SF State student and guest lecturer Edwardo Madril, 40, performed a traditional hoop dance in Jack Adams Hall Friday, November 20 to celebrate the unveiling of "We Are Still Here," a new mural celebrating Native American culture in the Bay Area.

Madril, first enrolled at SF State fifteen years ago, but after a year in the American Indian Studies department he was stymied by the lack of a traditional American Indian music course. The young Pascua Yaqui student gathered references and petitioned the dean to teach the course.

"I walked into the dean's office as a freshman and said 'hey, you have nobody teaching this class so I'm gonna teach it,'" says Madril. "And they were like 'okay, but who are you?'"

Madril fell in love with teaching and after a year lecturing at San Francisco State left school to spread his appreciation for traditional tribal dance and music among educational institutions and American Indian heritage organizations in the Bay Area. He went on to found the Four Winds & Sweet Water Singers dance company, and they have performed traditional Plains Indian tribe dances throughout the U.S. at inter-tribal powwows and festivals like San Francisco's 2009 Ethnic Dance Festival.

Madril also regularly lectures in the American Indian Studies department of San Francisco State, and he was tapped this year to perform a traditional dance to celebrate the unveiling of the "We Are Still Here" Cesar Chavez Student Center mural.

"They [the American Indian Studies Department] asked me to perform something appropriate to celebrate the new mural," says Madril. "I chose the hoop dance because it tells the sacred story of creation."

The hoop dance originates with the cliff-dwelling tribes of the American Southwest as a way to represent the creation of the world. Traditional dancers like Madril pick up one hoop at a time without using their hands, because as Eddie says, "we believe any Creator who gave life to all the living things the world could do it without using his hands."

To watch Madril's dance at the unveiling ceremony, see the accompanying video.