Family Powwow in Richmond is a dance through history [Video]

She may be only 9 years old, but Iola Niedermayer takes a long view of history.

Her red hair sharply parted and pulled back in matching braids, Iola had just come off the dance floor — actually, it was the buffed tile landing of the soaring atrium of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts — where she joined hundreds who were moving and shaking it on Saturday with Native Americans from Arizona and California as part of a demonstration of their ancient terpsichore.

Iola — attending the Pocahontas Reframed Film Festival Family Powwow, a 2½-hour glimpse of the culture of the nation’s Indigenous people as part of an annual American Indian-focused film series by the VMFA and the Virginia Museum of History & Culture — said she’s better informed, having sampled firsthand, if only on a small scale, the experiences of people who settled in Virginia long before white Europeans …