# The Jingle Dress, a Modern Tradition An Interview with Brenda Child

**Channel:** College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota
**Source:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b36QFGTlajk
**Transcript page:** https://www.withtranscript.ai/video/b36QFGTlajk

## Chapters

- 0:02 — Origins and Revival of Jingle Dress
- 2:20 — Healing Story and Historical Origins
- 5:49 — Museum Exhibit and Evolving Dresses
- 9:43 — Resistance, Protest, and Public Recognition
- 12:11 — New Research and Historical Questions

## Transcript

**[0:02]:** though Jib way people believe in the healing power of music and dance I've discovered that the jingle dress dance and tradition first emerged during a global epidemic of influenza century ago one that was devastating to Ojibwe communities this was also a time when the United States outlawed ritualistic dancing making the jingle dress dance a radical tradition from its beginning more recently jingle dress dancers wear its standing rock to protest a pipeline project that threatens our water the tradition is very much alive today invigorated by the passion and creativity of a new generation of women

**[0:51]:** I became interested in studying the jingle dress because my grandmother was a jingle dress dancer when I was growing up and when I started teaching Indian history I began to have questions about its origin and I wondered how old is it is this something we've always done so I started looking for historic photographs of jingle dress dancers and I realized I couldn't really find a photo of what you would call a jingle dress or jingle dress dancer before circa 1920 in the United States or Canada and so that really is what kind of put me on the path to studying and wanting to learn more about the history of the jingle dress dance I think all of Ghibli people and now many American Indian people across the United States feel very connected to the jingle dress dance and tradition I'm connected to it because of my grandmother the tradition appeared to kind of skip a

**[1:49]:** couple of generations when I was a little girl it was mostly performed by older women in the community something happened in the 1980s so that the tradition expanded beyond Ojibwe and Dakota communities it became very popular and now my daughter who's a freshman at the University of Minnesota is a jingle dress dancer just like her great-grandmother

**[2:20]:** but you way people often tell a story about a little girl who was very near death and her father and her family became of course very worried about her her father had a dream a vision about a special dress and dance he made the dress for his daughter and taught her the steps they the way folks at Mille Lacs tell the story is that there was a drum ceremony taking place that weekend and the father brought his sick daughter to the drum ceremony she was sort of lying on the side taking it easy because she was so ill and then later on in the evening they started playing these songs and the little girl got up and began dancing and by the end of the evening she had recovered Ojibwe people connect the the jingle dress dance tradition to healing and I should say that it's the dress it's the dance and it's also the

**[3:23]:** songs so I call it a tradition because it's more than just the dress itself a Jib way people believe in the healing power of music and the jingles Ojibwe people believe that spiritual power moves through air and if you've ever been to a powwow and you've heard dozens of dozens of Ojibwe women dancing together in jingle dresses it makes an incredible sound and so the sound of the tinkling of jingle dresses is part of healing but it is very much in line with how Ajab way people view the world and how they view spiritual power I started putting together the story of the jingle dress with the flu epidemic because of that story because it was a very flu-like illness that it seems that the girl had and those of us we've all had the flu you feel like you're going to die you're near death you're not going to survive and then you kind

**[4:27]:** of turn a corner and that's what that story sort of said to me as well and so Jib way people still tell the story of the first jingle dress dancer who was a little girl

**[4:46]:** well we have an exhibit up at the lacs Museum that shows the history of thee and the evolution of the dance the dress itself and what's interesting to me and what was really exciting for us is to to get the dresses from the Historical Society and to be able to highlight dresses from different communities in Minnesota through the decades today I think we have a certain idea of what the jingle dress is but when we go back and look at dresses from its first decade of the 1920s the dresses really follow women's dress styles of the era and so dresses from the 1920s its first decade really look like flapper dresses of very very very similar so the dresses have evolved and changed but I think the meaning of the dresses and the dance and the tradition have pretty much stayed the same throughout the past century

**[5:49]:** there's some very special stories probably behind every one of the dresses in the exhibition several that I think about that first come to mind one dress is a very old Dakota dress which shows that the jingle dress which evolved in Ojibwe communities in central Minnesota perhaps also in Ontario around whitefish bay that they very soon passed to our Dakota neighbors and it became a kind of regional tradition early on so I like that very early Dakota it's actually a skirt that's in the exhibition there were other dresses it's almost like there were our two exhibitions in a sense one is the historical dresses behind the glass cases from the Historical Society and there's another area where women from the communities here in Minnesota brought in their jingle dresses one dress is that that was very special is from Vanessa Northrop who's from the Fond du Lac community I in Minnesota and she made her police

**[6:57]:** uniform into a jingle dress and that one is very popular in the exhibit there's another dress in the exhibit dad Li's staples who is also known as opus on who's a spiritual leader from central Minnesota he asked us if we wanted his mother's dress in the exhibit Lee himself is about in his 70s now and so we said of course we'd love to have your mother's dress in the exhibit there's there are a lot of stories about the jingles themselves which folks tend to always think are made from Copenhagen snuff can lids from tobacco can lids and Obus ons mother's dress is made from old baking soda can lids so when you turn them up and look inside they're red they're very pretty

**[7:58]:** the exhibition has been very popular atma lakhs it's at the Mille Lacs Museum and it will be there until October 2020 and the response has been really really great from the community when we first opened the exhibit in the spring the community wanted to dance in the old dresses as they put it and so women came to the museum on Memorial Day weekend and danced throughout the museum and we had almost like a mini powwow on the Grands grounds of the museum that day and they were very happy to be reconnected to these older historic dresses in the exhibit so it's been great and I also think it's educated a lot of non-indian people about some of our cultural traditions many people when they go to a powwow today they look at Native people dancing and wearing their wonderful powwow attire and they think they're seeing something ancient now what how else aspects of powwow

**[9:09]:** else can be very old but the jingle dress is really about modernity Native people are always seen as historic people rather than contemporary people and I think what the jingle dress expresses is how native people are part of the making of the modern world and how they are also influenced by world war one or the big flu pandemic like other people were who were alive in the early 20th century

**[9:43]:** it's a radical tradition because at the time the jingle dress arose around circa 1920 in the United States powwows were essentially illegal ritualistic dancing was banned from the indian office there was a famous circular in fact that came out of the indian office in washington in the nineteenth early 1920s banning ritualistic dancing on reservations most people don't realize that Native American religious traditions had been suppressed to this degree people today might think well what's the harm in a powwow but at the time the jingle dress arose Native American children were in government boarding schools our languages were being suppressed are dancing and powwow traditions were being suppressed and it was all part of the assimilation movement Native people were not supposed to be Native people anymore or practice our traditions or even speak our language and so this is the atmosphere in which this new tradition began so when it's been used in popular protest

**[10:55]:** movements of the last few years idle no more in Canada the Standing Rock protests against the pipeline project in the Midwest to me it's not something new it's always been part of the jingle dress dance tradition

**[11:17]:** I was really excited about the Google Doodle when I first learned about it it was the first time that Google had commissioned a native artist for a doodle and so it's really exciting to me it when it appeared I couldn't help but think of my grandmother because this was something that I'd known about all my life and I'd learned about it from her Jeanette auginaush who lived in redby minnesota on the Red Lake reservation and it was such a small regional tradition and now everybody who googles was going to know a little better at least see the jingle dress dance in the whole US and Canada that was really remarkable to me

**[12:11]:** I'm working on a number of projects right now some of them have to do with children's literature I wrote a book that just came out a year ago called Bow Wow Bow Wow which is about a little girl and her dog and about traditions of the powwow it's a bilingual book in Ojibwe as well as in English I'm working on a second children's book about baseball and names and the power of names and so that's another project but just today I was writing a grant application about my next research project where I'm from up on the Red Lake reservation there is a an archive there that I've been working in the last few years that isn't really it's it's a it's an archive left by generations of Indian agents who lived on the reservation in the late 19th in the early 20th century I've come to discover that there is a file for virtually every

**[13:14]:** person who lived on the reservation in the late 19th in the early 20th century the Indian agents were very intrusive and I begin to I started to think about the surveillance of reservation life about how people lived under this system in the late 19th in the early 20th century so I I see a couple of book projects coming out of that archive the first one is about the history of American Indian marriage there were lots of changes oh ghibli people were moving from arranged marriages to Christian marriages at the turn of the century native people on reservations if they wanted things like housing loans had to get married in a Christian Church service they couldn't get married in an Ojibwe way which involved traditionally a ritual exchange of gifts that's how my grandparents were married they the families exchanged gifts and that's what made it Ojibwe marriage later on they wanted a housing owned and

**[14:20]:** so they had to get married in a Kris and church service in order to be eligible for that I'm also writing about domestic violence on the early reservation and I'm writing about a really interesting case of an Ojibwe woman from white earth who married a Syrian immigrant to the United States went to live in Beirut and the Indian agency did not want her children to be enrolled because she was married to a non-indian and lived off the reservation it was a very interesting story and her case went to the Supreme Court in the 1930s no one is written about it before so that's part of my new book on the history of American Indian marriage

**[15:17]:** I start out with many different questions so it would be hard to narrow it down to just one question but I find that as a historian what interests me most is the small human story which is why the jingle dress story and history appeals to me so much because it starts out with a small story about a little girl who appears to be near death and her father wants to do something to save her life so that's what's always attracted me to studying history and it's not really until I see the small stories on the ground jingle dressed dancers at Mille acts and so forth that I ever get to the big picture of what were American Indian people during doing during World War One or during the flu epidemic and that's pretty much I used to think something was wrong with me because in graduate school everybody seemed to have the big questions and

**[16:11]:** I was always looking at these sort of little human stories but that's what attracts me to the study of history is the small human story