Indian Yellow Princes
The Indian Princess is ready for the Pow wow with a special gown, headband, with new feathers for the occasion. With a prayer fan and a shawl over her arm she is prepared for an evening of social dancing. The shawl can be used to sit on during the warm part of the day and to cover her shoulders when the evening cool dampness arrives. The prayer fan is to swirl away the warmth from her face and to offer a prayer to the heavens as the evening coolness arrives.
A social dance is a pow wow and a dance of celebration, a festive dance of solid fun participated in for the pure joy of dancing. Pow wows are among the most useful of dances in building programs for the entertainment of audiences. Dashing and noisy, they make the best of climaxes or peaks of action.
And the song without the dance is one that an Indian would scarcely be able to comprehend, for to them the dance movement and song are merely different phase of the same thing. The drum is indispensable; it is to the dance as the bow is to the arrow. The Dance with the song and drum are prayers of thanksgiving, for hunting success, for forgiveness for taking the life of an animal for food and clothing necessities.
The Social Dance is just one of many of the themes, motifs and types of dances possible. The types are many. There are religious dances and secular dances; there are dances for the accomplishment of serious life-purposes and others for sheer fun. There are comic dances and tragic dances, and mourning dances. There are dances built on the war theme, on the hunting theme and on the agricultural theme. There are dances of mimicry, some in imitation of spirit bodies and others in imitation of nature, as in the animal and bird dances. There are dances in which masks and others disguising costumes are worn to aid in this mimicry and others that rely only on the art of pantomime without special costuming. There are dances that tell stories some with obvious overt dramatics and others with conventionalized symbolic movement, understandable only to the informed. There are dances for men only, others for women only, and still others for mixed groups. There are solo dances, some which can be done by any dancer and others that are personal property of a single individual. There are dances limited to certain societies, which own them, and there are dances open to everybody.
The dances in which women found their greatest joy were those, which are danced in the actual pow wow social dances of mixed dancers.
