Felipe Rose

Felipe Ortiz Rose (born January 12, 1954) is an American musician who was an original member of the disco group the Village People. While in the group, he performed as "The Indian", usually wearing a costume consisting of an imitation, "bespangled war bonnet", loincloth, and theatrical face paint. Rose was a member of the group from 1977 until 2017, when the name of the group was turned over to the original lead singer, Victor Willis. Rose subsequently launched a solo career and released the single "Going Back to My Roots" in 2018.

Felipe Ortiz Rose was born in Manhattan. His father, reportedly of Lakota descent, moved to New York for work as a welder, where he met Rose's Puerto Rican mother. Rose has said his father was Mescalero Apache, Lakota, and Cherokee. He was raised in Brooklyn, where he displayed an interest in the arts during his childhood, and first dressed as "an Indian" while in school for "the Christopher Columbus parade and celebration."

After graduating from high school in 1972, he moved to Greenwich Village where he stayed with a succession of friends and acquaintances. He also spent time in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he performed his "Indian" character in the Arthur Blake bicentennial revue.

He cites his mother was his main inspiration as she had been a dancer for the Copacabana during the 1940s and 1950s.

In the early 1970s, Rose was working as a nightclub dancer. He describes being encouraged by an aunt to begin dancing in what he says was "his father's tribal regalia," which he says led to his costume, acting and neon facepaint in the Village People. "His aunt, he has said, inspired him to work the Indian angle into his showbiz ambitions: 'Why not honor your father's heritage,' Rose has recalled her saying, 'and dress in your tribal regalia in your dance journey through culture?'"

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.