At one end of the park is a low stage, and throughout the late summer day, musicians from Indigenous communities far across the US have been performing. Now, after dark, in the Arizona heat, Ed Kabotie is dangling his legs off the tailgate of a battered pickup, beer in hand.
Kabotie has driven down from the Hopi reservation 200 miles north of here to play with his reggae-rock band, the Yoties. And he is keen to tell his story, one that weaves in and out of his identity as Native American, as it does for most musicians here gathered together under the banner of Native Guitars Tour, a collective of Indigenous artists promoting Native music, art and fashion that advocates for greater cultural and economic representation.
Kabotie, who is Hopi, emphasises that the vision of Indigenous life that is presented online or in films is frequently generalised, crudely drawn or misleading.
“It’s important that people recognise that a Hopi is not a Havasupai, and a Havasupai is not an Apache,” he says. “We don’t all have casinos, and some of our governments hate that shit. We’re not all pow-wow people, and the pow-wow culture that you see isn’t necessarily an internal tribal culture. For some it is, for others it’s not.”
Where Kabotie is from, “a lot of people don’t have running water and electricity … we don’t have stores and it’s two hours to get to a hospital. All that being said, I like it. It’s not representative of every Native culture, it’s just one, whatever that is.”
Soon after we speak, Wavelengths, a Navajo-Zuni powerpop band from Shiprock, New Mexico, come on. “We’re trying to inspire ordinary Native Americans that you can do more than stay at home,” says their singer-guitarist Cody Waybenais. “I feel we are reaching a point where all of us, all Indigenous people, are collectively worldwide, all directions; all tribes are finally reaching a world platform.” (...)
But how real is real, and who gets to channel that reality, remains contentious. Devery Jacobs, a Canadian First Nations actor who stars in Reservation Dogs, recently critiqued Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, calling it “painful, gruelling, unrelenting and unnecessarily graphic” in its depiction of a series of murders of members of the Osage Nation tribe in 1920s Oklahoma.
The bands in Arizona are not – and may never be – competing with the giants of the music business, but the point is clear: Native American arts and cultural expression that were once limited to their localities are gaining a wider reach. The social and economic filters that once isolated and constrained Indigenous voices are lifting.
by Edward Helmore, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Reservation Dogs/Hulu/YouTube
[ed. Spirit apparently appears every time Bear gets knocked out (which is often). Man, I have to see this show but unfortunately don't have Hulu. See also: Reservation Dogs review – a stereotype-smashing, Tarantino-esque triumph (The Guardian). Besides the video below, more words of wisdom from Spirit here (YT).]
