Marie St. Claire is on a mission to make her Pops' dreams come true. She also just wants to reinvent herself with some odd adventures that while growing up; she never experienced. Marie will discover that her Pops never told her everything and this discovery leads her to places and people that are dark and sinister. She also finds herself entangled with her heart. Every beat pounding a resounding note that it never played before. Only one man could sing the song and only one town could hold her tight in its grip; while she wrestled the demons that tried to steal her Pops dreams.

Describes an encounter in the desert when the animals came to a caravan campfire and danced with a child because fear was absent.

During the past thirty years, Native American dance has emerged as a visible force on concert stages throughout North America. In this first major study of contemporary Native American dance, Jacqueline Shea Murphy shows how these performances are at once diverse and connected by common influences. Demonstrating the complex relationship between Native and modern dance choreography, Shea Murphy delves first into U.S. and Canadian federal policies toward Native performance from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, revealing the ways in which government sought to curtail authentic ceremonial dancing while actually encouraging staged spectacles, such as those in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows. She then engages the innovative work of Ted Shawn, Lester Horton, and Martha Graham, highlighting the influence of Native American dance on modern dance in the twentieth century. Shea Murphy moves on to discuss contemporary concert dance initiatives, including Canada’s Aboriginal Dance Program and the American Indian Dance Theatre. Illustrating how Native dance enacts, rather than represents, cultural connections to land, ancestors, and animals, as well as spiritual and political concerns, Shea Murphy challenges stereotypes about American Indian dance and offers new ways of recognizing the agency of bodies on stage. Jacqueline Shea Murphy is associate professor of dance studies at the University of California, Riverside, and coeditor of Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance.

Reproduction of the original: The Indians of the Painted Desert Region by George Wharton James