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.
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