Maria Tallchief: The Native American Woman Who Transformed Ballet
School of American BalletMaria Tallchief became the first Native American prima ballerina.
As a girl growing up in early-20th-century Oklahoma, Maria Tallchief and her sister were often encouraged to act out “Indian” dances at country fairs.
“It wasn’t remotely authentic,” Tallchief later wrote of the experience.
“Traditionally, women didn’t dance in Indian tribal ceremonies. But I had toe shoes on under my moccasins, and we both wore fringed buckskin outfits, headbands with feathers, and bells on our legs. We’d enter from opposite wings, greet each other, and start moving to a tom-tom rhythm.”
But Tallchief’s early experiences didn’t dissuade her from pursuing dancing. The daughter of an Osage man and a Scottish-Irish woman, she’d found a passion for the craft and soon leaped into the world of ballet.
After training in Los Angeles, Tallchief moved to New York and snagged a part in Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, a leading touring company, in 1942. There, Tallchief’s talent attracted the ire of some of the other dancers. But it also caught the eye of famed choreographer George Balanchine.
Before long, Tallchief became Balanchine’s muse — and briefly his wife. At Balanchine’s New York City Ballet, he even created a role specifically for Tallchief in his 1949 version of Stravinsky’s The Firebird.
In a rave review of Tallchief’s performance, a New York Times dance critic swooned that Balanchine had “asked her to do everything except spin on her head, and she does it with complete and incomparable brilliance.”
Tallchief also danced as the Swan Queen in Balanchine’s version of Swan Lake and the Sugar Plum Fairy in his version of The Nutcracker. Even after she and Balanchine divorced in 1950, she continued dancing with his company and other companies until the late 1960s. She later went on to work as a dance instructor and artistic director in Chicago.
Maria Tallchief, who died at age 88 in 2013, is remembered today as America’s first major prima ballerina, and the first Native American prima ballerina. But Tallchief always saw herself as a dancer above anything else.
“Above all, I wanted to be appreciated as a prima ballerina who happened to be a Native American, never as someone who was an American Indian ballerina,” she once said.
