Dancing for Snow

Tourism, Entrepreneurship, and Race in the American West

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4517638
AutoresBrandi Denison (autor de correspondencia)
Año2024
Volumen34
Número1
Páginas34-64
Fecha de publicación2024-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaReligion and American Culture A Journal of Interpretation (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1052-1151 • E-ISSN: 1533-8568
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/rac.2025.2
OpenAlexW4407898758
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas45

Starting in 1960, ski resorts in the American West invited American Indian dancers to perform snow dances to address low snowfall. The first documented snow dance was associated with the 1960 Winter Olympics at Lake Tahoe, and snow dances have occurred throughout the twenty-first century, including a 2012 dance at the Vail Ski Resort. In most instances, ski resorts declare the dance successful when snow falls. These snow dances and the related rain dances are best understood in the context of white tourism to the American West and its settler-colonial legacy. I argue that these weather dances are the products of a dynamic relationship between white-owned businesses and American Indian performers in the arid American West, and they have produced racialized ideas of the "sacred"-specifically, an authentic experience that connects settler-colonists to the natural world, facilitated through American Indian spiritual practices. This connection often increases the profitability of businesses that exploit the natural world but also provides an opportunity to express Indigenous communicative agency. I situate the settler-colonial notion of the sacred alongside Indigenous ritual practice, entrepreneurship, and self-determination, using newspapers and anthropological reports

Archaeology · Economic geography · Entrepreneurship · Geography · Meteorology · Political science · Snow · Sociology · Tourism · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · Gender Studies · Race, History, and American Society