Dancing for Healing and Wellness: The Grass Dance, the Jingle Dance

 
Jingle dress dancers circle the Grand Casino Hinckley powwow grounds during the grand entry at the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe Grand Celebration Powwow, June 2019. Photo: Evan Frost/MPR News

Jingle dress dancers circle the Grand Casino Hinckley powwow grounds during the grand entry at the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe Grand Celebration Powwow, June 2019. Photo: Evan Frost/MPR News

Indian Country, like most of the globe, finds itself vulnerable to the spread of Covid-19, with its own unique challenges in the face of this crisis (The coronavirus is exacerbating vulnerabilities). However, long before colonizing Europeans brought waves of disease that decimated Indigenous Nations (see Chapter 2 in the Sickness section), Native peoples had thousands of years of healing traditions upon which to draw in times of sickness – traditions that continue to evolve over time, but upon which they still draw.

Native dances performed at Powwows have their place in the larger practice of wellness, healing and well-being, among them, the grass dance and the jingle dance. Currently, in response to the pandemic spread of coronavirus, videos of Indigenous women jingle dancers performing the dance on their front porches, is going viral (Jingle dress dancers, dancing in the face of COVID-19).

Karen Pheasant-Neganigwane in her Jingle dress at the 2007 National Powwow in Washington, DC. The National Powwow was organized and sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of the American Indian. Photo: Katherine Fogden, SI NMAI

Karen Pheasant-Neganigwane in her Jingle dress at the 2007 National Powwow in Washington, DC. The National Powwow was organized and sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of the American Indian. Photo: Katherine Fogden, SI NMAI

For more about the history and practice of these dances take a listen to this interview with Anishninaabe author and educator Karen Pheasant-Neganigwane. Karen, of Manitoulin Island of the Wikwemikong First Nations, is an expert on Powwow, and Jingle Dress Dance: