Circling Back to Healing
Deanne Hupfield teaches powwow dance online to reach a wider audience
While teaching basic powwow steps, Deanne Hupfield reminds her students of Canada’s recent history of forced assimilation. “This was against the law; you could go to jail for learning this dance,” she explains.
Hupfield, who is Anishinaabe, is the creator of the “How To Powwow Dance” YouTube channel where she posts video tutorials like “OLD STYLE Jingle Dance Steps” and “How To Powwow Dance FOR KIDS.” Collectively, her videos have more than 50,000 views. She also hosts online workshops for making jingle dresses.
Dancing carries a heavy significance in many Indigenous cultures. To understand why, it’s important to understand Canada’s role in the displacement and genocide of Indigenous Peoples, which forced them from their traditional lands and culture. Laws through the Indian Act sought to assimilate Indigenous Peoples, prohibiting ceremony, language and dancing.
This colonialism saw countrywide policies and invoked the residential school system: Canada forcibly removed Indigenous children from their homes and communities to go to schools hundreds of miles away as a means to assimilate them into the dominant Eurocentric culture. Children were harshly punished for practising their culture or speaking their language. Additionally, the ’60s Scoop saw thousands of children removed from their homes and adopted by white families. Some of Hupfield’s family members are survivors of residential schools and the ’60s Scoop, which she says stripped much of the culture from her family.
Hupfield describes dance as a fight to gain back that culture. She attended her first powwows as a toddler. She wanted to dance, but her mother didn’t know the steps, so she encouraged Hupfield to go dance with the women in the ring. Dancing is now a path to healing that she always circles back to.
As Hupfield tells her story, she speaks of the anti-Indigenous racism and bullying she endured in Thunder Bay, O.N., and how normal it seemed. In 2017, her cousin Barbara Kentner died six months after being hit by a trailer hitch that was thrown from the window of a passing car. (At the time of this writing in early November 2020, Brayden Bushby is charged with manslaughter and aggravated assault and is facing a criminal trial.) It wasn’t until Hupfield was speaking with her future husband, in Toronto, that she realized how much she normalized this racism. It moves her to tears, thinking of her family and community suffering.
Growing up, Hupfield and her family struggled with poverty and addictions while recovering from the trauma of colonialism. This took a toll on family life, and Hupfield entered the juvenile justice system. She recalls being in a group home, where she connected with an Anishinaabe social worker, Ron, who ran the New Experiences Program/ Circle to connect Indigenous youth with their culture to address colonial trauma.
Hupfield says that Ron went above and beyond, ensuring she always had a safe place to stay when she could no longer stay at home. Hupfield considers him a father. “Once in a while, a person like Ron will come along and give selflessly for years,” she says.
Throughout the majority of her turbulent teenage years, Hupfield remained dancing. It was after a traditional fast when she was around 13 years old that she began to design and sew her own regalia. Ten years later, she was accepted into a fashion program at George Brown College in Toronto.
Since then, Hupfield has stayed in Toronto and has been dancing and designing regalia for herself and the community. The loss of culture and the disenfranchisement of Indigenous Peoples makes teachers like Hupfield widely sought-after, and she has spent her career educating within the Toronto District School Board (she is now on a leave of absence) on Indigenous culture through dance. She then realized that she wanted to reach broader Indigenous audiences and made the move to online teaching.
The response to her online teachings has been overwhelming, Hupfield says. Many community members tell her they are grateful because they don’t have access to culture in their community, which made Hupfield reflect how far and wide disenfranchisement from culture has been.
These days, she is busy packing patterns to send to her online learners for making regalia, finishing up filming and planning upcoming sessions for crafting fancy shawls and jingle dresses. She is hopeful and passionate about helping Indigenous people reconnect. “I have purpose now and I feel like I'm putting goodness in my community,” she shares. “I'm supporting people, so I feel very grateful that I'm able to support people.”
Dancing carries a heavy significance in many Indigenous cultures. To understand why, it’s important to understand Canada’s role in the displacement and genocide of Indigenous Peoples.