[Wind blowing] [Horn blowing] ♪ [Drums beating] ♪ Woman: If we don't know the roots that we come from, we don't really understand where we're going.
[Person chanting] Woman: Aztec dancing is a form of heightened meditation.
The dances move our spirit to connect with the land.
Hoo ah!
We allow the drum to take our body and move it and to move our feet.
And we're actually manifesting our thoughts through the prayers.
It allows you to get in this wave of this vibration through the drums and through the songs.
It moves you, and then the healing begins.
♪ Dulé: We're on the north side of Houston right now.
Houston is the fourth-largest city in the country.
70,000 Indigenous people here.
That's a large population.
There should be programs and systems in place to make sure that that community's history stays alive.
Abuela M'api Rainflowa is fighting for her people to be seen and using her artistry to connect to her roots and maintain the story of the Indigenous people here in Texas.
Abuela M'api Rainflowa: Hi.
Dulé: How is everything?
Abuela M'api: Good.
Dulé: Dulé.
Very nice-- Abuela M'api: Hold on.
I'm gonna teach you.
Our handshake is like this.
Dulé: I love it.
Abuela M'api: And then camaraderie here.
Yeah, and then back to your heart space.
You touch the vein.
Dulé: Here?
I love it.
Boom.
Oh, come on, now.
Ha ha!
Abuela M'api: Now you got it.
A lot of us grew up around here.
This is our home base park.
What we're gonna do is we're gonna siembra the land, which means, like, fertilize it or seed it.
We're going to get it ready for our dance.
We're in what's called Sun Dance season right now.
That's why we're going to teach you Sun Dance, the actual dance, the Aztec/Mexica dance.
Anytime dancers dance, what we're doing is we're connecting with the land.
Dulé: Mm-hmm.
Abuela M'api: We're asking it to be fertile.
We're asking it to cleanse us, too.
You can look around.
There's a lot of unhoused relatives here.
Dulé: Right.
Abuela M'api: There's a lot of addiction and problems.
And so we feel like when we push out this, it actually, like, changes.
Dulé: So you're using your, like, the dance to really send out good energy.
Abuela M'api: Mm-hmm.
Dulé: In the first few minutes of us here meeting, I can tell there's so much history.
Abuela M'api: Uh-huh.
Dulé: How did you tap into all the history?
Abuela M'api: Ah, yeah.
That's a whole story in itself.
Dulé: See?
Ha ha!