The Foundation

Welcome to Unit 10: Dancing in Step

At a powwow, the drum sits at the center of the arena. Everything moves around it, the dancers, the families, the vendors, the singers. The drum is not accompaniment. It is the heartbeat. Dancers enter in grand entry, moving clockwise around the arena in a procession that honors the space and the people gathered there. Elders lead. Children follow. The arena fills with color and sound.

Every piece of regalia a dancer wears is made with intention. Jingles on a jingle dress are cut and rolled from metal by hand. The fringe on a grass dancer's outfit is selected to move like the prairie grass the dance honors. The roach headdress a Traditional dancer wears reflects the identity of their family and their warrior lineage. Regalia is not costume. It is biography, worn, not put on.

In this unit you will build a page that introduces six dance traditions across the Lakota, Dakota, and Ojibwe nations. You will use CSS Grid to create a card layout for six illustrated dancer images. You will write CSS hover effects that reveal each dance name when a visitor moves their mouse over a card. And you will write JavaScript that opens a modal, a popout window, with the full story of each dance and its regalia when a card is clicked. You have already used JavaScript once. This unit takes that same skill further.

Read First

Before writing any code, spend a few minutes with one of these resources. You are looking for one thing to hold onto: what does powwow mean to the people who gather there? Not just what it is, but what it represents, community, continuity, identity.

The Smithsonian NMAI is one of the most thorough sources on powwow in any medium. Indian Country Today covers contemporary powwow life across many nations. White Earth is an Ojibwe nation in Minnesota whose website includes cultural resources relevant to Ojibwe dance traditions. Any of these will give you strong grounding for the paragraph you are about to write.

Going deeper: The dance descriptions you will build in Stages 6 and 7 draw from Heartbeat of the People: Music and Dance of the Northern Powwow by Tara Browner (University of Illinois Press, 2002). If your school or public library has it, it is the most detailed account of Northern powwow dance styles available.

Build the Page Structure

Type the code below. This builds your page foundation and the hero section. The hero uses a deep midnight indigo background, darker and richer than any previous unit's hero, appropriate for a subject tied to ceremony, movement, and gathering after dark. You will replace the placeholder paragraph with your own research writing in Step 5.

Why These Styles?

• background: #1a1237 on #hero, a deep midnight indigo, darker than any previous unit's hero. The color of a sky just before stars emerge. Powwow gatherings often continue into the evening, and the drum carries through the night. The color sets that tone from the first line.
• font-size: 3rem on #hero h1, larger than previous units. The title needs to carry weight on the page. At 3rem it lands with presence without taking up the full screen.
• letter-spacing: -0.02em on #hero h1, a small negative value that pulls the letters slightly closer together. At large font sizes, the spacing between letters can start to feel loose. Tightening it just a little makes the heading look more deliberate and polished. This is a typographer's detail, and it is worth knowing.
• rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.65) on .tagline, dimmed to 65% opacity white. Lower than the paragraph text at 85%, which creates visual hierarchy: the title commands the most attention, the paragraph is for reading, and the tagline is a quiet breath between them.
• color: #d4a853 on #hero a, warm gold. Against the deep indigo background, gold creates a contrast that feels traditional and celebratory. Every unit uses a distinct link color in its hero that reflects the subject matter. Gold is the right choice here.
• max-width: 680px on #hero p, limits line length. Long lines of text are hard to read because the eye has to travel too far across the screen before returning to the next line. A cap around 650–700px is a reliable choice for comfortable reading.

Write Your Research Paragraph

Replace "Write your research here." with one paragraph written in your own words about powwow. Use what you read in Step 2. You might address one or more of these ideas:

• What a powwow is and who gathers there
• The role of the drum at the center of the arena
• What grand entry means and why it matters
• What regalia represents to the dancers who wear it
• How powwow connects the Lakota, Dakota, and Ojibwe peoples, and many others
• What it means to say that powwow is a living tradition, not a historical one

Write in your own voice. One strong paragraph is enough. You are writing for someone who has never attended a powwow and knows nothing about it, help them understand why it matters.