She was an Osage dancer. She was also America’s first prima ballerina.

ByErin Blakemore

Published October 27, 2023

• 9 min read

When Maria Tallchief took to the stage, she didn’t just dance—she flew. Athletic and graceful, she stretched, hovered, and almost levitated, riveting audiences and embodying the wonder of ballet.

“We are always aware that the air is her true milieu,” dance critic John Martin wrote of the dancer in 1949.

Now, a decade after her death, American ballet icon Maria Tallchief has once again taken flight, this time on the reverse side of a U.S. quarter. It’s an honor she earned as America’s first prima ballerina—and one of the most recognizable Native Americans of modern times.

Oklahoma roots

She was born Elizabeth Marie Tall Chief on Osage Nation land in Fairfax, Oklahoma, to an Osage father and Scotch-Irish mother in 1925. Osage members then owned a fortune in oil wealth—in part thanks to her great-grandfather, who had helped the tribe secure mineral rights on their land earlier in the century.

Those rights presented dangers to the Osage Nation, however; some white settlers targeted and even murdered Osage to access their oil rights. Tall Chief’s family was no exception: A young cousin, Pearl, lost her entire family in a firebombing and was targeted by men who attempted to steal the oil fortune she inherited.

(This is the true story of the Osage murders.)

Yet Betty Marie, as she was called in childhood, grew up feeling “like my father owned the town,” as she wrote in her 1997 biography. She and her younger sister Marjorie went to private school and took piano and dance lessons thanks to their mother, who dreamed of stardom for her girls. In the 1930s the family moved to California so they could pursue dance and music.

As a student in Beverly Hills, she was teased by classmates who made fun of Native Americans and pretended not to understand her last name. “After a while, they became accustomed to me, but the experience was painful,” she later recalled. “Eventually I turned the spelling of my last name into one word.”

A young ballerina

In California, Tallchief began seriously studying ballet with legendary choreographer and teacher Bronislava Nijinska, and fell in love with the strict art form. Soon, she was performing at the Hollywood Bowl and danced in a Judy Garland movie.

Her big break came after high school in 1942, when she joined the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo on a tour of Canada and the U.S. As it toured, the company debuted new ballets, promoted avant-garde composers and choreographers, and breathed new life into the art form, introducing ballet to people across the continent.

At the time, ballet was largely seen as an elite, largely European tradition, dominated by Russian dancers. No American woman had ever been recognized as a “prima ballerina assoluta,” the highest honor within the profession. The Ballet Russe helped bring the art form closer to home.

Still the company’s American dancers were pressured to change their names to sound “more Russian”—and Tallchief was encouraged to change her last name to Tallchieva. But she refused. Though she eventually adopted her middle name as her first, she would not abandon her roots. “Tallchief was my heritage, and I was proud of it,” she later wrote.

“She was ferocious in her loyalty and determination,” says poet and editor Elise Paschen, Tallchief’s daughter.

Marriage and musehood

That determination caught the eye of one of the world’s most famous choreographers, George Balanchine. They married in 1946.

“I was his wife, but I also was his ballerina,” she later wrote. “He was my husband, but he was also my choreographer. He was a poet and I was his muse.” She followed him to Paris, becoming the first American to dance with the Paris Opera Ballet. Everywhere she danced, she turned heads, and Balanchine cast her in ever more spectacular roles.

(Ukraine’s ballet dancers are a “voice of resistance.”)

In 1949, Tallchief danced the most spectacular of all: the title role in Balanchine’s revival of The Firebird for the newly founded New York City Ballet. Composed by Igor Stravinsky and featuring sets designed by Marc Chagall, the ballet was dynamic and passionate. It was the perfect vehicle for Tallchief.

“Everybody had to go see this amazing, gorgeous creature,” dance critic Jordan Levin later remembered. Critics, and the public, raved about her performance. “Maria Tallchief…merits the style of prima ballerina assoluta,” wrote a critic in The Guardian, referring to the highest rank for females in the world of ballet. She took curtain call after curtain call as the entire audience shouted her name.

The career that followed was nothing short of stratospheric. Tallchief now symbolized a new era for American ballet. Vibrant, graceful, and powerful, she became a household name. So did many of her roles, from the Sugar Plum Fairy in Balanchine’s revival of The Nutcracker to the Swan Queen in his reworked Swan Lake. By the 1950s, she earned more than any other dancer of her era.

An American prima ballerina

Tallchief represented a distinctly American approach to ballet, and the public was fascinated by her Native American heritage. As a stereotype-shattering Native woman with rare national recognition, she became what historian Rebekah Kowal calls “an unwitting protagonist in a cultural debate over Native American self-determination.”

Many reviews fixated on her ancestry; in a typical feature in the Kansas City Star in 1954, an interviewer remarked that she “varies from Indian trait,” pointed out that she had grown up in a house, not a teepee, and repeatedly called her an “Indian princess,” a reference to a 1953 honor conferred by the Osage Nation.

(For the Osage Nation, photography has harmed—and healed.)

By then, Tallchief was used to the attention—and the public’s interest in her identity. “She never seemed to let it bother her,” says Paschen.

“Above all, I wanted to be appreciated as a prima ballerina who happened to be Native American, never as someone who was an American Indian ballerina,” Tallchief wrote. Over the years, her Osage roots “acquired deeper meaning,” and she served as a role model to other dancers who bucked traditions of race and style on stage.

Legacy

After years at the top of the dance world, Tallchief retired in 1966. By then, she had divorced and remarried, and she moved into backstage roles. She co-founded the Chicago City Ballet with her sister Marjorie—also a professional ballerina—in the 1970s. And she tirelessly focused on passing her passion along.

“She was so committed to continuing ballet’s legacy,” says Paschen. “Transmitting that knowledge to the next generation was important to her.” In 1996, Tallchief received a Kennedy Center Honor and was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

Tallchief died in 2013. But her legacy still reverberates—and in 2023, she received an honor only shared by 19 other women when she was given a spot on a special series of American Women Quarters produced by the U.S. Mint. Tallchief’s quarter features her in the midst of a dramatic leap as The Firebird. It also includes the name her grandmother gave her: “Wa-Xthe-Thoṉba,” or “Two Standards”—reflecting her dual roles as a ballet dancer and Osage woman.

Paschen says her mother would be thrilled about the honor but would likely have also taken it in stride. “She wasn’t concerned about fame,” she says. “What she really cared about was the art in and of itself. She was magnificent.”

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