For Indians, images are a means of celebrating mystery and not a manner of explaining it

- Jamake Highwater

In the New Hebrides, any dancer making a mistake was assaulted, wounded, and possibly killed by bowmen posted to keep careful watch for inaccuracies …

- Jamake Highwater

Art doesn't want to be familiar. It wants to astonish us. Or, in some cases, to enrage us. It wants to move us. To touch us. Not accommodate us, make…

- Jamake Highwater

White performances were always dull in comparison to the astonishing expressiveness of Black dancers. Behind the white person's inarticulate body we…

- Jamake Highwater

Art is a staple of mankind... So urgent, so utterly linked with the pulse of feeling that it becomes the singular sign of life when every other aspec…

- Jamake Highwater

For the Indian,dance is a personal form of prayer. When the Eagle Dancer puts on his costume,when he begins to dance to the music,he doesn't simply p…

- Jamake Highwater

Among the language of the American Indians, there is no word for 'art'... For Indians, everything is art... therefore needs no name.

- Jamake Highwater

Dance in this century has remained primarily a personal ritual operating, like most avant-garde art, as an idiosyncratic form rather than a tribal ex…

- Jamake Highwater

The story of dance in the Western world is as much an alternative vision of the events of history as is the folk history told for generations by prim…

- Jamake Highwater