We’re on the highway up the coast along the Pacific listening to this album, song after song and place after place flies by past the road that lays between the trees and the ocean. It’s been on repeat the last few days, with each song offering a new context and a new soundtrack to the changing earth and weather, cycling between day and night. We’re in a far off landscape far away from South Dakota, Los Angeles, Homeland X, etc, but location never matters with music like this.
Being Native, or Indigenous, or Lakota, or Ho-Chunk, or whoever from whichever Nation recognized and unrecognized alike contains a constant redefining of who we are and who you are and who I am. The balance between the weight of history and lightness of the present is always tenuous, is always fraught with the tug of a direction undefined and unnamed. Mato sings about being somewhere beyond his skin and beyond his bones and how many of us can say we’ve sung that song too? It’s in music and words like this, that harmonize to create an experience that explains and gives sound and sight to so many of the things that we don’t yet know how to create ourselves.
It’s easy to let these songs wash over you, the layers are pleasurable and painful, with a bounce and a twist between the innocent and the dark, the mature and the youthful. Yet it’s not about binaries or an either/or, rather the question we ask is how do we make space for all of our complexities and multitudes when the world asks us to be so flat, so uniform.
The burdens of representation are heavy.
An art of refusal is an art that moves down paths well worn
by family-given and family-chosen
yet seeks to celebrate and swallow all that heals and creates
and rejects and expels and illuminates all that constrains and restrains.
It’s through Mato’s album, about the joys of love, growing up, getting old, reflecting on family here and gone. It’s about music and melodies you can’t get out of your head and songs you want to play for someone you also can’t get out of your head.
It’s a wide net cast into an ocean of lifetimes
some remembered, most forgotten.
A blithe breeze blowing through plains of tall grasses singing to us
as they brush and bend towards and against each other.
A whisper of sands gathered and spreading across dunes large and small
concerning the heat of day and the cool of night.
We’re still on the road on a highway singing along. We’ll get off at an exit in the middle of a track wondering where we’ll go next. Maybe places where songs are sung, where songs are heard, and where we’ll think to ourselves:
My voice isn’t very good but I’ll try my best