This is an IHeart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Hey, this is Annie.

And Samantha.

And welcome to Stuff I Never Told You, a production of IHeart Radio.

And today for our book club, which may or may not come out in December, you know, holidays coming around, a lot of scheduling happening.

We are talking about a beautiful children's book from 2022, Finding My Dance, written by Ria Thundercloud and illustrated by Kalila J. Fuller.

It follows the story of a young indigenous woman, Wakaja, Hajja Pwinga, which is Rio's Ho-Chunk name,

and her journey from a child to an adult with a child, and her different experiences with dance, as well as her becoming a mother.

It is largely autobiographical and based on Thundercloud's own experiences with dance.

She is a professional indigenous dancer.

You can look up videos of her. Really amazing.

And thank you to the read-along of this book that she does, which is really lovely and very

helpful for pronunciations. And thank you. We always try to get those right, but sometimes

you can't find them anywhere. But here,

this was, it's wonderful. You can look it up. Just fantastic. You can also look up photographs.

She does dance from both northern and southern styles of indigenous dances, which honors her heritage.

And she's also, she's just done a lot of other stuff. She's collaborated with PBS. She's talked about missing and murdered indigenous women.

She's talked about indigenous sensuality and sexuality. She's got a lot of interviews and things

that you can find.

So look her up and also look this book up.

It's really, really lovely.

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