Date of this Version Historians who have covered the dance
controversy usually treat it just in passing as one of the
events in John Collier's reform career before he became Franklin
Roosevelt's Commissioner of Indian Affairs. They have generally
characterized the public debate over Indian dances as a struggle
over whether religious freedom should be extended to Native
Americans. To many Native Americans, the threat to ban Indian
dances certainly did impinge on their religious practices. Yet,
the controversy itself involved more than a constitutional
debate on religious freedom. Many of the non-Indian participants
in the controversy were white women who, in an era in which
gender roles and female sexuality were in flux, used the
controversy to voice their anxieties, their hopes, and their
visions regarding new roles and sexual standards. In their
discourse regarding Indian dances, these white women revealed a
greater concern with emerging sexual mores in American society
at large than with the traditional rel