We Are Dancing for You

“I am here. You will never be alone. We are dancing for you.” So begins Cutcha Risling Baldy’s deeply personal account of the revitalization of the women’s coming-of-age ceremony for the Hoopa Valley Tribe. At the end of the twentieth century, the tribe’s Flower Dance had not been fully practiced for decades. The women of the tribe, recognizing the critical importance of the tradition, undertook its revitalization using the memories of elders and medicine women and details found in museum archives, anthropological records, and oral histories.

Deeply rooted in Indigenous knowledge, Risling Baldy brings us the voices of people transformed by cultural revitalization, including the accounts of young women who have participated in the Flower Dance. Using a framework of Native feminisms, she locates this revival within a broad context of decolonizing praxis and considers how this renaissance of women’s coming-of-age ceremonies confounds ethnographic depictions of Native women; challenges anthropological theories about menstruation, gender, and coming-of-age; and addresses gender inequality and gender violence within Native communities.

Cutcha Risling Baldy is an assistant professor of Native American Studies at Humboldt State University. This is her first book.Thrush Coll :

Coll Thrush is professor of history at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of two books: Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (University of Washington Press, 2007), and Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (Yale, 2016). He is also the coeditor of Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture and History (University of Nebraska Press, 2011). He serves as a series editor for the University of Washington Press's Indigenous Confluences series.Coté Charlotte :

Charlotte Coté is a professor in American Indian Studies at the University of Washington. She is the author of Spirits of Our Whaling Ancestors: Revitalizing Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth Traditions (University of Washington Press, 2010).

Cutcha Risling Baldy is assistant professor of Native American studies at Humboldt University and a member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe.

"This text is critical for scholars of Native studies, American Indian studies, anthropology, sociology, psychology, gender studies, history, and American studies, as well as other fields... In centering a gendered ceremonial practice, We Are Dancing for You documents that cultural resurgence, decolonizing praxis, and Native feminisms provide a space for academics to recognize the daily and ceremonial roles of Indigenous women in indigenizing space and place in their homelands and homewaters. Beyond the academy, Risling Baldy references the positive outcomes for ceremonial participants and reminds readers of the critical and utilitarian need to re-indigenize Indigenous life."

"Her book is well-written, well-argued, and a joy to read for scholars and general audiences alike!"

"Risling Baldy distinctly positions the significance of coming-of-age ceremonies through arduous historical research, sophisticated contributions to Native feminisms, and Indigenous narrative interweavings."

Olivia Chilcote:

"Risling Baldy skillfully argues that a Native feminist analytic reveals that Native feminisms were not introduced by Western culture, but have always been contained in oral narratives and are fundamental aspects of Native culture and society."

"Cutcha Risling Baldy’s research on the Hupa flower dance is important feminist and Indigenous scholarship as she is not only approaching the subject as a key insider, but she is also exploring what it means in the larger continuum of Hupa epistemologies and ontologies. While this could easily and beautifully linger in the ethnographic realm of scholarship or in the more common California Indian Studies sphere of examining the devastating consequences of colonization and genocide in California, Ms. Baldy instead magnificently pushes the analysis further by developing a Hupa feminist methodology. She models the political possibilities in reviving the dances that are geared especially toward woman. This tribally specific work and her analysis reaches beyond Northern California and into other Indigenous groups who are working to decolonize structures by regaining healthy gendered elements of tribal life and activist work. These insights are key to our understandings of cultural production, gender, and revitalization and vital to understanding solutions for California Indian communities."—Mishauna Goeman, (Tonawanda Band of Seneca), author of Mark My Words: Native Women (Re)mapping Our Nations

"Part meticulous research, part spiritual journey, and fully in the heart of cultural re-invention, We Are Dancing for You does work that cherishes, educates, celebrates, and enriches our future generations with the knowledge that yes, our bodies are the archive, and the archive is alive and singing."—Deborah A. Miranda, (Ohlone Costanoan Esselen Nation / Chumash), author of Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

"I am in awe . . . Risling Baldy’s interventions into the field are many and absolutely necessary. We Are Dancing for You is located in a place, in the lives of a community where the voices of individual women are heard, as is the author’s. [This book] locates its authority in community knowledge and language. It pushes back against the outside, primarily white male ethnographic professional as authority."—Dian Million (Tanana), author of Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights

"A truly significant contribution to the field exploring Indigenous approaches to menstruation and the meaning of womanhood. That it is grounded in the particular culture of the author makes it all the more valuable and unique."—Kim Anderson, author of Life Stages and Native Women: Memory, Teachings, and Story Medicine