Hoop dancing championships highlight mastery, spectacle

By Maya Hilty mhilty@sfnewmexican.com Aug 5, 2023 Updated 4 hrs ago



Piero Benally practices as he waits for his turn to perform in the youth division during the Lightning Boy Foundation's Nakotah LaRance Youth Hoop Dance Championship on Saturday at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture.

Jim Weber/The New Mexican

A competition this weekend honored the man whose passion sparked a chain of events that has brought the once-lost tradition of hoop dancing back to New Mexico.

Nakotah LaRance died in an accident in 2020. The second annual Nakotah LaRance Youth Hoop Dance Championship, named after the hoop dancing teacher and held at Milner Plaza on Museum Hill in Santa Fe this weekend, features dancers from 2 to 26 years old.

Over 50 dancers registered in the competition, including many from pueblos of Northern New Mexico, as well as dancers from all over the U.S. and from First Nations in Canada.

The championship is hosted by the Lightning Boy Foundation — a Pojoaque-based intertribal nonprofit with the mission to empower Native youth through hoop dancing — in collaboration with the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture.

“A beautiful thing about it” is that stories from Indigenous groups throughout the Southwest credit the pueblos of Northern New Mexico as the origin of the hoop dance, said Steve LaRance, Nakotah’s father and co-chair of the Lightning Boy Foundation.

More:
https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/hoop-dancing-championships-highlight-mastery-spectacle/article_a6757eb8-30be-11ee-b0f8-3356806a1e25.html