Lakota hoop dance and Northern Plains drum
Riverton, Wyoming
Photo: Joshua J. Pate-Terry
Two-time world champion hoop dancer Jasmine Bell is a carrier of a Lakota tradition with roots that go back millennia. The hoop dance is traditionally performed by a solo dancer who uses a dozen or more hoops to create complex shapes symbolizing elements of the natural world and the circle of life. One of only a handful of women performing this traditionally male dance, Bell is a celebrated performer and ambassador of her ancestral tradition, sharing its message of interconnectedness with audiences across the nation.
Many Indigenous cultures in the U.S and Canada have long utilized hoop symbols and have their own hoop dance origin stories. The Lakota, part of the Great Sioux Nation, trace it to the Lakota rainbow dance, which involved small hoops made from natural materials. Rainbow dancers are said to have picked up their hoops with their feet before grabbing them with their hands—a tradition carried on by hoop dancers today. Modern hoop dancing, however, is attributed to the 1930s innovations of Tony White Cloud of Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico, who used large hoops that he could fit inside and pass over his body. Other dancers expanded upon this practice, and by the 1950s, hoop dance was among North America’s most recognizable Indigenous dances.
Born on Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota, Jasmine Bell remembers pictographs of dancers with hoops on the walls of caves near her home. Named “Good Road Woman of the Crow Creek Sioux” in the Dakota language (a close relative to Lakota), Jasmine was first encouraged to dance at an early age by her grandmother, Theresa Red Bear. Her father, Dallas Chief Eagle Jr., is a renowned hoop dancer who passed on the tradition he learned from his own father and grandfather to his daughters as well as his sons. When Jasmine’s brother, who had been training to compete in the world championships, suddenly died, she honored him by taking his place in the competition—and won, launching herself to the forefront of hoop dance.
Like other modern hoop dancers, Jasmine makes her hoops from a combination of natural and synthetic materials, including PVC piping and colored tape. Some of her hoop formations were handed down through her family; others are her own creations. All, however, are rooted in her connection to family, her ancestors, the natural world, and her desire to bring healing and inspiration to others. Through her dancing, Jasmine aims to encourage young girls to dream big. She also sees hoop dancing as a metaphor for life: “We start with one hoop: yourself,” she says. “First, you have to learn to dance with yourself before you can dance with others.”
Jasmine has performed at such venues as the Library of Congress, the Kennedy Center, and the annual Mount Rushmore Fireworks Celebration, for which she was featured in Ken Burns’s The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. At this year’s Richmond Folk Festival, she will be accompanied by North Bear, an acclaimed northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone drum group from Wind River reservation in central Wyoming. One of the foremost exponents of the Northern Plains “straight” or “traditional” style of singing, North Bear drives the dance with their powerful falsetto voices. Founded in 2003, the group, led by Jasmine’s husband Luke Bell, previously appeared at the Richmond Folk Festival in 2009. Considered a sacred entity and spiritual conduit in most Native American cultures, the drum provides the foundation for hoop dancing. As Jasmine says, “Without the heartbeat, without that drumbeat, there is no dance.”
Watch this Dakota Life feature on Jasmine Bell.