| While Salas danced as a youth at pow wows on the Bad River Ojibwe reservation where he grew up because it was fun, as he grew up, he realized its significance and the style of his dance changed. "When you first start out, you haven't picked up any of the moves," Salas said. "Basically, you'e not going to be stressing your body as much as possible. But as you get into it, as you improve, you find yourself experimenting more and taking more risks physically such as getting down lower or twisting your body in certain ways. And your balance improves so that you can move and combine different moves. As you go along, the level of difficulty of dancing also increases because you find yourself trying new things. As you go on, it will get harder because you will make it harder on yourself." While the dancing may look relatively easy to the casual observer, it is actually very physically demanding. For Salas, grass dancing -- indeed all Native American dancing -- is a holistic approach to caring for the well-being of a person. "Personally, I think it does amazing things for a person," Salas emphasized. "First of all, it is physically intense. As you may know, diabetes and obesity is rampant among Indian people. So dancing is a way to not only keep in shape, but also to combat obesity and therefore, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and hypertension. It's also a way to maintain a really important part of our culture. And beyond that even, it's therapeutic or medicinal in the way that you are expressing yourself. It's almost like you are releasing a certain amount of emotion. But at the same time, you are having fun. It's a very positive experience. It's just overwhelmingly positive. You feel good about what you are doing. You feel good because you're getting in shape. But you also feel good because you are releasing these things through your dance and your self-expression. So it is very multidimensional and medicinal. It is very healing for the mind, body and spirit. It is also healing culturally." Through the pow wows, Salas has also begun to realize that his role in the community is changing and that although he is still young, he is also moving into a role of responsibility and leadership. "Even though I am going to be dancing for as long as I can, I just recently have been noticing that I am on the other end of the spectrum now," Salas reflected. "I am teaching. But I'm still learning all of the time. There were a couple of really young grass dancers, maybe 8-9 years old, at a pow wow. They gravitate toward older, more experienced dancers. I'll show them a move. Or we'll just dance together and I would try to encourage them to do their best. And they would try new moves on their own. They just kind of hang around and dance near my brothers and I and try to pick up some things passively without really coming out and asking for actual steps. But now I get to hang out with these kids and they might look up to older dancers like me." "Now that I have grown up a little bit, once I started to dance with these younger kids, I realized that I was in that position before and now I'm in the adult position and it has gone full circle," Salas continued. "When I realized that happened, that's when I felt the connection between the past and the present. And I also felt a connection to the future because these little kids like to hang around and they are going on to do the same thing because they appreciated it. Or maybe they had a good memory because they got to dance with these older guys. In that way, that's when I really started to feel the connection with the cycle of the way things work." Salas has also realized that he has a responsibility to hand down some of the institutional knowledge that he gathered as an officer of Wunk Sheek. "I worked there for three years," Salas said. "Upon leaving during the last year and a half, I realized that I wouldn't be around and I had to pass the information on. And that's just kind of reflected in other areas of my life too. You have to hand down the torch." And this connectedness with past, present and future that Salas feels is part of a larger cycle of renewal that Native American communities are experiencing. "I feel like there has been this cultural renaissance since the American Indian Movement and it has been building ever since. With each generation, it has just been growing stronger and stronger. For my generation, I would say there is this resurgence and dances are becoming more popular. I can only speak for my community. Cultural societies have been reestablished and reinstated. From what I can see, it's just on the up rise. Cultural dances are coming back. We are becoming more populated. The use of traditional languages is coming back very rapidly. Within my community, they have language programs, Ojibwe language programs. They've had it in the high school for the past few years. They have classes 3-4 times per week that every employee can go to. I think it is a paid break. It is highly encouraged through the tribe. It's not necessarily with my generation or age group, but rather in this time there is this cultural renaissance." Life is coming full circle. |
| UW-Madison student organization Wunk Sheek sponsors a Veteran's Day Pow Wow Preserving Native traditions By Jonathan Gramling |
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| (Clockwise from upper left: Ice Wolf drum group with Lead Dancer Dale Nelson; Kara Besaw; Sawyer Denning (l) with Frankie Brandon; Martin Salas performs the Grass Dance |
| When Wunk Sheek, the Native American student organization on the UW-Madison campus, sponsored its Veterans Day Pow Wow on November 18 in the Great Hall of the Memorial Union, it was connecting with a past filled with meaning and expression. As it honored the warriors -- the veterans -- of the Native American community, it was also connecting the students with who they are and their place in present times. One of the dancers was Martin Salas, a UW senior majoring in sociology and a former Wunk Sheek officer. Salas' chosen dance specialty is the grass dance. "The men would go out and look for a spot for a ceremony," Salas said about the origin of the dance during an interview with The Capital City Hues. "They would find a good spot in the prairie where there would be tall grass. And they would cleanse and prepare the area for the ceremony. By doing so, one of the things involved in preparing it -- in addition to blessing it -- they stomped the grass down so people could be seated and be seen." While the grass dance is an individual form of self-expression -- no two dancers perform it exactly the same -- there are some basic guidelines for the dance. "Traditionally, the idea is to emulate the motion of tall grass, the way it would flow in the prairie, for example," Salas said. "But for the actual dances, what should normally be done is you should try to have some measure of balance on both sides. So whatever you do on one side with one leg, you would also copy that on the other side just so that you have this natural balance." |