We Are Dancing for You

"Risling Baldy skillfully argues that a Native feminist analytic reveals that Native feminisms were not introduced by Western culture, but have always been contained in oral narratives and are fundamental aspects of Native culture and society."

"Risling Baldy distinctly positions the significance of coming-of-age ceremonies through arduous historical research, sophisticated contributions to Native feminisms, and Indigenous narrative interweavings."

"Her book is well-written, well-argued, and a joy to read for scholars and general audiences alike!"

"This text is critical for scholars of Native studies, American Indian studies, anthropology, sociology, psychology, gender studies, history, and American studies, as well as other fields... In centering a gendered ceremonial practice, We Are Dancing for You documents that cultural resurgence, decolonizing praxis, and Native feminisms provide a space for academics to recognize the daily and ceremonial roles of Indigenous women in indigenizing space and place in their homelands and homewaters. Beyond the academy, Risling Baldy references the positive outcomes for ceremonial participants and reminds readers of the critical and utilitarian need to re-indigenize Indigenous life."

"A truly significant contribution to the field exploring Indigenous approaches to menstruation and the meaning of womanhood. That it is grounded in the particular culture of the author makes it all the more valuable and unique."

"I am in awe . . . Risling Baldy’s interventions into the field are many and absolutely necessary. We Are Dancing for You is located in a place, in the lives of a community where the voices of individual women are heard, as is the author’s. [This book] locates its authority in community knowledge and language. It pushes back against the outside, primarily white male ethnographic professional as authority."

"Part meticulous research, part spiritual journey, and fully in the heart of cultural re-invention, We Are Dancing for You does work that cherishes, educates, celebrates, and enriches our future generations with the knowledge that yes, our bodies are the archive, and the archive is alive and singing."

"Cutcha Risling Baldy’s research on the Hupa flower dance is important feminist and Indigenous scholarship as she is not only approaching the subject as a key insider, but she is also exploring what it means in the larger continuum of Hupa epistemologies and ontologies. While this could easily and beautifully linger in the ethnographic realm of scholarship or in the more common California Indian Studies sphere of examining the devastating consequences of colonization and genocide in California, Ms. Baldy instead magnificently pushes the analysis further by developing a Hupa feminist methodology. She models the political possibilities in reviving the dances that are geared especially toward woman. This tribally specific work and her analysis reaches beyond Northern California and into other Indigenous groups who are working to decolonize structures by regaining healthy gendered elements of tribal life and activist work. These insights are key to our understandings of cultural production, gender, and revitalization and vital to understanding solutions for California Indian communities."