Finding My Dance
Review posted March 26, 2025.
Penguin Workshop, 2022. 32 pages.
Review written December 29, 2022, from a library book.
Starred Review
Finding My Dance is a picture book autobiography of a dancer -- a dancer of all kinds of music, beginning when she was four years old and received her first jingle dress, hand sewn by her mom.
Ria begins the book giving her name in her nation's language, which means "Beautiful Thunder Woman." She introduces herself as from the Ho-Chunk Nation in Wisconsin and Sandia Pueblo in New Mexico. Then she talks about how her heritage built her passion for dance, something those tribes value deeply.
She tells about first being brought into the powwow circle when she was very young and spending summers on the powwow trail, dancing with family and friends.
Later, she studied other kinds of dance -- modern, jazz, tap, contemporary, and ballet. She joined a competitive dance team and was named International Dance Challenge Champion.
She sometimes was made to feel she didn't fit in, but her indigenous heritage was her foundation, fueling her love of dance and connection with the earth. There are many beautiful pages in this book. I love the spread with postcards from many places all over the world where she traveled as a professional dancer, and I also love the spread where she talks about being given a set of eagle wings.
The eagle flies the highest in the sky, and we believe their feathers carry our prayers to our ancestors -- it is a messenger.
The connection to sky elements has always been a part of who I am.
When I performed my eagle dance while wearing the wings,
it felt like the eagle was with me the entire time.
This picture book does a lovely job of expressing not so much a list of facts about her career (Alas! There is no back matter), but her feelings about dance and about her tribes and her connections to the world. A truly beautiful book.