When Art Is Medicine – The New York Times

MINNEAPOLIS — From our first contact with Europeans to the present, Indigenous people have careened from one public health crisis to another. Our healing process and our historical memory of these moments should not end with vaccinations. Traditions of song and dance help restore the balance that is drained by bodily sickness and deliver spiritual sustenance to those who have lost loved ones. Art, in other words, allows us to survive.

During the 19th century, settlers appropriated our lands, water and resources, rendering our communities susceptible to smallpox. Indigenous people, over time, developed herd immunity. We also began taking advantage of vaccination when it became available with the Indian Vaccination Act of 1832, enacted primarily to protect new settlers in our midst.

When influenza hit in 1918, my people were only beginning to recover from a low point in our population. We resided in remote, rural communities of the Great Lakes, but, as in years past, that did not save us. Under the reservation system, thousands of children were sent away from home to government boarding schools, where influenza spread. This made our experience with the pandemic one we have never forgotten.

During that global pandemic, a new healing tradition emerged among Ojibwe women. If you have been to a powwow — a multifaceted “gathering of nations” — in recent years, you have seen it performed. Glittering and full of camaraderie, powwows are an Indigenous space for male drummers to sing, while everyone from children to seniors dance their style. Aspects of the powwow have grown more commercial, but the Jingle Dress Dance exists as a deeply spiritual part of these celebrations.

Ojibwe stories say the Jingle Dress Dance arose when a young girl grew ill and appeared to be near death. Her father dreamed of a new dress and dance that were imbued with an unusual power to heal. The healing dresses were quickly made and embellished with tinkling metal cones, then given to four women at a ceremonial dance. Hearing the sounds, the girl began to feel stronger. By the end of the night she was dancing, too. This young pandemic survivor helped organize the first Jingle Dress Dance Society. Versions of this story are told from central Minnesota to northern Ontario.

My grandmother, who entered her teenage years in 1918, lived on the Red Lake Ojibwe Reservation in northern Minnesota, and remained a Jingle Dress dancer for the rest of her life. She also attended a government boarding school, but that did not deter her from making her own Jingle Dresses. Today, my daughter, in addition to studying Art and Ojibwe language at the University of Minnesota, practices the Jingle Dress Dance.

Jingle Dress dancing holds a spiritual power for Indian people because of its association with healing. In the Ojibwe world, spiritual power moves through air and sounds hold significance. Rows of metal cones, “ziibaaska’iganan” in the Ojibwe language, dangle from the garment and produce a pleasant rattle as they bounce against one another. When many women dance together in unison, the effect is amplified, becoming a healing reverberation. Observers sometimes describe it as the sound of rainfall, though as an Ojibwe from the north, I hear it as the sound of ice.

Women dance in patterns, not in a straight line, to confuse the disease. Healers in the early 20th century, who could be men or women, were valued for their extensive knowledge of plants. Music and medicine coexist in a symbiotic partnership. Because song and dance heal us, art is as necessary as medicine in the worst of times.

The creation of the Jingle Dress Dance a century ago coincided with a new round of suppression of Indian religion. The Dance Order, condemning many forms of ritualistic dance on reservations, arrived from Washington in 1921. The commissioner of Indian Affairs at the time, Charles Burke, wrote the following letter to Indian agents across the United States:

“The dance, however, under most primitive and pagan conditions is apt to be harmful, and when found to be so among the Indians we should control it by education processes as far as possible, but if necessary, by punitive measures when its degrading tendencies persist.”

My own Red Lake Nation, governed by hereditary chiefs, circumvented the order by calling our powwow a Fourth of July celebration and planted American flags during the dayslong gathering. Women like my grandmother continued to dance.

The Jingle Dress Dance remained a regional tradition for decades until the 1980s, when it became wildly popular and spread among many tribal nations on powwow circuits across North America. The dance has become a symbol of Indigenous women’s empowerment. Jingle Dress dancers were at Standing Rock, and dancers in red dresses now call attention to the plague of missing and murdered Indigenous women.

In recent weeks, with the pandemic expanding into the Navajo Nation, virtual powwows have sprung up in Indian Country. Dancers have been filming themselves, alone and in full regalia. Countless Jingle Dress dancers have answered the call.

Today, Ojibwe people number more than 200,000, across many small nations divided between the United States and Canada. We all remember in stories and dance a young girl who survived a global pandemic. Her survival gives us hope.

Brenda J. Child is Northrop Professor of American Studies & American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota and the author of “Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community.”

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