Social gatherings play a fundamental role in Native American communities.  As pictures in the APS collections demonstrate, hunting, fishing, harvesting crops, and food preparation are often communal activities.

Dances and other ceremonies are frequently portrayed in visual imagery, such as the Ojibwe or Anishinabe dance painted in Minnesota in 1826. A Cherokee ball game, shown here in remarkable action shots from 1888, brought the entire community together for a night of dances before the game was played the next day. In the 1940s, anthropologist Frank G. Speck collaborated with elder Will West Long to document Cherokee dances and music. The Yanomamo of Venezuela are famous in anthropology as “the fierce people”—a perception created partly by dramatic photographs of war dances from the 1960s.

Many ceremonies are sacred and private. Even though outsiders may have described, drawn, or photographed these types of ceremonies in the past, some Native communities now prefer those texts and images to remain restricted. Therefore, the APS does not include such pictures on its website, though they are available for study on-site. (See Cultural Sensitivity for more information.)

A number of gatherings, however, are public, such as the Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial held annually in New Mexico since 1922 to celebrate indigenous cultures from all over the continent. Some Native American community events demonstrate cultural blending. For instance, photographs from the 1950s by anthropologist Ruben Reina show Mayan men in Guatemala dressed as Christian apostles. Still photographs can only convey a fraction of the experience of such events; viewers must imagine the music, movement, and emotions for themselves.