Sakina Redmoon
Darlene Benally, a Navajo woman raised in Los Angeles, wrestled as Sakina Redmoon from 1978 to 1986 in the Southwest and on the Pacific Coast. She held the GWA Women's Championship in 1979.
Sakina Redmoon was a Navajo woman from Los Angeles and one of the Native American wrestlers of the Great Western Wrestling Alliance, the American territory promotion chronicled across this site. She worked the Southwest and Pacific Coast territories from 1978 to 1986 and held the GWA Women's Championship in 1979.
AT A GLANCE
- Name: Darlene Benally
- Ring name: Sakina Redmoon
- Nation: Diné (Navajo)
- Born: 1955, Gallup, New Mexico
- Billed from: Crownpoint, New Mexico
- Active: 1978 to 1986
- Territories: Southwest, Pacific Coast
- Era: Golden
- Championships: GWA Women's Championship (once)
EARLY LIFE
Darlene Benally was born in 1955 at the Indian hospital in Gallup, New Mexico. Her family is from outside Crownpoint. In 1957 her father signed up with the federal relocation office and moved the family to Los Angeles, where the office found him work driving a route for a linen supply company. Her mother did alterations at a department store downtown. They rented in Bell Gardens, among other relocated families and the Oklahoma and Texas people who filled the country bars on Florence Avenue.
She grew up in English. She understood her grandmother's Navajo and answered in English. Most summers she rode the Greyhound back to her grandmother's place near Crownpoint and herded sheep. Her mother's squash blossom necklace spent some years in pawn at a trading post in Gallup and some years on her mother.
In her teens she danced fancy shawl at the Indian Center powwows around Los Angeles. After high school she worked the boot counter at a western wear store in Downey. In 1974 she went to work at the front desk of the Los Angeles Indian Center. Part of the work was sitting with families at county hearings when the county moved to place their children in non-Indian foster homes. In 1976 she rode in a van of Indian Center women to a Women of All Red Nations meeting in South Dakota, mostly because there was a seat in the van.
CAREER
Southwest (1978 to 1979)
She went to the matches at the Grand Olympic Auditorium on Friday nights with her cousins. In 1977 a woman on the undercard told her about a trainer in Phoenix, an older Indian woman who had wrestled as a princess in the 1950s and now ran shows and trained girls in a garage. Benally quit the Indian Center and drove to Phoenix.
She was in the ring by 1978. The Phoenix promoter put her on the posters as "Princess Sakina Redmoon." She had never been to the Plains and had never heard the name Sakina. That year she wrestled Calamity Queen in Albuquerque and Flagstaff.
In 1979 she challenged Nurse Agnes Pruitt for the GWA Women's Championship. She beat Pruitt for it at Showdown Spectacle '79 in Las Vegas on 4 August 1979. Vanessa Rose took it from her on 22 September.
Pacific Coast (1980 to 1983)
In 1980 she moved home to Los Angeles and wrestled on the Pacific Coast without the princess billing. Promoters on the road still billed her as the princess some nights, and on those nights she spun her shawl and gave a whoop on the way to the ring.
Southwest (1984 to 1986)
She went back to the Southwest in 1984 and spent her last three years wrestling the younger women there. She retired in 1986.
RIVALRIES
Nurse Agnes Pruitt held the GWA Women's Championship for most of two years before Redmoon challenged her in 1979. Redmoon took the title from her in Las Vegas.
Vanessa Rose took the championship from Redmoon seven weeks later.
IN THE RING
She wrestled in a dark red velveteen suit with a row of silver buttons down the front and plain black boots, her hair in one long braid tied off with white yarn. She came to the ring in a red fringed shawl and a silver concho belt and took both off before the bell.
She used the headlocks and armlocks her Phoenix trainer taught her, and she was fast: she spun away from her opponents and threw them to the mat by the arm. She usually won by rolling her opponent onto her back and holding her there for the count. She was not strong enough to lift and slam bigger women.
ON CAMERA
She gave short, plain answers and did not play to the camera.
LEGACY
Redmoon held the GWA Women's Championship once, in 1979, and wrestled until 1986.
More GWA wrestler profiles.
