Celebrating the Jingle Dress Dance

Dancers move in unison and a sound fills the air, like raindrops falling on a tin roof. Today’s Doodle by Ojibwe guest artist Joshua Mangeshig Pawis-Steckley celebrates the Jingle Dress Dance, which originated during the 1920s amongst the Ojibwe tribe somewhere between Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Ontario. The dance lives on today, notably in events such as the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe Grand Celebration Pow Wow this weekend in Hinckley, Minnesota.

According to stories passed throughout generations, the origin of the jingle dress dates back to when an Ojibwe girl fell sick, and the idea for the dress and dance came to her worried father through a vision. Hundreds of metal cones, known as ziibaaska’iganan, were fashioned and sewed onto her dress so that the dance movements would create a jingling sound.

The girl’s father taught his daughter the sacred dance, instructing her to always keep one foot on the ground—and eventually, her illness was cured. After the girl recovered, she taught her friends to make the dresses. Together, they created the first Jingle Dress Dance Society.

Over time, the choreography and dress style of the jingle dress has evolved, with increasingly intricate footwork learned through years of practice for the competitive pow wow circuit, as well as garments now ranging from aprons to full-length designs. Many dancers make their own dresses, as taught by parents or tribal elders. Some wear eagle feathers in their hair, or carry a feather fan.

Despite some changes over the years, what remains constant is the dance’s jingling sound. Today, the dance also serves to affirm the power of Native American women.

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Guest Artist Q&A with Joshua Mangeshig Pawis-Steckley

Today's Doodle was created by guest artist Joshua Mangeshig Pawis-Steckley, who divides his time between Wasauksing First Nation (in Ontario) and Vancouver. Below he shares his thoughts behind making the Doodle:

Q: Why was this topic meaningful to you personally?
A: Some of my cousins and friends are jingle dress dancers. I drum at pow wow with my uncle and cousins. 
 

Q: What were your first thoughts when you were approached about the project?
A: I was excited to hear from Google. When I heard the Doodle was about the Jingle Dress Dance, I was eager to get started. Watching the dancers at pow wow is one of my favorite things to do. 
 

Q: Did you draw inspiration from anything in particular for this Doodle?
A: Pow wow, family, Norval Morrisseau, and nature.

Q: What message do you hope people take away from your Doodle?
A: That Anishinaabe culture is beautiful. That indigenous women are strong and resilient, and the voice of our future.

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Early sketches and behind-the-scenes photos

 

 

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Ahmed Khaled Tawfik’s 57th Birthday

"My English was not good enough to read horror literature, so I started writing it myself,” said Egyptian doctor and author Ahmed Khaled Tawfik. Today’s Doodle celebrates the life and work of the first and most prolific Arab writer of horror and science fiction, born in Tanta, Egypt, on this day in 1962.

Growing up in a house full of books, he read works by Somerset Maugham, Mark Twain, Chekhov, and Tolstoy from his father’s extensive library. By the age of 10, Dr. Tawfik began writing his own adventure stories.

"You write to keep your mental stability," he said in an interview. However, making a living as a writer did not seem practical to Dr. Tawfik. Instead, he attended medical school, and later earned a PhD in tropical diseases and became a professor at his alma mater.

After writing secretly for many years, he accumulated a trove of manuscripts. "Every writer has close friends who tell him he is a genius, but I did not trust them,” he said, but eventually decided to send his work to a publisher. In January 1993, he published Ostorat Masas Al Demaa’a and Ostorat Al Rajol Al Tha’eb, the first of 80 installments in his Ma Waraa Al Tabiaa series of novels for young readers.

As a professor of medicine at Tanta University, Dr. Tawfik's education and career in medicine strongly influenced his work writing medical thrillers. He went on to author over 500 titles.

In this Doodle, he is depicted as writing on his desk, with some of his most notable characters in the background—Refaat Ismael, the main character of Ma Waraa Al Tabiaa in his famous suit, Alaa Abdel Azeem, the protagonist in Safari, and Abeer Abdel Rahman, the heroine of Fantazia.

Dr. Tawfik continues to be remembered as one of the most prolific Arab writers of his age.

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Jacques Demy’s 88th Birthday

Today’s Doodle celebrates French director Jacques Demy, born in Pont-Château, on this day in 1931. Demy fell in love with the movies early and longed to tell his own vividly colored visual stories. As part of postwar French cinema’s New Wave, Demy and other members of the movement, known as the Nouvelle Vague, reimagined filmmaking as a personal artistic expression rather than a commercial industry, inspiring a generation of independent auteurs in the process.

As a child, Demy created his own puppet shows and animated home movies before convincing his parents to let him study film in Paris. After two years at France’s Technical School of Photography and Cinematography, he assisted animator Paul Grimault and director Georges Roquier in the 1950s before getting the chance to direct his first feature.

Set in his childhood hometown of Nantes, Lola starred Anouk Aimée as a heartbroken cabaret singer awaiting the return of a lost love. The bittersweet film debuted in 1961. A year later, Demy married Agnès Varda, who would later direct her husband’s life story in the singular biopic Jacquot de Nantes, based in part on his own diaries.

Inspired by American musicals, Demy created a world of his own in wistfully romantic films like Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (The Young Girls of Rochefort), which featured Hollywood legend Gene Kelly, and Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), which put Catherine Deneuve in the spotlight and won the grand prize at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival.

A consummate cinephile and audiovisual craftsman, Demy infused his musicals and fantasies with a documentarian’s eye and a poet’s heart.

Bon anniversaire, Jacques Demy!

Doodle by Sophie Diao

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2019 ICC Cricket World Cup Begins!

Over 100 players, 10 teams, but only one cup.

Today’s Doodle celebrates the International Cricket Council’s 2019 World Cup, which opens at the Oval in London.​

Taking place every four years, the Cricket World Cup is the world’s leading contest in one-day cricket, and has become one of the most popular sporting events on the planet. Ten teams earn their chance to compete for the cup through a qualifying process that takes five to six years. This year’s round robin will be hosted in England and Wales.

Now England’s official national sport, it is said that cricket began as a children’s game in the Weald of rural England. Cricket spread to North America by the 17th century, eventually arriving in the British colonies of the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa and has since spread around the world.

The world’s first international cricket match, between Canada and the United States, took place in 1844. The first World Cup tournament was held in 1975, won by the West Indies team, who repeated the feat in 1979. This year’s defending champions are Australia, a perennial powerhouse that has won five of the eleven cups.

No matter how heated the competition may get, cricket is highly respected for maintaining high standards of fair play and good sportsmanship. Hence the phrase “It’s just not cricket,” which describes anything considered unfair.

May the best team win!

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Dame Cicely Saunders’ 100th Birthday

A pioneer of the modern hospice movement, Dame Cicely Saunders felt that all should live with “a sense of fulfillment and a readiness to let go.”

Born 100 years ago today, Saunders performed many roles in her life, including nurse, doctor, author, and social worker. It was while caring for a terminally ill patient that she recognized certain challenges other medical professionals of her time did not: that his diagnosis required a fundamentally different kind of healthcare.

Through this experience, Saunders envisioned an environment that focused care on a patient’s individual and specific needs. As a result, she went on to found St. Christopher’s, the first modern hospice, in a suburb of London in 1967. There, core values included vigilant pain-management as well as a holistic and individualized understanding of practical, medical, and psychological patient needs.

Not only did Saunders’ work inspire hundreds of other hospices worldwide, but her books and teachings also established a new branch of medicine known as palliative care, which addresses the importance of holistic care among patients with life-limiting illnesses. She also went on to establish a global charity focusing on palliative care research and education, Cicely Saunders International, which still works to improve the lives of patients with progressive illness to this day.

Today’s Doodle, created by London-based guest artist Briony May Smith, was inspired by Saunders' favorite anthology, All In the End is Harvest (1984) which states, “Love and life is an eternal thing, like the growth and reaping of the harvest."

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Special thanks to Christopher Saunders, brother of Dame Cicely Saunders and Life President of Cicely Saunders International, for his partnership on this project. Below, Christopher shares his thoughts on his sister:

Cicely came a long way from being a six-foot tall, shy, very intelligent girl who felt like a bit of an outsider, to being one of the very remarkable people who have positively impacted end-of-life care around the world. Yet there is still much work to be done. The need for palliative care has never been greater and is increasing rapidly given that people are living longer as a result of improvements in tackling acute disease. While each illness brings specific physical symptoms such as pain and fatigue, there are also more invisible ones such as helplessness and loneliness, which can too often become part of the final phase of life. Cicely’s medical research charity, Cicely Saunders International, enters the centenary year of her birth energised with the spirit of Cicely to meet these continuing challenges, and make a positive difference just as she did throughout her life.

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