Description
By Cutcha Risling Baldy, Hupa, Karuk, and Yurok and enrolled in the Hoopa Valley Tribe, Coll Thrush and Charlotte Coté. Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy is an Associate Professor of Native American Studies at Cal Poly Humboldt who researches Indigenous feminisms, California Indians, Environmental Justice, Traditional Ecological Knowledge and decolonization. She is the Co-Director of the NAS Rou Dalagurr Food Sovereignty Lab & Traditional Ecological Knowledges Institute where she leads several research projects focused on the resurgence of Indigenous Science and place-based learning. Coll Thrush is professor of history at the University of British Columbia. Charlotte Coté is a professor in American Indian Studies at the University of Washington.
“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.