from John Muir's Travels in Alaska (1914) but citing a dance he saw in 1879 on his first trip:

"The dances seemed to me wonderfully like those of the American Indians in general, a monotonous stamping accompanied by hand-clapping, head-jerking, and explosive grunts kept in time to grim drum beats. Drumming in 2008 is steady, and unvarying, but I wouldn't call it "grim". I'm not sure what he meant.



A dancer before drummers in Celebration parade. The dancing today is done in time to an unvarying straight ahead drum beat, movements made in time to the music, and often done with bent knees, the head jerking goes on, but I don't recall any hand-clapping except sometimes from the audience



The chief dancer and leader scattered great quantitiy of downy feathers on everybody like a snow storm as blessings on everybody,

while all chanted "Hee-ee-ah-ah, hee-ee-ah-ah" jumping up and down until all were bathed in perspiration.

The songs we heard began with a verse of what appeared to be non-language sylables, which would be repeated after each song verse, of which there seemed to be but 2 or 3, and then the sylabic chorus, the whole thing repeated over and over during the duration of the dance. With a bit of work i could probably work out what song Muir heard.

"After the dancing excellent imitations were given of the gait, gestures, and behavior of several animals under different circumstances - walking, hunting, capturing, and devouring their prey etc."



This seems to be pretty much a lost art. We saw some flying bird imitations, and the Raven character in the various groups almost always imitates ravens on the ground. But the wolf dancers mainly howled. They were not solo, but part of a larger dancing group so perhaps we just didn't see this part of the dancing.

While all were quietly seated, waiting to see what next was going to happen, the door of the big house was suddenly thrown open and in bounced a bear, so true to life in form and gestures we were all startled, though it was only a bear-skin nicely fitted on a man who was intimately acquainted with the animals and knew how to imitate them. The bear shuffled dow into the middle of the floor and made the motion of jumping into a stream and catching a wooden salmon that was ready for him, carrying it out onto the bank, throwing his head around to listen and see if any one was coming, then tearing it to pieces, jerking his head from side to side, looking and listening in fear of hunters' rifles. Besides the bear dance there were porpoise and deer dances with one of the party imitating the animals by stuffed specimens with an Indian inside, and the movements were so accurately imitated that they seemed the real thing.