SEQUIM — Hurricane Shelly is heading toward Brazil.

That’s Shelly as in Haupt, the Sequim fitness instructor who’s on her way today to the first World Indigenous Games.

That’s indigenous as in Native, in Haupt’s case the Sac and Fox nation of Oklahoma and the Midwest.

And that’s Sac and Fox as in 1912 Olympics decathlete and pentathlete and football great Jim Thorpe.

As for the hurricane, Shelly Haupt is a force of nature, as visitors to the Sequim Aquatic Recreation Center, Fit4Life Studio, the Sequim Gym and, soon, the Clallam County Family YMCA in Port Angeles can attest.

Haupt, 51, will serve as athletic coordinator for 22 Native American athletes representing the Apache/Comanche, Crow, Hidatsa (North Dakota), Lummi, Navajo, Northern Cheyenne and Sault Ste. Marie tribes.

Log-lugging races

Men and women from across the U.S. will compete in archery, dugout canoe races, javelin, log carrying, running, swimming and tug of war, an event in which Haupt will participate.

Other contests will include soccer, wrestling and stickball — similar to lacrosse — and indigenous sports from other nations.

They are joining competitors from 35 countries as they gather at Palmas, a city of about 265,000 people in central Brazil. Haupt will travel there via Seattle, Miami, São Paulo and Brasília.

The games themselves begin Friday and, together with cultural celebrations, will last through Nov. 1.

Like the Olympics, the World Indigenous Games will open with a parade of nations.

“These people are going to be coming in with their headdresses and their beads and their feathers and their tattoos and their brown skin,” Haupt said Thursday. U.S. athletes will wear their individual tribe’s regalia.

Participants also will share noncompetitive pastimes — in the U.S. case, hand games, known as bone games among Pacific Northwest tribes, noisy contests involving guessing and gambling.

‘Turtle Island’

Haupt designed the team T-shirt. It places a map of North America in the center of a stylized turtle shell.

“We call this Turtle Island — America, Canada, Mexico,” she said, invoking the Indian Country term for the continent.

“We are Team Turtle Island.”

Haupt bubbled with enthusiasm in an interview, almost boiling over with eagerness to leave for Brazil and join the first international athletic competition solely among indigenous people.

The event will echo international economic and environmental initiatives for native people.

If Haupt shows disappointment, it’s in the support the team received from athletic-wear companies.

Their total contribution: Nike, Haupt said, contributed one shirt.

Eight of the original 35 athletes who had hoped to visit Brazil couldn’t raise enough money for airfare and visas and so will stay home.

But it’s hard to dampen Haupt’s zest for the games — as it was hard to keep her off her feet in the wake of her near-fatal heart attack three years ago.

Talking with God

That was just after she’d had to close her exercise studio in Sequim Community Church when it canceled her lease.

“I was really mad, but God had another plan for me,” Haupt said.

That tactic involved a clogged artery that stopped her heart and necessitated her entering a chemically induced coma for two days until a stent was inserted into the blocked blood vessel.

She assailed God for what she thought was unfair.

“I said, ‘Come here. You said you knew everything,’” Haupt said.

“He came to me and said, ‘Shelly, I am holy. I am righteous. I did this. I can take people out and bring them back. You go tell people that.’”

Haupt was wearing a defibrillator ’round the clock and taking lots of medicines daily.

She addressed God again.

‘You’re free to go’

“I said, ‘God, I don’t want to live like this. I live in fear every day and I don’t want to do that.’

“God said, ‘You’re free to go.’ I called up my surgeon and said, ‘Where can I send my defibrillator? God said I was released, and I’m good.’”

She quickly signed up for sessions at the Sequim Aquatic Recreation Center — known as SARC — where she soon was recruited as an exercise trainer. She gives the coaching in faith for free.

“I got to tell my story to all these people. I got to spread the word of who he [God] is,” Haupt said.

She’ll spread her story in Palmas.

“This is major,” she said of the games. “This could be life-changing for indigenous people.”

Her visit could be life-changing for Brazil, too, when the dynamic Haupt hits Palmas.

That’s hurricane as in Shelly.

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Reporter James Casey can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or at jcasey@peninsuladailynews.com.