Anna Huckabee, adopted when she was young, uses dance to connect with her heritage.
“Growing up with white parents, they really wanted me to continue my heritage and my culture and where I grew up there wasn’t a lot of native influence. I grew up really, really deep in the mountains of Colorado,” Huckabee said.
Huckabee said she is a Swinomish Squaxin, a Native American tribe from the La Conner, Washington, area which is not a federally recognized tribe.
“By talking (to) my family on the reservation and talking to my mom and my aunties and learning about pow wows and native heritage, I kind of found out what is something that can tie me back to my culture and that’s where I found jingle dress dancing,” Huckabee said.
She said she grew up near Boulder, Colorado, and she spoke often with her family which lived on the reservation in Colorado.
It was from them Huckabee said she learned about the jingle dress dance, which she performed at the Women’s March Jan. 19.
The story behind the jingle dress dance began a long time ago, Huckabee said, with a man and his dying granddaughter.
“He had this dream and the great spirit said you need to make this dress,” Huckabee said. “It looks like the jingle dress we have now it has tobacco can lids filled with tobacco and when it shakes when you dance the tobacco is going to fall out and bless the person you dance around or the ground, and so his wife, her grandmother made it and she danced around her granddaughter and she got better.”
Lysa Salsbury, director of the Women’s March said she and other organizers wanted this march to be as inclusive as possible and to honor the ancestral heritage of Moscow.
“I asked a former intern at the Women’s Center, JayLynn Rogers, if she knew of any Native American dancers who might be willing to perform a healing dance to open the march. She put me in touch with Anna,” Salsbury said.
Salsbury said the theme of the March this year was “End Violence against Women.” Huckabee also wanted to acknowledge the history of violence indigenous women have faced.
Huckabee, who is studying pre-med with a focus on exercise and health, said she is also part of the Native American Student Association.
“I found something that could tie me back to my culture and that’s where I found jingle dress dancing. I learned the story and I don’t know, it just kind of connected me back to my roots,” Huckabee said.
Kali Nelson can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @kalinelson6