Jingle Dress

Image from preview.redd.it and submitted by kee-mosabe
image showing Jingle Dress

gofatwya on October 16th, 2021 at 05:16 UTC »

Beautiful!

Independent_North236 on October 16th, 2021 at 05:28 UTC »

Amazing and absolutely stunning. Be proud!👏😍

Darryl_Lict on October 16th, 2021 at 07:01 UTC »

Apparently the jingle dress came about in the 1918 flu pandemic.

The jingle dress dance originated during the influenza pandemic of 1918. As the story goes, a young girl of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe people was very sick with the virus. One night, her father dreamed of women dancing in colorful dresses with small metal cones attached, the air jingling with the sounds of their dance. The spirits in his dream told him that making the dresses and performing the dance would help his daughter heal. He told his wife about the dream, and she set to work making four dresses, their colors corresponding to the Ojibwe sacred colors. She finished each dress with rows of metal cones to create the jingles. Once completed, the dresses were given to four women, and he showed them the dance he saw in his dream. The women began dancing. By the end of the night, the little girl who had been sick with the flu was cured and dancing with them.

The power and symbolism of the jingle dress dance spread from the Ojibwe people in Minnesota to the Lakota and then westward into Montana and south into the Four Corners region. By the 1980s it was being performed by most of the nation’s Native communities.