| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Clyde Ellis. A Dancing People: Powwow Culture on the Southern Plains. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2003. Pp. viii, 232. $29.95.
This important—although sometimes problematic—book fills several gaps in the historiography of the Southern Plains powwow. Those gaps are more related to the wider social, cultural, and political contexts in which the dancing Indians of the Southern Plains found themselves in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries than with the powwow itself; as Clyde Ellis notes, the book is not about "dance styles and clothing" (p. 10). But it must be said that if the reader does not already know what the choreography, attire, and protocol of the Omaha, Straight, and Fancy dances (and their songs and singers) are, or what a crow belt, dragger, or bustle is, all of which are discussed but not described in the text, much of this discussion will go right over one's scalplock.	1
The powwow "culture" that is addressed here concerns the values expressed through participation in powwows—solidarity with family, community, tribe, and others Indian and non-Indian; pursuit and maintenance of status and prestige (and political power)—and the relationship with the supernatural expressed through song (and dance). Although Ellis calls his approach "chronological" (p. 10), it would perhaps be better called nonlinear, as topical threads often skip across several chapters, sometimes going backwards in time, and sometimes going across geography to invoke Northern Plains examples.	. . .

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