Fitness
These Indigenous Fitness Coaches Are Leading Their Communities to Better Health
This story is part of Indigenous in Fitness, a series of articles highlighting the challenges and triumphs faced by Indigenous trainers, athletes, and gym owners. Read the rest of the stories here.
MOVEMENT IS CENTRAL for many Indigenous cultural practices, so it makes sense that many of the people doing important work for our communities are coaches, trainers, and gym owners. I’ve had the honor of connecting with some of these remarkable men. Theirs is a path of alignment and shared purpose, resonating deeply with my own as a community health educator and author. Among the many leaders in Native country driving the movement of generational healing and thriving, they stand out not only as coaches, but as devoted community leaders, fathers, and husbands.
These men don’t boast of their accomplishments, but remain focused on the horizon’s next goal. While they have helped many to find the path to healing from grief, addiction, and aggressive behaviors, countless others still search for what it means to be a Native man today. Indigenous matriarchs have led our people in this movement, and it is long overdue for Native men to heal, reclaim, and evolve the vision of Indigenous masculinity in 2024.
Each of these three men fuels this movement with their fire. We spoke about our work together to find common ground and share our perspectives about what being an Indigenous leader in fitness means today.
Joseph Marshall
Joseph Marshall, 43, is of the Natinixwe people (known federally as the Hoopa Valley Tribe). He grew up on and still lives in the Hoopa Valley Reservation, the largest Indian reservation in Northern California. He currently serves on Tribal Council, which oversees all areas of the Tribe. He started the Warrior Institute in 2011 to bring fitness and strengthen his community.
Dion Denny
Dion Denny, 32, is a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla, Cayuse, and Walla Walla. He grew up on the Umatilla Indian Reservation located near Pendleton, Oregon and has lived in Portland, Oregon for the last five years in recovery for substance use disorder. He is a Level 2 CrossFit coach and director of The Recovery Gym, which offers CrossFit classes and programming dedicated to helping people on the path to recovery for substance use and mental health challenges.
Josh Mori
Josh Mori, 40, is of the Kingdom of Hawai’i currently living in Waimea, Kaua’i. He was born in Hawai’i but grew up on the continent, moving around Iowa, Colorado, and Oregon before graduating high school. He attended and taught at Montana State University, then moved to Kaua’i 11 years ago. He started Iwikua, a community wellness and cultural organization, in 2014. He’s currently pursuing a PhD in rural indigenous health.
THOSH COLLINS: Dion, you got into this because of your daughter, Rory. What in your healing journey brought you into fitness to be a coach at the Recovery Gym?
DION DENNY: I was about four months into my recovery, 268 pounds. I was attending meetings, going to treatment, and I was still very unwell inside. I thought of my kid… I knew something had to change. I remember February 10th of 2020 was my first experience walking in the gym, and right when you walk in the door, there’s a decal. It says, “leave your ego at the door and your sweat on the floor.” That always stuck with me, and it still does.
When I started completing treatment, getting a little healthier, stronger, I earned my CrossFit Level 1 certificate to become a trainer. That seminar started on my two-year sobriety date. I didn’t even have a bank account. Someone offered to pay for my training.
People knew about The Recovery Gym, but I never worked out there. I reached out to ask if I could shadow classes, and they offered me a paid internship. So I applied and became an intern, earned my coaching title, became a CrossFit Level 2, gymnastics, CrossFit Kids, conjugate powerlift—all these different seminars and certificates. At the beginning of the year, I got promoted to director. Now I oversee our program.
It’s all Creator. I’ve worked hard and earned it—but in recovery, they tell you your higher power will do for you what you can’t do for yourself. That’s people, places, things that come into your life to help guide you and help direct you as you go down your path.
COLLINS: Joe, you’re a leader in the community. When I went to Hoopa, you’re surrounded by sequoia and there’s not much there for tribal enterprise. But there’s this nice steel shed building, an awesome CrossFit gym space. How has your experience as an Indigenous man in your community brought you to this journey of coaching and health, fitness, foodways on the land, and now into your position as Tribal Councilman?
JOE MARSHALL: I started The Warrior Institute in 2011. I was a PE teacher. A friend of mine told me about CrossFit, and I was like, okay, I’ll look into it. I went and got certified, I did the diet, I lost 20 pounds—I was like, man, this is the greatest thing ever. I felt like these group exercise classes were something that our community needed. We’ve made a lot of advancements in our culture and language and sovereignty. Now this was the missing link to bring up our fitness level. I jumped right in with the CrossFit part, and then I added a river program because we have the river that runs right through here. I did a veggie farm. Basically, it was trying to help a lot of things that were already happening. I sent a number of people to get CrossFit trained, to get river guide trained, and just be involved.
The gym’s been open for 11 years now, and it’s being used from 4:30 in the morning till 12 at night by young people, people in sobriety, moms. The tribe gave me the building for a dollar a year. That’s how I was able to grow so fast, because I had the job as a schoolteacher at the same time I started The Warrior Institute. The California Endowment was a big supporter and helped me with the seed funds to get this project off the ground. I got into [Tribal] Council because I was seeing the end of the life of the gym—we need a tribal fitness center in Hoopa, and go bigger with it.
One of the barriers was the older population. They don’t know what’s going on in the gym. They never trained that way. It’s kind of a disconnect with new things in the community. But after awhile, there’s so many people who train and [everybody’s] related to everybody. So eventually it got to somebody that [they’re] connected to, they’re seeing the benefit, and we’ve had this positive ripple effect. We’ve been seeing younger people getting stronger and fitter—there’s not a lot going on, so every day, right after school, we’ve got high schoolers, like 20 of them, hanging out at the gym, wanting to train. That’s what I had first seen—we had this little weight room at the school, and kids after school trying to get in there. I was like, dude, I’ve got to do something because these kids want to keep training.
Joseph Marshall
COLLINS: Josh, you built Iwikua without federal funding, without tribal funding. You’re not a reservation, you’re not federally recognized, and many of you reject that federal recognition. You want to maintain your indigenous identity as Hawai’i people, as people of the land. How has your cultural experience brought you into this journey of fitness coaching, healing, and wellness?
JOSH MORI: For my mo’olelo, my story—my most proud thing is that I was healthy enough to deliver all of my children. All of this is intertwined; the aspect of being a kāne, being a man, being a father, being a partner to somebody—all of it is through wellness in my perspective.
I only came at it from the Western way through sports as a young person. I played football, ran track collegiately, got beat up, broke my neck. Then because of the spine and the neck issues, I have to either just turn into a cucumber or stay really active. It hurts to wake up every morning. Iwikua started 10 years ago out of that necessity. I was teaching at Montana State University, and I felt it in my gut, in my naʻau, “I want to go home—there’s things happening at home that I could be a part of.” I didn’t come home with a blueprint. I didn’t come home to own a gym. Didn’t come home to start a non-profit. We’re the largest open-air pesticide testing site in the world. When I moved home it was strategic to move right in the belly of the beast, into chemical testing. Much like California in Salinas, all the health issues with migrant workers because of the farms—we’re the original testing site where all that stuff goes. Out of that came wellness.
“Iwi” is actually your bone, the bone of your kūpuna. So iwikuamo’o is your spine. It’s cool to see there are pockets of people in community who aren’t well-funded who out of necessity are like, “We’re going to level up or we’re going to disappear.” I’m really inspired to see other people leveling up. I really want to focus on the makua age—I want 25 to 50 years old. We have a lot of funding for [age] six to 18. When people become parents, we expect them to know everything. Wellness, nutrition, diet, how to provide—and then there’s a lot of funding for kupuna, for elders. We just kind of leave parents on their own.
COLLINS: How have your people’s traditional ways of knowing and being played a role in your work? That’s been one of the drivers in my health and wellness journey is to know that athleticism is our culture. It’s our himdag, our way of life, fitness—momoika [exercise] is what we say in O’odham. So how have your teachings, your upbringings, played a role in your coaching and fitness today?
DENNY: We offer free CrossFit to folks in recovery or seeking recovery services. Where I grew up in Eastern Oregon, they talk about how you go to the longhouse and you work. You work on your life every day. When you’re out on the wash, you dance, and you dance hard for your family. You give thanks. I do the best I can to try to apply that to my own practice in the gym, to how I conduct myself on the floor when I’m coaching a class to how I approach my coaching philosophy when I’m helping others.
I wasn’t taught any of this growing up. This has been keeping the posture of learning the last five years—I celebrated five years recently in recovery. [My] physical is getting stronger, my spirit’s waking up, I’m starting to think a little bit more clearly.
MARSHALL: We’re fortunate here that we keep our ceremonies going. One of the things we have is a Fix the World ceremony. Being in balance is almost like juggling. It’s so much to keep everything going with your mental game, your physical game, your spiritual game, financially, socially—it’s hard.
Another thing interesting with our dances—the word is ch’idilye, that means to move in a sacred way. All those movements, to do them smooth and graceful, you’ve got to be fit. We have one dance where you’re jumping in the middle in a squat, going lateral, or during our jump dance, you’re doing a deep lunge, the girls are doing calf raises. All these movements—I’m looking at them, and these are the movements of exercises I’m doing right now. They’re actually in the dances.
There’s a whole story about how [ceremony and fitness] keeps balance in our world. A long time ago, we were going to lose our culture. People stopped following the ways and weren’t living right. The spirit people were going to take away our culture, so they had a stick game. It was against Thunder, and the Ant people came to our aid. Our people went on to win that game. That shows how fitness keeps everything in balance.
MORI: I was raised on the periphery of hula. My grandma, my mom, my sister, all dance hula. But we moved—we had to leave Hawai’i because of drugs and alcohol abuse and domestic violence, so I was raised on the continent, but doing hula. I only mention that because I was raised where I was allowed to know only the good shit. I didn’t have to feel hapa, I was allowed to be so proud of my culture from 3,000 miles away. When I finally was able to come home when all that dust had settled, all that pilikia, which happens in all of our communities—I’m definitely a child of unwellness, drug abuse, drug dealing, alcohol abuse, and definitely domestic violence—with that as the base layer, my culture was always the iwikuamo’o [the spine].
In Hawai’i, we have a season that we’re in right now, Makahiki season. We’re one of the few cultures in the world I’ve studied where we have a four-month period dedicated to wellness. In this period, there’s no war, there’s no pilikia. There’s no actual hana—there’s no hard work. We let the land heal, we let our culture heal, we play games, have debate, riddles, physical games, and there’s an abundance of sharing.
I think it’s extremely important, the sharing of dance like Joe was talking about. Hula back in the day was a male thing. Men did it, and it’s because we didn’t have war. So a lot of our lua that came after, the Hawaiian martial arts, is the same steps as hula. It’s just done with a different intent, to break someone’s bones instead of to step.
There’s two things I think about frequently in my coaching style which are very culturally rooted. One is actually a Jay-Z quote, but G-rated: “What you read doesn’t make me… poop.” So, “What you do for you is going to make you better for you—don’t do it for me.” Hawai’ian philosophy is very much that way. We do it collectively, but you have to care for yourself. The other one is e ʻai i ka mea loaʻa: “Eat what you have.” My first gym, I welded kettlebells out of old anchors. We’ve got to try to take care of our bodies so that we don’t fail.
It all goes back to you being kāne and our responsibility as men and being able to help give life. Every man in our community, I try to push that on them. We really need everybody to level up.
Dion Denny
COLLINS: That generational thinking is so prominent amongst Native people. And as a Native person, you’re oftentimes peering into dominant society. What is it about your approach as an Indigenous person doing fitness and health that dominant society and the mainstream fitness industry can learn from what you’re implementing within your work?
DENNY: I think a big part of what we lack is being mindful of others, the simplicity in caring for the person next to you. People come into the gym to work on their lives and themselves every day, and we don’t know what they leave there. It’s important to be mindful of those things and even take care of your space in that way—keeping it clean, keeping it clear in the energy, giving thanks, smudging it down. A lot of times things like pride and ego get involved, and sometimes we forget why we even started.
We can’t create a safe space for everyone, but what we can create is a space where people have the freedom to try to find that connection. Just get back to the basics, and master those basics, and when we think we mastered them, go back to them again.
One of my brothers told me we should never look down on someone else. The only time we look down on someone is when we’re reaching our hand down to help them up.
MARSHALL: I see myself as a bridger, to go out and get new information and bring that back into our community. Maybe in a big gym you’re trying to make profits. In here, it’s making that connection. I don’t charge anybody. Just to get to the door, to say, “I want to work on myself,” is a big deal. And if you say, well, now you need to pay $100 a month and they’re already having a hard time… I just try to break that barrier down, to have no barrier.
Also, realizing the mainstream, dominant culture is a big part of our culture. The youth are into sports, like football, basketball, and baseball. So you’ve got to meet them halfway. That’s why I like the gym. When we do a 30-day health challenge, the ripple effects go in our community so far. You have people talking, “Hey man, I did this on my health fitness challenge,” and they’re not even part of the group, but because their cousin did it and they’re sharing it, they’re like, “What are you doing differently?” So then they’re doing it, and it affects the whole community. In a tribal community, the web of people, the social connection, is so big.
MORI: When I look at the fitness world, we’re not really a part of it. We are a really small gym and a really small community, and the farm supports the gym. We’re the cheapest public gym on island—I wish that we could fundraise well enough or I could grant-write well enough to get it all paid for, because I totally agree with what Joe said: I hate that barrier. We have 130 members. That’s great. That’s 130 people who have a safe place. For our after school program, if you get a 3.0 [GPA], you pay for your first month and then all semester, as long as you keep a 3.0 you get to lift for free. You have to do check-ins, you have to clean the bathrooms like once every month, a little bit of ownership in there—but those creative ways of how you do that.
When I look at mainstream fitness, I think it’s just the pendulum swinging. What indigenous communities have been for dominant society, for mainstream society, for a long time—we’ve been the iwikuamo’o, the spine. We are great at adaptation. Dion was talking about empathy—we embody that through our indigenous philosophies in a lot of communities. So when the pendulum swings all the way this way, and they’re like, “everybody’s got to have massive glutes,” then it swings back this way, “everybody’s got to do 500 pounds on their back squat,” what I think keeps us sane is knowing that we’re right here: the iwikuamo’o, we’re that spine right in the middle.
I think it’s just having that calm in the chaos, which I oftentimes attribute to a lot of the Native communities that I’ve been able to work in relationship with. Their moʻolelo, their history, and all the horrible things that have happened and continue to happen systemically—there is a thread there. There’s a self-belief and there’s a knowledge and identity; that is that calm in the chaos. So in the fitness world, it’s having that as well—it’s not biting on every possible trend. It’s looking at it really objectively and going, “Maybe it’s not for everybody, but how does it fit for us?”
Josh Mori
COLLINS: I want to wrap things up by asking: What is the vision you have for your work within your community? What are the outcomes you want to see? And for non-Native readers, what is a takeaway you think they might have from that?
DENNY: I’ve had this vision from very early on. I’m going to continue to use CrossFit as the vehicle to drive the purpose of helping our people take our health back. I’ve opened two gyms in the city; I want to bring this back to the rez. I want to open one on the reservation. I see it in the heart of the community. I see people running their 400 [meter sprints] around the big grass. People coming from the surrounding areas, small towns—it’s not just going to be for Native people. It’s going to be specific to that, but anyone’s welcome. You want to come work hard, let’s go.
I’m going to continue to learn, continue to work hard, and try to help. That ripple effect everyone was talking about—in Wellbriety, 12 Steps in the Native Way, they talk about change happens with the self first. Then it’ll go from self to family, from family to your community, and from community to the nation. Sometimes with our people there’s walls up, because we’ve been so marginalized. So it’s continuing to walk the talk. I want my kid to grow up in a setting where hard work is exemplified, a place of service. I’m going to bring one home.
MARSHALL: When I started this my goal was to have a strong, healthy, happy, active life for 100 years.
MORI: My personal vision is simple: I’m going to be the world champion in the 40- to 45-year-old pole vault for track and field. Then between 45 and 50, I want to be the world champion in the decathlon—and I want to do this under the Kingdom of Hawai’i. Right now, we’re not recognized as our own country. Everywhere legally we are, but not in the United States. People have no idea that our kingdom still exists. If you actually Google, if you actually go to Geneva or look at it internationally, Hawai’i is an occupied nation by definition… So for me, I’m really passionate about winning on the world stage and forcing them to take our passport, and forcing them to acknowledge it. They already do it in surfing—when John John Florence wins the professional world surfing, he surfs for Hawai’i with the Hawai’ian flag. That’s my vision for me personally, and that’s my own crazy to get over all of my hurt and my broken neck.
For Iwikua, we’re working more in that prehabilitative space. Our vision is to start to marry the Western science with the Native science and having this Indigenous space in the community. Things like being able to offer space for lomi lomi traditional massage, but also to have the machines we can offer in for PT. We also want to deepen our relationship within our community and offer more things. Right now we do a 5K, 10K fun run in the town celebration. We do two competitions a year in lifting. We have a track club now, we do a hoops camp. Our vision is to deepen our relationship with wellness.
Hawai’i is not barren of things. Each island has amazing opportunities, so I definitely want to reflect that Iwikua is a small piece of this answer. We definitely look around to the Dan Aipas and these braddahs on Big Island and these sistahs on Maui who are doing amazing work.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Want to read more first-person perspectives on overcoming obstacles, breaking barriers, and finding success from Indigenous fitness pros? Click the link below to read all of the stories.
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