Tribal Appropriations in Bellydance
The taking of tribal territory must be stopped; the environmental destruction of tribal water sources and lands must be stopped; the impoverishment of tribal communities must be stopped; the removal of tribal children must be stopped; the destruction of tribal culture must be stopped. There has to be a distancing from the harm before healing can occur. That cannot happen if harm continues to be perpetuated. [1]
~ Sherri Mitchell ~
Penobscot Environmental Lawyer and Author,
Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change
Have you ever been humbled by an abrupt shift in perception? Have you suddenly realized that your impact was not what you intended and things were not as they’d always seemed? I recently experienced a deep shift that ultimately changed my identity and profession — one that rewired my understanding of history, feminism, ancestors, and the sacred. It revolved around a word that is loaded with historical, political, and cultural nuances — “tribal.”
Nearly two decades ago, as a new mother, I stumbled into my first “Tribal Style Bellydance” class. Its sinuous movements, gorgeous costuming, and group improvisation attracted me instantly. With pleasure, I noted that the aesthetic of this art form welcomed the bodies of pregnant people, mothers, and elders. Some of my favorite aspects were its fluid, shared leadership and mesmerizing synchronized group improvisation. Within a few months, I was performing with a troupe. Shortly thereafter, I was researching and writing a Master’s thesis [2] on how “Tribal Style Belly Dance” positively influences young women’s body image. Eventually, with several professional teacher certifications under my coin belt, I used this dance to facilitate embodied healing, creative expression, and empowerment for groups of teenage girls, survivors of sexual and domestic violence, and women of all ages. In wonder, I watched their confidence and self-acceptance blossom. I taught, choreographed, directed troupes, and performed with an international dance company.
After fifteen years of immersion in these engaging activities, a friend sent me a critique of white women using the word “tribe” to market our products and services, and how the use of this word harms Indigenous peoples because of its painful historical connotations. The critique resonated with a nagging dissonance I’d been feeling for some time. As though a switch was flipped, I suddenly saw that I could no longer use this word in good conscience. For the first time, I saw how “tribe” had been co-opted to describe something that was filling a niche for (mostly) white women. It was giving us something we longed for while disregarding our impact. Our circles were not consciously aware of settler colonialism; we did not practice reciprocity with the Indigenous cultures that had inspired our dance; nor did we acknowledge (or even understand) that we were dancing on stolen Indigenous land.
Suddenly, it was obvious why the word “tribal” had appealed to us and had been used extensively throughout the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia to market an emergent art form. The socially engineered identity of whiteness requires amnesia about our ancestry, stunts our capacity for group improvisation and spontaneous co-creation, undermines embodiment and reverence for the Feminine, and now puts these basic human needs up for sale. Use of the word “tribal” spoke to white women’s longings for essential aspects of human wellbeing that we didn’t even know we were missing. Today, the word “tribe” is used carelessly in inspirational quotes and evocative marketing, even as Indigenous communities struggle to survive ongoing settler colonialism. Many of us long to reinvent tribal ways of being, but in our quest for belonging, we often ignore the bigger picture.
“Belly Dance” was a term I had once embraced because it explicitly named a part of the female body that had been shamed under patriarchal control. I proudly used “Belly Dance” to celebrate feminine creativity, intuition, and life-giving capacities. Embedded within this feminist reclamation, now I could see its paradox: the history of belly dance I had researched for my Master’s thesis had roots in colonialism and cultural appropriation that I had not yet been able to perceive.
It is thought that the Romani people were largely responsible for spreading women’s sacred dances throughout the world in their migrations between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. Hundreds of years later, in the early nineteenth century, Europeans traveled to the Middle East and Northern Africa, where they watched traditional women’s dances being performed. Although they overwhelmingly expressed disgust for the dancers, European Orientalist painters somehow managed to keep watching long enough to paint the dancers through a romanticized lens, often depicting them with light complexions.
In 1893, Indigenous Ghawazee dancers of Egypt and Ouled Naïl dancers of Algeria were brought to the Chicago World’s Fair by an American named Sol Bloom. Far removed from their cultures of origin and recontextualized through the gaze of settler colonialism, the traditional dances were exoticized. Versions of these dances were later performed by idealized white women in the 1920s and 1930s Hollywood films. This is how the sexy, glamorous, stereotypical image of the “belly dancer” became ubiquitous. This style of costuming and image were later exported back to the Middle East, where they became popular in nightclubs.
Beginning in the 1990s, white Western feminists developed and trademarked fusion-based iterations of “Tribal Style Belly Dance” as their intellectual property: mixing music, costuming, and dances from Central Asia, the Middle East, Spain, India, North Africa, and beyond. The form they developed is uniquely based on fluid leadership and synchronized group improvisation. It requires developing deep muscle memory that can spontaneously gel into group performance driven by instinct rather than thought. In response to white women’s deep longings for community, intuition, and embodied expressions of the Divine Feminine, this fusion-based artform was sold all over the world in workshops, classes, and teacher certifications.
The word “tribe”
After being sensitized to the harmful impacts of white women using the word “tribe” and perceiving the historical complexity of “belly dance”, I removed almost all the content on my website, editing the one remaining page to explain why I would no longer be using the term “Tribal Style Belly Dance.” All the while, I was smacking my forehead and wondering, “How in the heck did I not see this sooner?” Having this blind spot revealed made me want to crawl under a rock and erase all my previous affiliations with the term. After a while, I realized that I didn’t want to (and couldn’t) expunge the artistic practice that had shaped my life and community in important ways. But I also needed to consider the historical context, wounds, and impulses behind my language. In my process of recovering from whiteness, this was one of many nuances I have seen only in hindsight.
For a time, my classes, troupe, and performances slowly whittled down until finally, I stopped dancing completely. This newfound stillness opened space for reflection. I did not know what to call the art form or how to relate to it anymore. Perceiving this dance through a different lens left me sitting with painful uncertainty. With sadness, I realized that the cultural void of whiteness had tricked me into buying and selling practices that had been appropriated from other cultures without relationship, permission, or reciprocity. For the first time, it dawned on me that I did not know anything of the earth-based communal dances, music, regalia, and rituals my European ancestors practiced before they were colonized, anglicized, and converted to patriarchal belief systems. I did not know anyone who could teach me the Old Ways of my people. I felt like an orphan, and I had to grieve.
Anatolia
Years later, watching a presentation by historian Max Dashú, images of ancient figurines, pottery, and artwork from the region of Anatolia (present-day Turkey) plunged me into visceral memories. I was learning about the Indo-European ancestors who spent a long time in this region before beginning their migrations into Europe. As evidenced by the artwork of the region, female bodies and deities were venerated for countless generations in Anatolia.
Spirals, circles, waves and curves — the same shapes I’d once made and taught others to make with their hips, arms, rib cages and hands — were ubiquitous. Feminine figures were depicted as heavy and grounded; regal and magical. They sat upon sturdy stone benches flanked by big cats. They undulated with snakes in their hands. Their arms were raised overhead in supplication, or cradling their breasts to emphasize nurturing superpowers. Their images evoked the aesthetic of “Tribal Style Belly Dance” — hypnotic and powerful. I could almost hear primordial rhythms accompanying the joyful, dancing footfalls of the ancestors. I caught fleeting glimpses of their communities, in which women were once regarded as mystical beings of transformation, intertwined with animals and the sacred geometry of the natural world.
These images recalled how it felt when I was first learning to belly dance — it was as though the challenging movements and rhythms were already part of my muscle memory and only needed to be refreshed. Learning this dance carried the enchantment of encountering a long-lost friend in an unexpected place. The ancient ceremonial artwork illuminated how my innate affinity to this dance could have been blood memory, a gift passed down in whispers from ancient Anatolian great-grandmothers whose remote legacy still lives in my DNA.
The problem was not the music, imagery, or movements themselves, but their treatment within our capitalist paradigm in which cultural practices are taken out of context, commodified, trademarked, and sold. This pattern keeps us oblivious to the insatiable hunger and entitlement of whiteness. It allows us to adopt (and adapt) whatever we fancy without the challenging work of building trustworthy relational bridges across cultures. Paradoxically, the embodied ways of knowing that developed during many years of practicing “Tribal Style Belly Dance” eventually helped me build the resilience to perceive its complexity.
In my own experience, cultural appropriation is a misguided expression of profound longing for identity, culture, and wholeness. Quiet introspection can be a lasting antidote, cultivating more nuanced perception over time. Today, in the stillness of not knowing, dances of embodied ancestral memory are germinating. Could communal dance become a prayer for the elements and all Creation; a path to peace within that leads to peace without; a conduit for ecstatic joy and healing tears? What if our new/old ancestral dances became ceremonies for the cosmos once again, rather than intellectual property to be marketed and sold?
Are there similar patterns you have seen only in hindsight? Those of us who are in recovery from whiteness can gently, kindly, and compassionately acknowledge that limited perception is simply part of the air we’ve been breathing for generations. Hand-in-hand with our communities, we can expand our perception to remember, embrace, and evolve our ancestral blueprints with reverence and respect. Synchronized group movement, cultural adaptation and dancing on the earth have been part of human artistry since the beginning of time.
endnotes
Mitchell, Sherri. Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change, 73.
Giovale, Hilary. Undergraduate Women, Belly Dance, and Body Image: Personal Narrative and Qualitative Analysis, 41-46.
Hilary Giovale
is a mother, writer, and community organizer who lives on Diné, Hopi, and Havasupai land. She is in training to become a good ancestor.