Don “Wild Eagle” Wuebber is an enrolled Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community member who grew up on the East Coast in Suffolk County, Long Island, New York.

He was born at Good Samaritan Hospital in Phoenix and was adopted at 3 months old. Now, at 57, he lives in Pennsylvania and splits his work time between being a spiritual adviser for a high school girls’ lacrosse team and a security guard in the Pleasant Valley School District.

Each year, on the birthday of one of the greatest athletes of all time, Olympic champion Jim Thorpe (Sac and Fox Nation), Wuebber performs a smudging at the Jim Thorpe Mausoleum in Pennsylvania.

Growing up away from the Community came with some challenges, he said.

“I knew I was different. Going to school was a very hard thing to do because everybody in the American society thought that Natives were dead, and if not, the cowboys beat them up,” Wuebber recalled.

“The ‘cowboys’ beat me up almost every day when I got to school. It was a trying period when I was growing up.”

He started working at 11 years old with a paper route. He said when he was 15 or 16, he got in a verbal fight with his adopted parents, and his stepfather told him to leave. He didn’t see them for 11 years, when, he said, he came back with a wife and a child.

His adopted father, who is German and Mohawk, is the one who gave Wuebber the name “Wild Eagle.”

“As a teenager I started putting feathers on my jacket vest and an eagle patch on the back of my denim jacket so that I would make my identity as Wild Eagle,” Wuebber said.

When he turned 18, he felt it was time for him to go out and find his history. Armed with very little information about where he came from, now he had a new mission. He found out he was O’odham, Piipaash and Yavapai.

He also discovered that there was a powwow that took place in Babylon, Long Island, not far away. This was the Paumanauke Powwow.

“I was walking down the street after I took the bus. I knew it was about maybe eight blocks away, walking. I could hear the drum beating and I could feel it in my heart, and [I was] feeling the proudness coming into my spirit, getting closer,” he recalled as if it were yesterday.

“Coming into the powwow, I was asked ‘Are you Native?’ And they told me I was good. I stood by the dancers just feeling the energy, and it was incredible. I started feeling my spirit coming out.”

When he found out he was Yavapai, he began to wear a red headband with his hair down, “as an Apache would.”

He recalled, “There was this one lady, Rosie Dancing Flower, and she pointed at me and then down at the ground to gesture that I belong here,” he said.

“She called me over, and she became like a mother and a teacher, an adopted Native mom. I learned from her the history, the teachings, the pipe carrying and making. She passed on two years ago from a car accident.”

Wuebber’s adopted mom passed away from cancer around the same time.

After learning the history and foundation of who he was, he said, he started “becoming an Apache and [learned] how to wear and make regalia.”

Wuebber has passed down everything he has learned about his identity and history to his children. His son is a hoop and grass dancer, and two of his daughters are shawl dancers.