On January 7, 2012, Ute Indians performed a snow dance at the request of Vail Ski Resort. Snowfall was significantly down for the year, putting a dent in the usual $1.3 billion annual net revenue.Footnote 1 In response, the public relations department contacted a Ute Tribe member, Eddie Box Jr., who is the son of the first Vail snow dancer. During Vail’s first season, in 1962, Pete Seibert, a co-founder of the resort, had asked Eddie Box Sr. to perform a snow dance. In that year, as in 2012, the resort faced an opening season with little snow, a potentially disastrous start to an expensive endeavor. Box Sr. informed the resort that the Utes did not have a snow dance. Instead, he offered to perform a rain dance and hoped for freezing temperatures. The ski resort accepted this compromise, and Box danced. Snow fell, and the Vail Resort declared that the opening season was saved.
In 2012, Box Jr. fulfilled a similar request when fifteen Ute Indians prayed and danced at the mountain base, including Junior Miss Southern Ute Isabelle Howe, Miss Southern Ute Brianna GoodTracks-Alires, and Little Miss Southern Ute Ylana Howe. As snow fell on the crowd of skiers and dancers, Box Jr. acknowledged that the resort had asked the Utes to bring moisture to the area. For the dances to be successful, he instructed the crowd that “all of us here need to be in the frame of mind so that what we see here continues today, because it not only helps here, but it helps Mother Earth.”Footnote 2 The ceremony concluded with a Round Dance, which Box described as a friendship dance. He invited observers to dance. Non-Indigenous skiers bundled in ski coats draped their arms over the shoulders of Utes dressed in traditional regalia.Footnote 3 Then, linked together, non-Indigenous skiers and Utes danced in traditional Ute territory, sidestepping in a circle.Footnote 4 Twenty-five inches of snow fell in the three weeks following the snow dance, leading one newspaper to proclaim: “it worked!”Footnote 5
Skiers and dispossessed Utes danced together in what Box declared was an expression of friendship but which reporters described as a snow dance, a magical ritual performed with a singular purpose—to increase the snowfall so that skiers could continue to enjoy the sport. News reports repeated its effectiveness: the Utes danced, and snow fell. The image of American Indians praying for snow and dressed in full regalia dotted Vail Resort press releases, helping to market Vail as a portal to the Old West, one that is immersed in nature’s bounty and far from the cares of modern life. The incongruity between the people dressed in full regalia and skiers dressed in North Face jackets supported the ski resort’s claim to authenticity, or a space created by “genuine affect” and existing outside capitalistic markets, even though ski resorts are firmly located within these markets.Footnote 6
Snow dances and the related rain dances are the products of a dynamic relationship between white-owned businesses and American Indian performers in the arid American West, and they have produced racialized ideas of the “sacred”—specifically, an authentic experience that connects settler-colonists to the natural world, facilitated through American Indian spiritual practices. Ironically, in the case of rain and snow dances, this connection is often made to increase the profitability of businesses that exploit the natural world. The settler-colonial notion of the sacred exists alongside and is entangled with Indigenous ritual practice, entrepreneurship, and self-determination.
Snow dances became a feature of ski resorts in the 1960s and are the byproduct of early twentieth-century tourism to the American Southwest and water-based economies in the West, such as farming and skiing. Southwest tourism and the related markets helped create rain dance commodities: rituals that could be replicated regardless of the people performing them or the places in which they were performed. In particular, these tourist markets facilitated the universalization of the Hopi Snake Dance, a ritual that was highlighted on early twentieth-century rail tours to the American Southwest. The related media reporting and academic scholarship about the Snake Dance from 1881 to 1940 helped to form the notion that all Indians dance for rain, which led to more white businesses hiring Indians to perform these rituals. While the rain and snow dances grew out of settler-colonial spiritual tourism, the performances are not merely exploitative of American Indian rituals. Indians who participate in the snow dances are engaging in a century-long practice of producing rituals for white consumption to benefit the community as a whole, both by adding to their income and by educating white Americans about their tribe.Footnote 7
The dances underscore the complexities of ethnic-religious identity formation in the American West, a landscape rich in the founding myths of the frontier, featuring the rogue cowboy and the noble savage, locked in battle. The myth of Manifest Destiny narrates a story of progress—white settlers overcame American Indians to bring civilization to the land—and suggests stable, atomized identities of white settlers and colonized Indians. In actuality, however, the development of a regional identity rested on the entanglement of the identities of Indians and settler-colonists.Footnote 8 The performances arose from the economic needs of settler-colonists and shifted power toward Native peoples, who, in the imaginary of settler-colonists, had the power to increase moisture. Religious spectacle, early twentieth-century anthropological theories of magic, and the “communicative agency” of Native peoples are intertwined in the snow dances, creating contested regional identities based on conflicting interpretations of religious performance.Footnote 9
The snow and rain dances could be understood through the history of Indian performances for non-Native audiences, such as Wild West shows, Fourth of July celebrations, and intertribal powwows. The related literature highlights how Native performers negotiated power in order to assert expressive and performative agency, earn money, and express religious agency even as these performances shape non-Indian perceptions of Native religious practice.Footnote 10 However, American Indian snow and rain dances performed for predominately white audiences are neither fully like the Wild West shows, as the rituals are intended to solve a business problem, nor entirely a powwow, as the rain and snow dances are initiated by white businesses and performed outside of what Kathleen Buddle has called an “Indigenous public sphere.”Footnote 11 Instead, these performances happen within white corporate spaces that are in the business of selling ephemeral experiences of the American West. The history of rain and snow dances exposes the entanglement of American Indian agency, religious appropriation, and old anthropological theories. The formation of snow dances also demonstrates the creation of a modern-day “sacred,” one produced by settler-colonial interests and marketed around ideas of what predominately white businesses deem to be “authentic.”
While snow dance performances might evoke questions about tradition and the authenticity of modern American Indian dances, I will not explore those here. The ideas of “authenticity” and “tradition” are rooted in a colonial history that locks oppressed peoples and cultures into a set past, one that implicitly labels those who maintain pre-contact practices as “savage” and those who adopt aspects of modern life as “inauthentic.” As the anthropologist James Clifford has argued, a more productive way of analyzing shifts in culture is through articulation theory, which foregrounds the ongoing political act of forming and reforming identities, “productive processes of consensus, exclusion, alliance, and antagonism that are inherent in the transformative life of all societies.”Footnote 12 Gregory Johnson has argued that the language of “invention” is troublesome because it ossifies American Indian religious practice into an unchanging past and can have deleterious implications for Indigenous legal cases.Footnote 13 Furthermore, the notion that Native peoples cannot modernize their ritual practices hinges on colonial narratives of conquest, which were supported in early scientific literature.Footnote 14 Scholarship that attends to how identities are articulated through remembered pasts reframes narratives of loss toward capturing a living culture, without looking away from the horrors of colonization. When I consider “authenticity,” it is from the perspective of white businesses using images of Indians in order to promote experiences anchored in the imaginary of the West—evoking exoticism, access to unspoiled nature, and unworldly, spiritual experiences—cloaking the capitalistic endeavor of tourism in promises of the “real.”
Snow dances are born out of the Anthropocene climate crisis to address the critical impact of climate change on Western snow economies. The American West has experienced a 15–30 percent decline in snowpack in the past century, shortening the ski season by over a month and putting other water-based economies in peril, not to mention day-to-day life in the West. When settler-colonists call on Indigenous peoples to perform rain and snow dances, they are reenacting spiritual colonialism and aiming to bypass the environmental and religious logics of the settler-colonialism that created the current climate crisis. The settler-colonial act of calling on American Indians to bring moisture is itself a ritual practice, one supported by early anthropological theories, tourism, and the tenuousness of water economies in the arid American West. In response, some Indigenous dancers engage in strategic essentialism in order to reach new audiences.Footnote 15 By taking these performances seriously, we can see a cross section of interlacing rituals emerging from each other. These interlacing rituals were born out of necessity and function to simultaneously support and challenge colonial power structures.
The Hopi Snake Dance and Rainmaking
In 1962, Eddie Box Sr. created a snow dance out of a rain dance performed in freezing temperatures. When, then, did white Americans seek out American Indians to perform rain dances? The Vail snow dance developed out of the universalization of the Hopi Snake Dance, a ceremony anchored in the land and stories of northern Arizona. Through a mixture of tourism, anthropological theorizing, and media reporting about the dance, non-Indigenous Americans came to believe that all Indigenous peoples dance to control the rain. The Snake Dance became caught up in American industrialism, where, much like a commodity, it could be duplicated and reproduced to solve one of America’s most vexing problems—the lack of control of the weather. Through the notions of capitalistic replication, the Snake Dance became transformed from American Southwest artifact to universal ritual, one that could be performed anywhere and by anyone. The underlying assumptions that emerged regarding the Snake Dance included that the notions: that the dance was performed in order to bring rain, rather than to mark the changing seasons or to express gratitude; that it was responsible for bringing rain, sometimes to the peril of white residents; and that it could be transferred to any part of the country and replicated by anyone.
The Snake Dance occurs around Arizona’s annual monsoons and is accompanied by nine days of ceremonial preparation. The dance reflects the Hopi Tribe’s deep connection to their ancestral homeland and, as such, Hopi religious life is oriented toward expressing gratitude and living in balance with the land. The Hopi maintain a delicate balance between their arid homeland and an agricultural existence. The annual monsoons are therefore central to Hopi ceremonial and practical life, two strands of life in the desert that cannot be easily untangled. Rather than adopting a magical understanding to bring the rain, the religious and ceremonial life of the Hopi is oriented toward maintaining reverence toward the earth, and the cultivation of a good heart by those undertaking the ritual.Footnote 16 Drought is the result of ignorance or greediness, not the result of wider climate patterns, and the Snake Dance is one of many ceremonies used to create and maintain a right relationship with the land.Footnote 17
As Anglo settlers colonialized the homeland of Southwest Indians, the dance became an attraction for well-heeled non-Indigenous observers. In 1879, mainstream presses published accounts of the dance, with other newspaper articles about it following.Footnote 18 In 1896, around two hundred non-Indigenous tourists attended, nearly overflowing the plaza.Footnote 19 By the 1930s, local and national newspapers reported when the dance would be held.Footnote 20 The event attracted amateur and professional anthropologists eager to explain the significance of the ceremony and multiple photographers wishing to document the dances lest they disappear. The Santa Fe Railway facilitated tourism and salvage anthropology, promoting rail tours throughout the Southwest that promised “enchanted lands” and a journey “back through the centuries.”Footnote 21 The railway distributed free calendars with artwork featuring romanticized visions of Southwest Indians, creating a tangible reminder of the “primitive” world made accessible by rail.Footnote 22 As the scholar Leah Dilworth noted, the collaboration among ethnographers, artists, and railroad promotion of tourism to the Southwest was “instrumental in the formation of cultural identities for the nation and region, for urban middle-class Americans, and for Native Americans.”Footnote 23
As an attraction on the Santa Fe rail tour, the Hopi Snake Dance became a nodal point for modernist tourists to find authentic religious expression outside the Christian norm. It also served as a means for non-Indigenous supporters to demonstrate their openness to non-Christian ritual practices.Footnote 24 For these tourists, the Snake Dance was a holy ritual and deserved respect. For example, in his grand tour of the American West in 1913, the former president Theodore Roosevelt attended the dance and was annoyed with the tourists who “did not show the proper respect for the religious observance they were watching.”Footnote 25 Similarly, the author D. H. Lawrence, while a tourist himself, chastised fellow tourists for creating a circus-like atmosphere for the religious ceremony.Footnote 26 The Snake Dance both came to represent what humans had lost with the advent of modernity and, ironically, became representative of one’s modernity. In an additional layer of irony, the tourists who appreciated the religious nature of the dance were able to do so because of the United States’ expansion into the West and the destructive federal policies that confined Indians to reservations, as well as the railroads that brought the tourists to the Southwest. Like other stops on the Santa Fe rail tours, tourism to the Snake Dance became an expression of imperialist nostalgia, a term coined by anthropologist Renato Rosaldo to refer to the feeling of longing on the part of colonizers for the culture that they had destroyed. It “uses a pose of innocent yearning … to conceal its complicity with often brutal oppression.”Footnote 27
Religious tourism facilitates commoditization, just as the commodities can expand the tourist market—Indian commodities became a way for Americans to experience “real” America, just as the tourist dollars gave Indian artists a means to provide for their communities. Tourists came to believe that American Indians use rituals to bring rain, and they spread this idea when they returned home with trinkets purchased during their visit. For example, in the late nineteenth century, Aaron Gold, an early purveyor of Pueblo Indian curios, sold tourists visiting Santa Fe “rain gods,” clay figurines that were marketed as depicting an unspecified deity.Footnote 28 While the figurines were rooted in historic Pueblo artistry, they were, in fact, comical depictions of the Anglos who were purchasing a memento of their “authentic” Indian experience.Footnote 29 The figurines were neither ritual artifacts nor depictions of historical or concurrent deities. Nevertheless, these ornaments created a talisman that became representative of the idea that Indigenous peoples dance to control the rain, and this idea followed the pathways home of the traveling non-Indigenous tourists.
In the 1930s and ’40s, the Associated Press (AP) and the United Press International reported the timing and the efficacy of the Snake Dance. For example, the New York Times published AP reports about the Hopi dances each year. The paper noted when the dances were announced and then commented on whether they brought rain.Footnote 30 The AP reported that the Snake Dance worked most years, even as this success was offset with an editorial wink. For example, one year, the headline placed the word “bring” in quotation marks, suggesting that, even though the Hopi believed that the dances were meant to bring the annual rains, the [white] readers of the Times knew the truth.Footnote 31 Other years, the AP reported that the dance had failed. The journalist attributed the failure to a new priest.Footnote 32
In many media reports, rain resulting from the Snake Dance primarily impacted non-Indigenous residents because the ritual could work too well. For example, in 1947, using adjectives common to the era to describe the ritual, the San Francisco Examiner stated, “Rain began falling in Phoenix almost at the climax of the ritual when a weirdly painted snake priest leaped down.”Footnote 33 The resulting cloudburst trapped forty-five presumably non-Indigenous spectators. Another example comes from a letter to the editor in Life magazine regarding a California forest fire. Mrs. R. M. Gwinn responded to an earlier piece about forest fires in Nevada and California and reported that the US Forestry Service credited the Pueblo with a rain dance that put the fires out. Gwinn wrote, “The Forest Service breathed a sigh of relief, and it was reported they were even a little glad the rain dance was stopped when it was,” as they were concerned about flash floods.Footnote 34
Eventually, reports led readers to believe that the dance could be produced and replicated through the United States, regardless of the location. For example, in 1939, the AP wrote about the Hopi Indians at the World’s Fair in New York City. While the Hopi dancers performed what the article identified as the Snake Dance, the newspaper stated that rain started to fall, potentially impacting the year’s festivities.Footnote 35 The reporting focused on the particularities of the tribe that performed it, but the story is indicative of an emerging idea among white Americans that all American Indians dance for rain and that these performances can be effective throughout North America.
In 1921, white Americans began replicating the Hopi Snake Dance. In 1921, non-Indigenous residents of Prescott, Arizona, founded the Smoki People, a fraternal organization that performed their version of the Snake Dance annually for seventy years. This organization created another bridge between professional ethnography reports and tourism. In doing so, the Smoki People helped to shape mainstream ideas about rain dances and to increase the commodification of Indian rituals. The businessmen of Prescott, which is located 200 miles southwest of the Hopi reservation, looked to draw tourism interest to their town and capitalized on Indian tourism. Smoki members performed the dances themselves, dressed in redface created out of a mixture of chocolate and cold cream. The organization became a marker of privilege—only the most prominent business owners and politicians were invited to join it. For example, President Calvin Coolidge was inducted as an honorary member, and, before he was elected senator, Barry Goldwater was a member.Footnote 36 He had a tattoo on his left hand, signifying his membership in the society and his status as an honorary chief.Footnote 37
The Smoki People prepared all year for the performance, visiting nearby reservations and reading from the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology reports, including those written by the Bureau’s director, Jesse Walter Fewkes.Footnote 38 In addition to the Snake Dance, the Smoki performed other Southwest Indian dances, such as dances from the Pueblo and the Navajo—again, relying on professional and amateur ethnographic reports. In 1921, Rosemary Tumber, a white Prescott resident who had lived on the Hopi reservation, created the first Smoki Snake Dance from memory.Footnote 39 Later on, the organization attempted to defend itself against charges of cultural appropriation by asserting that they were salvaging the “rapidly disappearing vestiges of Arizona’s earliest civilizations” and by creating a museum to house American Indian artifacts. The initiated members of the Smoki People based their performances on “extensive library research, usually in the annual reports of the Bureau of Ethnology.”Footnote 40 These arguments, which were brought up in response to Hopi requests that the Smoki People stop performing the Snake Dance, highlight the lasting impact of professional anthropology published between 1871 and 1921 on mainstream knowledge of American Indian religious practice and, as the scholar Sarah Dees has argued, helped to sustain racialized notions of Indigenous religious practice.Footnote 41 In the case of the Smoki People, professional ethnographic reports both inspired and legitimated the racist parody of the sacred Hopi dance.
The racist Smoki dance, justified through the notion of “preservation,” continued until 1991, when Hopi leaders successfully pressured leaders to disband the organization.Footnote 42 The purported claim was that the white organization was preserving the Snake Dance practice for later generations, mimicking the concerns of early ethnographic reports.Footnote 43 However, the Hopi continued to survive and practice the Snake Dance according to ceremonial practices handed down from earlier generations, not needing the settler-colonists to preserve the tradition. Additionally, the tribe has banned the white public from attending, since tourists continued to treat the ritual as a spectacle for their consumption, a stark rejection of strategic essentialism. The Hopi Tribe regained control over the production of their sacred power, but the era of Southwest tourism had a lasting impact on non-Indigenous perceptions of American Indian ritual practice.Footnote 44
In the mid-twentieth century, the particular dance practices of the Hopi slowly became enfolded in a universalized notion of Indigenous rain dances. Examples of this shift appeared in both journalism and primary school curricula. White journalists started using references to Indian rain dances as rhetorical flourishes on articles about too much rain or not enough. For example, in an article about drought conditions in the Adirondacks, a journalist related a story about a Ute Indian hunting guide who could reportedly control the weather for hunters.Footnote 45 One Salt Lake City opinion writer discussed the effectiveness of a rain dance in Salt Lake but worried about how one could stop the rain once it started.Footnote 46 Non-Indigenous schoolchildren throughout the twentieth century were encouraged to dress as Indians and perform their rain dances under the guise of “learning” about other cultures.Footnote 47 A group of 4-H’ers rain danced with feathers in their hair in California, and a group of Girl Scouts performed a rain dance at camp.Footnote 48 Boy Scouts performed ersatz rain dances, dressed in Plains Indian headdresses and, in a nod to the origin of the rain dance in Hopi ritual, sometimes accompanied by a snake.Footnote 49 For some white children, the rain dances impacted their lives. As a child, Charles Reinhart, a director of the American Dance Festival, learned “about the power of dance when a sunny day clouded over during his [second-grade] class performance of an American Indian rain dance.” This experience guided him into his dancing career.Footnote 50
The idea that American Indians performed dances to control the weather continued to loom large in American media, including TV and newspapers. The Looney Tunes 1939 “Sioux Me” cartoon is a case in point. This cartoon short is a remake of the 1936 short “Porky the Rain-Maker.” In the earlier film, Porky, as a farmer, is experiencing a drought impacting his crops and livestock. When he acquires a rain pill, the drought ends, but the rain does not stop. “Sioux Me” is a remake of that earlier short but leans into racist depictions of Indigenous peoples. The Indian chief demands that the rainmaker (also Indian) make rain, threatening the rainmaker with death if he is not successful. The rainmaker organizes a rain dance, including men hopping around and grunting, “We want rain.” This rain dance does not work; instead, a white inventor with “rain pills” is successful. In this depiction, the magic of the rainmaker is inferior to the magic of white scientists, and the Indian rainmaker’s life is indebted to white knowledge.Footnote 51 The cartoon universalizes American Indians through the typical markers of Plains Indians, with the Indian chief dressed in a feathered headdress and tepees featured in the background, and expands on the idea that Indigenous peoples dance for rain, and also that the rituals are ineffective when compared with white science.
The “Sioux Me” cartoon represents a convergence of white misconceptions about American Indian dancing and late nineteenth-century scientific and pseudoscientific attempts to control the rain in the arid American West. In 1871, the civil engineer Edward Powers advanced the concussion theory in War and the Weather, or The Artificial Production of Rain. Footnote 52 He argued that rain could be caused by tremendous noise, and, in his book, he lists many battles in which artillery was fired and rain followed.Footnote 53 Powers’s theory was in the same vein as Charles Dana Wilber’s notion that the act of turning over the cracked, dry earth of the American West would cool the surface, which would cause rain—leading Wilber to declare that “rain follows the plow.”Footnote 54 Although Powers’s attempt to have Congress authorize a test of this theory failed, it had staying power in American thought, visible in the common refrain that it always rained on the Fourth of July because of the fireworks and in the attribution of rainy weather in the 1940s to the war.Footnote 55 Powers’s concussion theory inspired General Daniel Ruggles to patent a process for producing rain through aerial explosions.Footnote 56 These ideas inspired the Texas Legislature to approve experiments that launched explosives at the sky to bring rain.Footnote 57
In Plains states, though, rainmaking turned into a booming business. Reports across Nebraska indicated that white rainmakers traveled to towns desperate for rain, charging up to $1,000 to make rain, with varied success.Footnote 58 Rainmaking endeavors sometimes included causing explosions, while others created concoctions meant to coax rain out of cloudless skies. Some rainmakers were engaged in what they believed to be genuine scientific experimentation, while others admitted that they were frauds. Many of the rainmakers framed their activities as circumventing God or harnessing the powers of a god.Footnote 59 However, one rainmaker, Dr. William B. Swisher was “religious minded” and stopped selling his services because he felt more and more that “the plans of nature and Providence should not be tampered with,” amplifying the fears expressed about the possibility of unleashing uncontrollable floods.Footnote 60
Dr. Swisher’s fear of playing God mirrors the formulation of magic, science, and religion in anthropological literature. For early anthropologists, rain dances in particular stood as an example of magic. For instance, James Frazer, in his Golden Bough, used the rain rituals of ancient Greeks and Romans, as well as those of Indigenous peoples in North America, Africa, and Asia, as a means to explore his conception of imitative magic—that is, magic that involves mimicking the desired result through ritual actions. When introducing the efforts of premodern cultures to control the weather, he used derogatory language such as “false,” “absurd,” and “savage”; similar language was found later in the Looney Tunes cartoon and in the adjectives the AP used to describe the Hopi Snake Dance (“weird” and “zany”).
Frazer drew a direct line from premodern magicians to modern science, arguing that weather shamans “were the direct predecessors … of our investigators and discoverers in every branch of natural science.”Footnote 61 For him, at least, the trial-and-error process of attempting to control the weather led to modernity’s scientific method, suggesting that the border between “us” and “them” is held together with a gossamer thread. Frazer hypothesized that the stakes of getting the weather wrong were high, as he suggested that unsuccessful weather shamans would be punished with death—much like the underlying motive of the Looney Tunes cartoon. Thus, according to Frazer, a generation of proto-scientists was born: eager to protect their lives, weather shamans developed proto-science.
Like his fellow anthropologist, E. B. Taylor, Frazer understood premodern people’s use of magic through the lens of an evolutionary model of cultural and intellectual development, with modern rational science at the end of evolutionary development. Even though magic was a trunk on the evolutionary tree, it was based on false rationality. Still, Frazer indicated that magic was central to the development of science, even though it was false pseudoscience. Religion, in this case, was a foil for science/magic. As Randall Styers has demonstrated, Frazer equated magic and science in that they “share the view that nature is regular and mechanistic,” in contrast to religion’s portrayal of nature, which is “subject to erratic, personal intervention by divine beings.”Footnote 62
Furthermore, magic and science become differentiated through the melting of individual desire: the weather shaman uses magic because he has a self-interest in making rain, whereas the white scientist merely provides the means to do so without self-interest. Again, as Styers argued, “Any visible manifestation of human desire, agency, or purpose of action can become tainted with the aura of magic.”Footnote 63 In this formulation of magic–science–religion, Frazer’s rain shamans and the nineteenth-century rainmakers are separated only by that slippery demarcation of “modernity” that, as Bruno Latour noted, is created through the severing of “culture” from “nature.”Footnote 64 The rainmaking scientists are modern because they are impartial observers and manipulators of nature. The weather shamans are premodern because, despite the fact that their efforts to “make” rain are rooted in scientific observation, they act out of self-preservation. By contrast, Dr. Swisher, the nineteenth-century rainmaker who quit, did so because of “religious” reasons—opting out of the science/magic activities to avoid the specter of “magic.”
In 1947, eight years after the Looney Tones “Sioux Me” short, the comparison of pseudoscience to Indian rainmaking was captured in an editorial cartoon published in the San Francisco Chronicle. Sun beats down on withered crops while a white farmer speaks to two people, one dressed as a white businessman with a suitcase labeled “Dry Ice Rainmaking.” The businessman is leaning toward the farmer as if he were pleading an urgent case. The second person is depicted as a Hopi dancer holding two snakes, with a third resting in a basket on the ground. The figure is wrapped in a blanket and is wearing moccasins and a headband with a single feather. The Indian raises a snake in the air while expressing his case just as emphatically as the white rainmaker. The farmer is scratching his head as he listens to each offer. The farmer’s indecision is captured in the caption, which states, “Another Jurisdictional Dispute.”Footnote 65 This caption mocks the notion of Indigenous claims to sovereignty and land, as the farmer is positioned as the owner of both, and the ultimate adjudicator of who controls—or owns—the weather.
This editorial cartoon and the Looney Tunes short present two depictions of white rainmakers that are in tension with each other. On the one hand, the Looney Tunes short portrays rainmaking as a science—a problem to be solved by non-Indigenous, rational people—and the Indian rainmaker as consulting with the white rainmakers out of self-preservation. On the other hand, the editorial cartoon places both the white rainmaker and the Indian rainmaker on the same visual plane, linking the pseudoscience of white rainmaking with Indian rainmaking. The viewer is positioned as the real modern, rejecting magic in all forms—either as a scientist who knows the truth about both rainmaking attempts or as a believer in modern religion who would not dare to “play God.”
Snow Dances
These fears of dabbling in magic had been discarded by 1959, when the narrative shifted from ritual ineffectiveness to efficacy, after Great Basin Indians—as the story goes—rescued the United States from international embarrassment by bringing snow to the Olympics at Lake Tahoe.Footnote 66 The preceding decade, white Americans had continued to cultivate an interest in Southwest Indian tribes, as professional and amateur ethnographers toting Carl Jung books conducted ethnography and the counterculture Beats sought out peyote. Additionally, as noted by Philip Jenkins, Western psychology began to take paranormal phenomena such as extrasensory perception seriously, calling into question earlier scientific dismissals of Indigenous worldviews.Footnote 67 At the same time, other Americans began to question stalwart institutions, including the scientific community, in favor of paranormal explanations.Footnote 68 The last-ditch efforts of those in charge of the 1960 Winter Olympics occurred within this context of a cultural rethinking of scientific thought.
In December 1959, Paiute Indians entered the world stage through performing prior to the Olympic opening ceremony, launching a relationship between Indigenous performances and the modern Olympics. The Olympic Games have been analyzed as nation-building rituals, reflective of the contradictions that embody modern nation-states.Footnote 69 The opening ceremonies in particular are carefully orchestrated spectacles that “embody the contradictions, tensions, and ideals of a community trying to be born,” as Catherine Bell argued.Footnote 70 For example, in the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics opening ceremony, Indian elders from five of the historic tribes associated with the state welcomed the athletes and offered blessings. In the academic literature on this ceremony, this inclusion has been both lauded as a means to counter colonial conquest narratives and also critiqued as a mechanism to legitimate and further the interests of a colonial state.Footnote 71 The 1960 Olympics pulled Great Basin Indians into the tensions and contradictions of the Olympic Games, the long legacy of American Indian spiritual tourism, and the complexities of the resulting markets.
The 1960 Olympics were nothing short of a spectacle. A merging of technology and Hollywood pageantry, this event marked the first time that computers were used to record times and scores. Walt Disney directed the opening and closing ceremonies, aiming for a larger-than-life feeling that could translate to television screens around the world.Footnote 72 American Indians did not play an official role in the opening ceremonies, but, according to cultural memory, Paiute Indians saved the Olympics through the first documented snow dance at a ski resort. The early winter months of 1959 were dry in the California mountains, and there was no prospect of snowfall, jeopardizing the snow events. The Olympic committee wanted to avoid the weather problems that had plagued the 1932 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid. New York had an unseasonably warm winter that year and, despite an early snowfall in November, snow was scarce in the two months leading up to the event. The bobsled track was destroyed by rainfall, and the event had to be delayed past the closing ceremonies.
The 1960 Olympic organizing committee hoped that science would help prevent a second international embarrassment. In 1958, the committee consulted with a weather forecaster to set the dates for the 1960 Olympics with an eye toward optimal snowfall. Based on his predictions, the committee selected late February. They also orchestrated cloud seeding, using silver iodide in order to encourage snowfall. However, by December, the snow had not arrived. Just two months away from international attention, local officials were getting nervous and sought out other options.
“Modern Science Fails; Officials Resort to ‘Snow Dance,’” one headline declared.Footnote 73 In December 1959, ten Paiute Indians performed a series of dances at the Olympic ski slopes at the invitation of the ski resort, led by Chief Henry Winnemucca. The dancers arrived from the Pyramid Lake Reservation, about 90 miles northeast of the ski resort.Footnote 74 The performance consisted of multiple dances, which the Sacramento Bee reported included a dance to increase snowfall so that animal tracks would be more visible, making for easier hunting. When journalists asked Winnemucca when they could expect the dance to work, the chief told them approximately two weeks. Any earlier, he professed, and his tribe would have difficulty because their bus was not equipped with snow chains.Footnote 75
This snow dance performance gave Paiute Indians access to a global stage, and, even though the dance occurred because of white corporations, the Paiutes presented themselves as still being central to the story of the American West and able to shape the economic success of that region on the global stage. Winnemucca’s joke—that he could control the precision of when the snow came based on his bus’s readiness—reveals his playfulness and harkens back to the Pueblo rain gods of generations past, an editorial wink from American Indians back to settler-colonists.
Later that month, snow fell, which led newspapers to declare that the dance worked. Just as with the Hopi dances, some journalists worried that the snow dance had worked too well. By January, the dry year turned wet, and a blizzard on the first day of the Games caused delays.Footnote 76 The opening ceremonies were punctuated with a “blinding downfall of snow,” which delayed the arrival of Vice President Richard Nixon.Footnote 77 Did the climatologist predict the timing of snow correctly? Did the cloud seeding work? Or did Winnemucca’s dance performance work? The ski resort at Lake Tahoe settled on the idea that the snow dance caused the snowfall, demonstrating a significant shift in non-Indigenous Americans’ perception of American Indians.
The success of the Paiute snow dance spread. Two years later, Vail Ski Resort hosted its first snow dance. When Eddie Box Sr. informed the resort that the Utes did not have a snow dance but could perform a rain dance and hope for freezing temperatures, both parties were operating within a shared ritual vocabulary, born out of settler-colonialism and enmeshed in a century of ethnic tourism and anthropological taxonomies of ritual. Just as the Paiute dancers had, Ute dancers successfully brought snow, thus saving the public investment in the ski resort, which rested on United States National Forest land.Footnote 78 Subsequently, snow dances proliferated throughout the country. Michigan, in 1965, experienced massive snowfall after one was performed; in 1970, in the Pacific Northwest, a geologist with self-proclaimed Indigenous heritage performed one to boost snowmobiling prospects.Footnote 79
In 1977, a lack of snow led Colorado Senator Floyd Haskell to ask President Ford to declare the Colorado mountains a disaster area so that federal funds would be available to the ski resorts. However, the Vail developer, Peter Seibert, not simply accepting federal aid, again asked Ute Indians to perform a snow dance.Footnote 80 In 1981, Utes performed a snow dance at Crested Butte, south of Vail, which newspapers reported as resulting in unforecasted snowstorms stretching from Aspen to Crested Butte.Footnote 81 In the Adirondacks in 1983, when the World Cup ski jumping contest was to be held, a lack of snow threatened the event, and an Abenaki Tribe member, Maurice Dennis, performed a snow dance. It took three days for the snow to arrive but, when it did, over a foot fell.Footnote 82 White people also performed snow dances, just as they performed rain dances, and the Smoki People performed a snake dance. For example, in 1984, a snow tour company dressed two (presumably white) ski guides in “Indian chieftain outfits.” They led eighty people in a dance around a bonfire with chants to the snow gods. The company owner attributed the snow that fell the subsequent weekend to this “zany and weird” ritual, language that mimicked the 1920s and ’30s reporting of American Indian religious ceremonies.Footnote 83
In the 1960s, when snow dances proliferated throughout North America, white Americans were also shifting their understanding of religion— moving from institutionalized, traditional religious practices toward a broader inclusion of Asian and Indigenous practices (or “from dwelling to seeking,” in the words of Robert Wuthnow).Footnote 84 Hippies, in particular, drifted toward American Indians because they provided a foil for modern life—coming to stand in for the “authentic”—against the capitalistic institutions of their parents’ generation.Footnote 85 Some Indians gathered with hippies, including Eddie Box Sr., the first performer of the Vail snow dance.Footnote 86 While hippies often did not fully understand the concerns of their American Indian friends, the resulting collaboration had an impact on legal battles and cultural attitudes about Indigenous religion. Having already formulated brands around notions of the Old West, Western ski resorts responded to and helped produce these cultural shifts by leaning into their connection with nature and spirituality through the promotion of American Indian ritual practice.
The cultural shift of the 1960s persisted in later years. In the late 1980s, ski resorts started to hold festivals to pray for snow in late fall. These occurred in Oregon, Colorado, and California.Footnote 87 The range of tribes throughout the country performing snow dances demonstrates that the dance had become a universalized ritual for white audiences. For example, Vermont’s Ascutney Mountain hired Abenaki Indians to perform a snow dance; four days later, four inches of snow fell.Footnote 88 In 1992, Lake Tahoe’s Incline Village Crystal Bay Visitors’ and Convention Bureau invited members of the Miwok Tribe to perform a snow dance in what became an annual intertribal powwow and cultural festival, with participants from the Washoe and Paiute tribes.Footnote 89 The inclusion of Miwok Indians, whose historic territory did not include Lake Tahoe, demonstrates both the solidification of the snow dance as a universalized ritual and the creation of an opportunity for Miwok dancers to be cultural ambassadors. In subsequent years, the dances and the accompanying cultural fair became a central part of the annual Olympic Heritage Celebration.Footnote 90
The mixture of religious performance, tourism, and water-based businesses crystallized in the efforts of the Native American Olympic Team Foundation, which was founded by former the Olympic skier Suzy Chaffee. In 2001, Chaffee began to advocate for the regular inclusion of American Indian performers at Western ski resorts. She herself participated in a successful rain ceremony in 1996.Footnote 91 After this, she became both a convert and an evangelist for snow dances, an advocate for Native American access to snow sports, and an environmental activist to preserve clean snow. These efforts crystallized in the Native American Olympic Team Foundation, which aims to promote snow sports among Native children, as well as to connect Indigenous elders with scientists to “regenerate Mother Earth” and “promote renewable energy.”Footnote 92 The organization promotes a dizzying array of initiatives, supporting such varied causes as American Indian women in snow sports, diabetes prevention among Native peoples, Indigenous Olympic hopefuls, solar power, and the use of natural beauty products. The organization also advocated for the Arctic Sanctuary at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro in 2012.
Snow dances are the connective tissue for all these initiatives—for Chaffee, a right relationship with nature will result in regenerative health and wellness, blessings that are manifested through more snow. The Foundation states that, after the Vail snow dance in 2012, “a door opened in the weather system that resulted in Vail and most Colorado ski areas enjoying powder the next day, which kept on falling throughout January, adding up to several feet.”Footnote 93 Chaffee promotes the idea that Indigenous skiers and snow dancers bring balance to the weather and will be a crucial part of preserving snow in the face of climate change. She has advocated for creating opening day dances in Steamboat Springs, Vail, and Telluride, as well as in advance of high-profile ski competitions such as the World Cup.Footnote 94 The “snow blessings,” as Chaffee calls them, “could assist ski areas with weather systems on a grand scale. … In the same way, Elders could assist farmers and help prevent forest fires with rain dances to enhance ‘Global Cooling’ and the snowy future of skiing.”Footnote 95
Even as Chaffee engages romanticized views of American Indian rituals, her organization has also given Indian spokespeople a platform to represent themselves, to advocate for the inclusion of Indian youth in winter sports, and to allow local tribes to access their ancestral homeland. For example, the Foundation provides a general guide for ski resorts interested in hosting a snow dance. In addition to directing interested parties to learning about local tribes, developing relationships, and cultivating patience, Chaffee advocates donating 100–200 lift tickets, along with beginner lessons and rental equipment, to the visiting tribe. She has also suggested that ski resorts should allow Elders to ride ski lifts in the summer in order to harvest traditional medicinals and berries. In a suggestion that transportation could be provided for dancers, she states that these gestures “results in awesome snow blessings.”Footnote 96 Even as her organization advocates for a reciprocal, healing relationship among business owners and tribal leaders, Chaffee’s assertion that the snow dances produce snow is rooted in the legacy of early twentieth-century anthropological knowledge, mixed with pop culture and the retelling of successful snow events. The American Indians who participate in the snow dances draw on a century of encounters with spiritual and ethnic tourists, seeing an opportunity to dance, make money, connect with each other, honor ancestors, and gather traditional medicine in their ancestral home.
Conclusion
The snow dances discussed in this article are anchored in a history of white curiosity at best, and outright racism at worst, but they are also anchored in a long history of strategic essentialism and self-determination. The snow dance developed as a ritual practice within a centuries-old settler-colonial spiritual marketplace—one born out of many years of ethnic tourism, complete with commodities such as photographs, ceramics, jewelry, and other trinkets. Rain dances, the predecessors of the Vail snow dance, are part of this touristic commodity and helped create a marketplace where a ritual, manufactured for the market, could be bought and sold. Increased tourism in the American Southwest amplified the perception of a divide between modern, scientific societies and premodern societies based on magic. The rainmaking commodities that tourists purchased helped shape the modern American religious landscape, particularly in the American West, by assisting in creating a pastiche of religious expression that centers the land in the agricultural and snow economies of the West.
Southwest tourism was a ritual act of remembrance and an attempt to create a sustainable regional identity around both the past and the desire to move forward into a so-called civilized future. Tourists were whisked away to “enchanted lands” via rail to observe what was marketed as a dying past and to witness American Indians control the weather, even as scientists aimed to disabuse non-Indigenous peoples of the effectiveness of the dance. The Hopi Snake Dance became enmeshed in the national consciousness through AP wires and transformed into a universalized rain dance. By the 1960 Winter Olympics, snow dances reflected another ritual: one not of remembrance but of efficacy. If white Americans still could not control the weather with scientific knowledge and technological skill, perhaps Indians could. First created as a foil for a modern, scientific white American, the idea of the American Indian dancer became a panacea for the environmentally destructive modern era.
In the 2012 Vail snow dance performance, Eddie Box Jr. described the final Round Dance as a friendship dance. In introducing it, he said:
They want us to bring moisture to the area and what we think and how we go about it is all of us here. I’m going to call on all of you that are here, that you may put yourself in our frame of mind that this continues to what we see today, because it not only helps us here, it helps Mother Earth. We can do one more dance, and we call that the friendship dance. In this dance here, we invite you to come in. It’s called a round dance. And they’ll start dancing around here and you’re welcome to join us.Footnote 97
What work did this friendship dance do? What kind of relationship (if any) was forged between the skiers and the Ute dancers? Flitting between romanticized universal notions, pan-Indian ideas and dances, and particular Ute kinships ties to their ancestral land in and around Vail, this Round Dance reified, transformed, and subverted Western imaginings of American Indians. The practice of inviting non-Indigenous people to dance reflects pan-Indian values of kinship and reciprocity. Furthermore, Box’s use of the phrase “Mother Earth” signals, in part, the complex system of kinship among humans, animals, plants, and the wider natural world, standing against Western notions of alienation from nature—an idea described by Vine Deloria, Jr. in God Is Red, and also reflected throughout American Indian religious thought.Footnote 98 This idea could also serve as shorthand for Ute kinship with the specific ancestral land on which the ski resort is built, even as the idea of “Mother Earth” also intersects with New Age notions of nature, as well as romanticized ideas about Indigenous religious practice. Box’s instruction to the attendees to be sure that they were in the right frame of mind to help Mother Earth reflects the notion of reciprocity, or the notion described by the American Indian historians Clara Sue Kidwell and George Tinker that “the cosmos is sacred and alive” and that “anything and everything humans do has an effect on the rest of the world.”Footnote 99 Similarly, Forrest S. Cuch, an enrolled member of the Ute Indian Tribe and a former executive director of the Utah Division of Indian Affairs, wrote: “Most Indian people believe that human beings are a part of Mother Earth. They considered themselves ‘caretakers’ of the earth through communion with the universe.”Footnote 100 In short, Box’s explanation of the Round Dance intersected with the pan-Native and Ute theology, centering kinship among people and the wider natural world.
The Round Dance is frequently performed at powwows, where all attendees are invited to participate.Footnote 101 The dance requires participants to sling their arms around each other’s shoulders in a tight circle as the dancers slowly sidestep around the circle. For Plains Indians, the circle is a cultural symbol that has been adopted throughout North American Native societies and which interpreters state represents the family, the tribe, and all of creation. As a non-linear, non-hierarchal shape, the circle flattens out all differences to emphasize connection, relation, and egalitarianism. It is the idea that the “whole is equal to the part,” as noted in an article jointly authored by non-Native and Native scholars.Footnote 102
In the Round Dance, the movements demand awareness of other bodies. It compels dancers to attend to their steps in relation to the group’s movements. Significant missteps can ripple through the group, but minor errors can be absorbed and corrected. The intimacy of the group dance forces one to become part of an embodied collective. It creates a temporary community bound together by steps and song, which dissolves as soon as the arms are unlinked. The Round Dance embodies the delicate nature of being in a relationship with other humans and forces dancers to be attuned to how their actions impact the group. It centers on friendship as a reciprocal relationship with each other and—with Box’s call to consider Mother Earth—with the environment that surrounds the dancers. Larger performances of the dance involve concentric circles sidestepping around the drum circle. The circle gives space for interlacing notions of what it means to be human, living in community, acknowledging that the dancers are all interconnected and that the actions of one person impact all living things. The presence of the Round Dance performance at Vail suggests that Ute dancers were there not to impact the weather or to model for the resort’s marketing department but instead to create an Indigenous public sphere—one that stages Indian “authenticity” and where Indians dialogue with and subvert the Western imagining of American Indians.Footnote 103
The Round Dance temporarily pulled non-Indigenous skiers into the cosmological world of Great Basin Indians, centering respect and reciprocity for natural objects, plants, animals, and other nations. In so doing, for a brief moment it inverted the history of colonialization: American Indian dance protocol constrained white bodies in an Indian dance, overriding 150 years of settler-colonial history, one and a half centuries of the US government constraining Ute bodies through dispossession, the creation of reservations, and boarding schools. The circle also allows for all the complexities of living within a colonized space without ignoring the hardships of dispossession and a legacy of scientific exploitation. Instead, white skiers must attend to the impact of their movements on the American Indian bodies nearby. By calling the skiers friends, Box pulled them into a relationship with Ute Indians and offered another way of being together—not as adversaries but as friends, in relation with the natural world. Of course, this rosy view of relations between settler-colonists and Indigenous people only exists as long as the Round Dance does; it melts away as soon as the circle is broken. Furthermore, like any other ritual, participants—Native and non-Native alike—could experience the dance without any connection to the notions of reciprocity, kinship, or notions of interconnection. The dance could simply be a good time. However, Box’s introduction of the dance as helping “Mother Earth,” the responsibility of everyone present, and as an expression of friendship signals the wider and multivariant symbolic possibilities of the ritual.Footnote 104
Even though modern rain and snow dances are an artifact of settler-colonialism, the dances do important cultural work. The moments in which the settler-colonist society creates spaces for Indigenous ritual are simultaneously born out of colonial appropriation and the embodied agency of the American Indian dancers. They exist within what the decolonial semiotician Walter Mignolo has called a contemporary pluriversality, which he defines as “several cosmologies entangled by a power differential,” which is the “logic of coloniality covered up by the rhetorical narrative of modernity.”Footnote 105 Existing outside the rhetorical narrative of modernity, the Ute Indians could help address the economic problem of the lack of snow even though the performers are part of the modern world. Conversely, the ski resort’s request created the opportunity for Ute ceremonial dancers to return to their ancestral homeland to dance and to compel settler-colonists to dance in the act of embodied agency.Footnote 106
The snow dances are the product of a vibrant, living ritual community. The public performances of Great Basin Indians, as well as those that occur throughout North America, are one strategy among many for engaging with the consequences of settler-colonialism and the romanticized ideas of American Indian ritual practices. Attending to the multiple cosmologies as well as the power differential within these public dances, without assuming that the ritual simply reproduces imperial nostalgia, allows for a nuanced understanding of American Indian public rituals and a deeper awareness of the “sacred” in American public life. The articulation of the “sacred” emerges out of questions of possession, dispossession, and repossession, alongside the production and reproduction of culture memory, laden with romance and nostalgia, and challenges the notion of what it means to be modern.Footnote 107 Amid the history of dispossession and mining of Native cultures to create an “authentic” natural experience, the rituals at ski resorts provide American Indians with an opportunity to perform dances for their community—broadly defined as encompassing the natural, ancestral, and living communities. As Leanna Betasamosake Simpson, a Michi Saagii Nishanabeg scholar, asserts, “our presence is our weapon.”Footnote 108 Indian presence in predominantly white, wealthy, and exclusive spaces gives Americans Indians a voice to proclaim that they have never left and that the mountains remain their ancestral homeland.
