How Osage dancer Maria Tallchief became America’s 1st major prima ballerina

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• John Yang:

  And now in our Hidden History series, we look back at the life of an Osage Nation dancer who left an indelible mark on the world of ballet. For Maria Tallchief, widely considered America's first major prima ballerina, dance was nothing short of an enchanting experience.

• Maria Tallchief:

  It's pure magic when it's right. It's just magical. It's so wonderful. It's — so for me it is a wonderful experience to work with dancers who respond to understand who see the difference.

• John Yang (voice-over):

  While her career took her to the stages of New York, Paris and Hamburg, Germany, she never turned her back on her Osage heritage. When friends advised you to call yourself tall Chiva to sound Russian or European, she refused.

  Elizabeth Marie Tallchief was born in 1925 on the Osage reservation in Oklahoma, the discovery of oil on Osage land made her family wealthy. It also led to the reign of terror in the early 1920s when dozens of Osage Nation citizens were murdered for their oil wealth.

  Tallchief took her first ballet lesson when she was three. Her mother wanted the best training possible so when tall chief was eight, the family moved to Los Angeles. Beginning when Tallchief was 12, she studied with the noted teacher Bronislava Nijinska, a former choreographer for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballet Russes.

  Nijinska gave Tallchief special attention helping her to perfect the poise and precision of movement that would define her career. At 17, she joined the famed Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, which had relocated to New York at the outbreak of World War II.

  It began a more than two decade professional career that took her to the top ballet companies in the world. She was the first American to dance with the Paris Opera Ballet, and she danced for the distinctively American choreographer, Agnes de Mille. Her defining collaboration was with groundbreaking choreographer George Balanchine, to whom she was briefly married.

• Maria Tallchief:

  He was a poet. George was a poet, and a musician and the greatest dance maker that ever lived, and I'm so lucky I was there, and I knew it. I was just lucky.

• John Yang (voice-over):

  And what is now the New York City Ballet. Balanchine named her prima ballerina, the first Native American to receive that honor. He created many roles for her, most notably the title role, and his version of Stravinsky's Firebird.

• Maria Tallchief:

  When I first dance Firebird was the most frightening and challenging thing of my life. And everybody in New York City was waiting to see what was going to happen because I had not done such an important role.

• John Yang (voice-over):

  In 1962, Tallchief performed for President John F. Kennedy and his predecessor Dwight Eisenhower in an American Pageant of the Arts. The televised event promoted fundraising for what is now the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.

  34 years later, she received a Kennedy Center Honor for her lifetime contributions to American culture. Other honors included induction into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

• Bill Clinton, Former U.S. President:

  Critics and fans said it was pointless to watch anyone else when she was on stage.

• John Yang (voice-over):

  And the National Medal of Arts awarded by President Bill Clinton.

  In retirement, Tallchief became an instructor teaching a new generation of dancers, and she and her sister founded the Chicago City Ballet. Tallchief died in 2013 at age 88.

  Today, she's honored on two pieces of U.S. currency, a $1 coin and a quarter. The dollar shows her on the tip of her toes. The quarter depicts her in the middle of a dramatic leap, illustrating both the grace and the power that characterized her artistry.

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