Native American Biography: Tanaya Winder, Duckwater Shoshone

 Tanaya Winder is enrolled in the Duckwater Shoshone Tribe, although she grew up on the Southern Ute Tribe, San Ignacio, Colorado.  Her background is Southern Ute, Shoshone, Dine, Paiute and Black,  She is a poet, vocal performer, including performance poetry, school teacher and motivational speaker.  She has several songs on YouTube.  With Cassandra opez she founded As/Us, an online literary magazine to promote women writers.  She also helps manage Dream Warriors Management which promotes Native American artists.  She published a work of poetry, "Words of Love."  She attended Stanford and graduated in English with an emphasis in creative writing.  She has an MFA from University of New Mexico.  I discovered her in the book #Not Your Princess.  

As Indigenous women writers and artists we are continually trying to exist, live and love in a world that doesn't always show its love for us.  This means, part of the artist's caall is to turn past traumas on their head, upside down, inside out, lift it up then put it back down as something changed and transformed so that others can find something beautiful or hopeful in it.  For that beauty and hope to exist we as Native American women must dive headfirst into the muck, ugliness, stark darkness of that wreckage.  This is what we do--we recast wounds in unending light.  And so light, love, and courage are circles we keep coming back to.  Tanaya Winder (Duckwater Shoshone). (From the Book "#Not Your Princess: Voices of Native American Women.

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Native American Biography: Maria Tallchief.

 Betty Marie Tallchief was born on the Osage Reservation in Oklahoma.  There she was introduced to attending pow woos with her grandmother.  Fortunate for her, the Osage people were generally wealthy due to oil having been found on their reservation.  Her father had been prudent in investing his oil money wisely, and her mother used the money to get dance lessons for Maria and her sister, Marjorie.  When they were young women the family moved to Los Angeles so the girls could continue their dance education.  Her name was changed to Maria Tallchief so as to make it more exotic as a title for her dance.  So although raised mostly off the reservation, Maria was the first indigenous person to become a prima ballerina.  She was the first American to break into the Russian and Paris ballets.  

After she retired, she and her sister organized the Chicago ballet.  She served as the choreographer.  She was inducted to the National Women's Hall of Fame.  She received the National Medal of Arts.  She also received honors at the Kennedy Center for her contribution to dance.  The Osage honored her with a new name when she was older, Wa-Xthe-Thomba, meaning woman of two worlds.  She was a member of the European style of dance, as well as that of a Native American woman.