By Cynthia Leitich Smith
Jenna wants to jingle dance at Saturday's powwow, but her dress is silent — no tin cones sewn on yet — so she visits four women in her Muscogee community and borrows a row of jingles from each.
Jenna is Muscogee and lives in Oklahoma, and she has watched Grandma Wolfe's jingle-dance video enough times to know it in her feet. She wants to dance at the next powwow. But a jingle dress only sings when rows of rolled tin cones are sewn down it, and hers is bare. So she sets out to gather them one row at a time. Great-aunt Sis has jingles and doesn't dance anymore. Mrs. Scott is busy cooking for the whole powwow. Cousin Elizabeth, a lawyer, is too tied up at work this year. Grandma Wolfe hands over the last row. Every woman lends one row so her own dress won't lose its voice — and on Saturday, Jenna carries all four of them out onto the floor.
Almost nothing goes wrong here, and that's exactly why I'd hand it over. Jenna is a Muscogee girl in a present-day town — there's a car, a cousin with a law degree, a video on repeat — and the whole of her want is one specific thing she gets by asking the women in her family. No tragedy, no lesson about hardship. Some children meet Native people only inside a unit about something painful, and an afternoon where the biggest trouble is a dress that needs more jingles can do quiet repair that a heavier book can't. It also opens two doors at once: a six-year-old can ride the tink tink tink, while a ten-year-old may start noticing that every woman who gave up a row had her own reason for setting her dancing down.