Delmar Uqualla is a teacher and activist from Wichita who fully embraces her Native heritage. She dances at powwows and travels across the nation to bring a better understanding of Indigenous culture and traditions. For this edition of In The Mix, Carla Eckels talks with Uqualla about her experiences.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You were born in Wichita. What tribes are you a part of?
I am ... Kumeyaay — [they] are from [the] San Diego area, Havasupai — [they] are from the Grand Canyon, and Kiowa and Comanche — [they] are from here, the plains area into Texas.
How are you related to the late Wichita artist Francis Blackbear Bosin — who created Wichita's 44-ft-tall sculpture, Keeper of the Plains?
He is my grandmother's first cousin. I grew up around his paintings and I would always get lost in them; staring at them at my grandmother's house. ...Being able to see the Keeper of the Plains where the two rivers meet is really special. For me,when I was a kid and the powwows [were] there, the Keeper was a little lower and we used to try to get up there and touch his feet (laugh).
Speaking of the powwows how did you learn to dance?
I learned from my aunt and my mom. They grew up doing more of the slower dances like buckskin dancing, and also traditional cloth dancing. And those are kind of more "you walk gently on the earth." And to me, they always said, "the earth can feel you, so [when] you're walking, you want to walk as gently as you can, but also while moving your fringes or your shawl on your arm." Sometimes you also hold a medicine bag or a fan. And you usually put up the fan at the proper time with a drum beat.
So they taught me how to do that. And also there's another dance — the jingle dress dance. I brought in a jingle dress today. ...[It's] one of my favorite dresses that has ever been made for me and you can hear it jingling (laughs).
Describe one of your favorite dances.
The fancy shawl dancing. It's one of the faster dances so you're usually on your toes and you're doing all these elaborate things with your feet, and kind of footwork spinning around and hopping. You're also spinning around with the shawl so your shawl will fan out and there's also more up north, they call it the crow hop, and you kind of hop and jump and you have to keep your feet together and sidestep. For me, I felt like it was really freeing to be able to go out there and put all your energy into doing this dance into spinning, and people really enjoy it since it's so high energy.
My grandma, Ernestine, taught me a lot about how to dress and the reason why we wear certain things and what it protects us from.
Sometimes we have different tools, like the fan. ...[It] depends on what kind of feathers you have on it, but [the fan] really works to kind of move the energy when we're dancing, or goes along with what the [prayer/song] is, ...and then we also have a medicine bag sometimes and sometimes we have medicine in there, like cedar or tobacco, for protection too.
So now your mother, does she also work on some of your dresses? Does she help create?
My mother works on my beadwork. She does more of medallions and big beaded medallions and earrings. She really taught me a lot, about being graceful in it too. She used to do these prayers for events or powwows that involved Native plain sign language. She would do the Lord's Prayer in sign language, and she taught me how to do that. When I saw her doing that as a kid, she looked like an angel being up there and doing the sign language in a full buckskin dress.
You also model. Tell me about the black coat you are wearing.
I brought [in] this coat that my grandmother made recently for my birthday back in the fall. I learned that the fabric came from Teton which is a Native Fabric Company that promotes Native artists.
And it kind of has ... this ... turtle spirit. It's purple and all sorts of different blues and oranges and greens and yellow and there [are] different sorts of crosses and designs. On the bottom, there are ribbons and more of the fabric. On the front, she added some rabbit fur and some of these turquoise buttons. It was always a dream of hers to be a fashion designer or a model. And for me being able to go out into the world, more like in New York and London and all over the place, and being able to just wear what she creates; it feels like it's coming to fruition and she's just really proud that her designs get to be out there. And I'm happy to be able to to wear them and share more of my culture at the same time by wearing them.
What is one of the misconceptions or things that people need to really know as far as it relates to Native American culture?
First of all, the history is dark with what happened and all. ...It wasn't really that long ago when indigenous peoples here were being taken away from their land and being put into boarding schools or ... just being displaced.
And now, some of us, [and] some of the elders, still remember a lot of the traditions, and some of them don't, and some of us are relearning. I think we're all … I don't want to say vulnerable because we've also been really resilient, but we're all healing while we're maintaining these traditions. So with powwows, even though it is entertainment — and it is fun, it should also not be seen just as entertainment because it's also our prayers.
...We've been doing that for a long time and for the land and with the land, and for people to be able to remember that. Also, [it wasn't long ago that] the Kitikiti'sh, or the Wichita Natives that were here before, were here and kind of took care of the land.
I always just get emotional thinking about it. And at the same time, I feel we're coming back with all these things and sharing our stories and the history. Because I know a lot of it isn't really shared in school; some of it is, but being able to educate, I feel like for me, has been a real honor and privilege, because some people are still really learning and I'm still learning a lot too. I'm learning the languages [and] the reason why we do certain things. I do my best to listen to the elders and when I'm around them. So being able to preserve that would just keep it alive. And that's really, really, really important to me.
