Rosalie Mae Jones

Rosalie Mae Jones, known professionally as Daystar, is a dancer, choreographer, educator and founder and artistic director of DAYSTAR: Contemporary Dance-Drama of Indian America.

Early life and education Rosalie Mae (in some sources May) Jones was born on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana in 1941. She was raised off the reserve in the town of Cut Bank, studied ballet and piano as a child, and was encouraged by her parents to pursue higher education. She attended Fort Wright College, where she studied piano, and a class in Modern Dance led by Hanya Holm, which changed the course of her studies. While at Utah, she studied under Joan Woodbury and Shirley Ririe, and met her life-long mentor, Barry Lynn.

Career While studying for her master's degree at the University of Utah, Jones was hired by the Institute of American Indian Arts to produce what would become "Sipapu: A Drama of Authentic Dance and Chants of Indian America" which featured thirty Modern dancers and two hundred traditional dancers from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Later, at Juilliard, her studies involved working with fellow student Cordell Morsette and members of the Flandreau Indian High School in South Dakota to produce "The Gift of the Pipe" a re-telling of the story of White Buffalo Calf Woman. The company distinguished itself by developing modern dance performances featuring Native American stories and oral histories. In the early 1990s, she chaired the Institute of American Indian Arts Department of Performing Arts in Santa Fe. From 2005 to 2017 she taught in the Indigenous Studies program at Trent University in the area of Indigenous performance.

Jones' style has been described as encompassing multiple styles that, while restaging Indigenous stories, also seeks to reclaim identities on a foundation of traditional culture while demonstrating a mastery of Western stage dance techniques. The Gift of the Pipe (1969) with Cordell Morsette Daystar: An American Indian Woman Dances Tales of Old Man jiibayaabooz: Light In The Underworld (2014) with Coman Poon and Heryka Miranda Dancing the Four Directions (2017) No Home but the Heart (2018)

Awards

National Endowment for the Arts Choreographer's Fellowship, 1995–1997