ASU student finds connection to his family's history in dance archives
Graduate student Garrett Keeto looks through the book shelves in the Cross Cultural Dance Collection at ASU Library. He said he wants more students to access the materials in the collection and that he aims to help people see how arts can connect to and create community.
First-year graduate student Garrett Keeto was visiting the Cross-Cultural Dance Resources Collections at Arizona State University as part of a course project when he discovered something unexpected: a book written by his great-great-great-grandmother.
“Seeing her book in the archives really shocked me,” he said. “I wouldn’t have thought they would consider it archival. I was blown away.”
A member of the Akimel O'odham community, Keeto attended Corona del Sol High School in Tempe, Arizona, and then received an undergraduate degree in performance and movement from the ASU School of Music, Dance and Theatre. He came back to ASU for a graduate degree in interdisciplinary digital media and performance through the same school.
His great-great-great-grandmother, Anna Moore Shaw, wrote “A Pima Past” in 1974. It tells the story of the Akimel O'odham people and contains the history of their past as well as the effects of European colonization. Keeto grew up with the stories from the book and knew it had been published, but had no idea it was in the archives at ASU.
The Cross-Cultural Dance Resources Collections is a special collection library, cultural artifact museum and scholarly archive on dance. It includes more than 15,000 books, journals, photos, films, recordings, artifacts, instruments, masks and costumes. The collections are stewarded by curator Shan Chuah and supported in part by a generous gift from Elsie Ivancich Dunin (professor emerita, UCLA), which allows the School of Music, Dance and Theatre to make all these resources available to students, faculty and the dance community.
Since 1965, the co-founder of Cross-Cultural Dance Resources, Joann Keali`inohomoku (1930-2015), conducted fieldwork research with the Hopi, the Hopi-Tewa of northern Arizona, the Yaqui, the Zuni and the Apache of the Southwest United States. In “Native America in the Twentieth Century: An Encyclopedia,” she wrote, "No description of Native Americans is complete without full attention on dance and its context."
Keeto became familiar with the Cross-Cultural Dance Resources as an undergraduate student. Professor Naomi Jackson spoke about the importance of cultural history and gave him a book on Indigenous dance.
“She told me that one day I can pass it on, just like she passed it on to me,” Keeto said. “It’s sitting on my shelf in a place of honor.”
But Keeto was stunned to discover his great-great-great-grandmother’s book on the shelves in the university archives. He said it’s an honor and has opened his mind to future opportunities.
“Who would have thought that I would have something that recognizes my culture in an archival space?” Keeto said. “I realized I wanted to study so much more.”
Growing up as a dancer, Keeto originally studied ballet. A trip to Chicago with his dance team made him realize he wanted to study dance professionally. As an undergraduate, he focused on breaking. Now he’s reexamining what it means to connect and preserve culture through art. For Keeto, that means creating art that reflects his heritage and inspiring the next generation of Indigenous artists.
“There aren’t many people from my background who continue in dance,” Keeto said. “Our culture is based on art. Why is no one continuing that?”
That is part of what Keeto is exploring in his graduate studies.
“I want to take my ancestral movement and implement it in my dance movement and my practice,” he said.
Keeto said he wants more students to access the materials within the Cross-Cultural Dance Resources collection at ASU. He wants to help people see how arts can connect to and create community.
“At ASU, we are so culturally rich. I want to help people connect to my heritage and to their heritage,” Keeto said. “I want people to come from all over the world to ASU and know that they have a home here. Dance can do that.”
For more School of Music, Dance and Theatre stories, visit https://musicdancetheatre.asu.edu/about/news.
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