Locating Popular Dance and Dance in Popular Culture: The Invented Choreographies of the Tomahawk Chop

The Tomahawk Chop has become a popular ritual for US sports fans, with its chant and its minimalistic choreography thoroughly woven into the fabric of US sports and popular culture. The mass mediatization of US sports and the invisibilization of Indigenous peoples in US popular culture have long conspired to posit Native American stereotypes as the tacit expectation of what Indigenous peoples look and sound like. The Chop scripts a well-rehearsed form of what Deloria terms “playing Indian” in which US Americans routinely “define themselves by what they [are] not.” Drawing on these cultural repertoires, Florida State University fans founded their ritual on the “war chant” and the Chop’s minimalist choreographic mimicry of an axe blade as a condensed racist stereotype of Indians as warlike and fearsome. In its simple choreography, the Tomahawk Chop not only scripts acts of identification with a specific sports team but also mediates popular feelings and imaginations of US American national and racial belonging.