Seven-time champion hoop dancer Lisa Odjig says she remembers the moment she realized she wanted to be a performer:
“Back in Wiikwemkoong, Manitoulin Island, we had our community gathering … I was eight or nine and I went to our pow wow and they were having the grand entry so, that’s when all the dancers come in and you hear the live singing and the live drumming…and I just got goosebumps…and I thought, ‘I should be out there,'” said Odjig.
That was the day Odjig said she wanted to learn more about her culture and who she was as an indigenous person.
Since then, she has embraced other artistic aspects of her roots through beading her own moccasins and jewelry and sewing her own performance clothing. As a child, Odjig studied Fancy Dance but when she was around sixteen years old, her uncle Gordie Odjig offered to teach her hoop dance.
“That was that evening when he taught me my first twelve hoops – what to do with one hoop, two, three, what the hoop dance means, where it comes from…I felt connected to it,” said Odjig.
She said hoop dance originated in the south-western states of the U.S. with healing as a focus but the storytelling and teaching aspects of the dance, — use of the hoops to depict images from nature like the eagle, the flower and lightning design – are all meant to show a connection to the land around us.
“Just to remember that connection we have to the earth, to each other and to give thanks for these beautiful creations,” said Odjig.
She has performed all over the world, including the Winter Olympic Games Closing Ceremony in Salt Lake City but the one performance that stands out above the rest was the day she became the first woman World champion hoop dancer at the annual Heard Museum World Championship Hoop Dance contest in Phoenix, Arz., in 2000.
“It was surreal…for about three years before that, before I won, I always won second place and it was always just by two points or three points. It was one of the best memories I’ll ever have in my life,” said Odjig.
She won the adult world champion hoop dance title again in 2003 and while each performance is different – at a different event in a different city for a different audience — the one thing Odjig keeps the same is her intention for the dance.
“I’m dancing for the land of course, the animals and just for protection of the land, the water. It’s a really great feeling,” said Odjig.
Odjig is looking for another win and is training to compete again at the next Hoop Dance championships in February 2020.