Home & Abroad: Veteran dancer performs all over

Robert Murray is a traditional dancer and has been headman dancer for two of the tribes he belongs to – Otoe-Missouri and Iowa.
He is also half Ponca, and is proud of all three tribes and celebrates and shares the culture of each one. He hoop dances and performs the Eagle dance and at 51 years old still “fancy dances every once in a while.” This dance is usually reserved for  younger powwow dancers.
He first danced in a powwow arena when he was 19 months old at a Ponca powwow. He said he has danced every year since then except for a total of three years, when he stopped dancing to observe deaths in his family.
“I’ve been in that arena for a long time,” he said.
He also has been singing with the powwow drum group “Yellowhammer” for nearly 17 years. The group travels to powwows throughout the country, he said. He also finds time to sing with the “Zotigh” drum group.
He’s an adopted member of the Kiowa Gourd Clan and is a member of the Ponca Haloshka Warrior Society.
When he’s not traveling the country, he and his 3-year-old grandson attend local powwows.
“We go every weekend during the summer and we camp out,” he said. “For me, with singing and dancing, I just want to pass it on to the younger generation.”
Murray and his Full Circle Dance Company have been sharing powwow singing and dancing since 1995. Dancers in the group perform most of today’s powwow dances and have performed throughout Indian Country and Europe.
A contract with Armed Forces Entertainment allowed the group to visit military bases in the northern Balkans, Iceland, London, England and Vienna, Austria in the late 1990s.
He first visited Europe in 1993, he said, with the Great American Indian Dancers. The group’s goal is to dispel existing stereotypes that encourage people to view Indians as historical figures or even worse, as Hollywood characters. The group has performed at shows and festivals in Madrid and Barcelona, Spain; Switzerland; and Sicily, Venice and Rome, Italy. Murray can’t recall every place he visited in Europe, but said it was an enjoyable experience.
“Oh shoot, there were a lot of places. I can’t remember all of their names,” he said.
He added that he would live in Rome because of the artwork. He appreciates all types of art.
“That’s where you need to go if you’re interested in art,” he said. “But it was hard me to visit with people there because of our language barrier. We used mostly sign language.”
A special memory for him, he said, was staying with a host family among the Catalan people near Barcelona, Spain. The Catalans live in the once autonomous region of Catalonia. During their week stay, the GAID group performed inside a dormant volcano, one of 12 volcanoes in that area, Murray said.
The host family showed the group the Catalonia region and hosted meals with traditional food. He said the GAID group related to the Catalans in one major way.
“They said way back the Spaniards came and took all the best land that they had and now they’re like on reservations,” he said. “So, they had a lot of respect for us and they were very nice to us.”
GAID once did a three-month stint in Italy, in 2002, doing five performances a day, seven days a week. Murray said the performances were only about 30 minutes each, but still took a toll on the group. But, he said, it was worth it because the group had 5,000 to 6,000 people at every show.
“They enjoyed our culture,” he said.
He said in Italy the dance group always had “groupies” who followed them around and were very interested in learning more about Indian culture.
Murray is not planning to go back to Europe anytime soon, but he is going to Los Angeles to attend an Indian film festival where he hopes to dance and teach the knowledge his elders began sharing with him nearly 50 years ago.