Hoop Dance Dynasty

Thanks to the pull of love, one of today’s most acclaimed hoop dancing families in the nation helped to revive the native dance that had all but died by the 1980s. When Ken Duncan, an Arizona Apache, followed his sweetheart Doreen, a North Dakota Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara, to Brigham Young University in 1976, they joined the university’s native dance troupe. Ken remembers its 10 members were “twice as many as all the hoop dancers in all of North America at the time—it was almost a