones. And the cones that are on this dress make the sound when they're dancing. It's just a beautiful sound. Because they call it a medicine dress, historically, it was the practical purpose of the prayers and the ceremony of the jingle dress to help bring healing and help teach to be able to tell the stories of healing and the importance of coming together for these ceremonies. The women's fancy shawl dance, from what I was told and taught, that originally amongst the Plains tribes especially, the majority of females would dance the traditional style, that's with the buckskin and the fringe. They say that the fancy shawl was born when a grandmother really felt the inspiration to dance a different style. So she grabbed that shawl, wrapped it around her arm, and she wrapped it around herself. And she asked the drum to sing the faster song, kind of forming a new style. And as she was dancing around, she moved different than the other ladies. It broke the mold of the traditional style, but eventually, now it's so intricate and the designs and the style is more flashy and contemporary, so it's evolved quite a bit and it's one of the most popular styles. The men's fancy feather, some folks say that it was a dance that derived from around the Buffalo Bill, Cody, the performances that Buffalo Bill would put on, that was a style that was born, that kind of more athletic, flashy style because of the times in the late 1800s, early 1900s. And so that's where I was told from some of the traditional knowledge keepers that that's where the dance would derive from. But I've also heard where traditionally they say that dance comes from the southern tribes. But it's just basically the bottom line is it's a, you know, provides a lot of entertainment and excitement and most exciting dance probably style in the Palo Alto Arena because of the energy that it brings and allows the dancers to share their style and tell their stories of their dance. It is important to learn about these traditional intricacies of what you're watching and you're seeing, so you don't think everything's the same. So that when you have that, you'll have a better appreciation for what you're watching. As mankind, as human beings, we do better when we know better.