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Dancing for Snow: Tourism, Entrepreneurship, and Race in the American West
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2025
Abstract
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.
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- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture
References
Notes
1 Vail Resorts Inc, Form 10-k 2012 (Broomfield, CO: Vail Resorts Inc, 2012), accessed July 8, 2024, https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?action=view&cik=812011&accession_number=0000812011-12-000017&xbrl_type=v#.
2 Vail Resorts, “A Snow Dance to Bring in the Flakes at Vail,” Wall Street Journal, January 19, 2012, https://www.wsj.com/video/a-snow-dance-to-bring-in-the-flakes-at-vail/D56064E6-D083-48A4-818E-8CD657396060.html.
3 In this essay, I use the term “Indigenous” to reflect a global understanding of communities displaced due to colonialism. I use the term “non-Indigenous” or “non-Native” to denote peoples that are descended from settler-colonists and that generally identify as white. I use the term “American Indian” or “Native” to denote Indigenous peoples residing in the United States; where possible, I identify people by their tribal affiliation.
4 Presumably, the skiers were white. Historically, skiing has been constructed around the Western myth of cultural memories of the Old West, complete with exotic Indians, which, as Annie Gilbert Coleman has argued, constructs ethnic whiteness through ski resort culture. Coleman, Annie Gilbert, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Skiing,” Pacific Historical Review 65, no. 4 (1996): 585 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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104 In the time since this article was researched, Palisades Tahoe ski resort has adopted a Land Acknowledgment, given members of the Washoe Tribe free access to the mountain, year-round, a co-curated display about the Washoe at the resort, and weekly Washoe cultural talks in the summer. These changes were spurred by the widespread protests in the summer of 2020 and signal new possibilities for both the ski resort and the Washoe Tribe.
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