To teach ballet is to bring dancers into a world of meanings and movements spanning several hundred years of inherited traditions. Since at least the early 2000s, ballet educators have worked to unpack and decolonize these traditions using the concept of a critical pedagogy to address social and cultural issues arising from ballet's complicated history. The purpose of this article is to contribute to this ongoing conversation by revisiting Joann Kealiinohomoku's (1970) article "An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance." My goal is to consider how Kealiinohomoku's provocative idea of ballet-as-ethnic-dance could be applied to my own teaching and in support of ballet pedagogy in higher education today. I ask what this phrase meant to Kealiinohomoku. How might this idea shift perceptions about, and languages for teaching, ballet today? How might I position or recenter my ballet pedagogy to explore how a now global dance form can represent the ethnicity of a broader community?