Rediscovering Tribal Wizdom

By Shawn Desjarlais, WireTap. Posted April 14, 2003.

I was born into the spirit of resistance. My late father was in A.I.M. (the American Indian Movement), and was one of the last people to leave Alcatraz after the occupation of the island by Native people in 1969. I have uncles that were at Wounded Knee in 1973, when hundreds of Native Americans stood up to the United States' federal government on the same land where, in 1890, Chief Big Foot and some 300 Oglala Lakota (Sioux) people were massacred by the U.S. Army.

The awakening to social awareness for me was in 1990: the Oka Crisis. I remember I was in Fort McMurray, and a lot of my cousins and I were watching TV and saw all these cops and the national guard lobbing tear gas canisters and beating on our native brothers and sisters, the Mohawks, with batons. This was the government's response to the Mohawks' attempts to protect their traditional lands, which included a sacred burial ground, from being turned into a golf course.

It was through this courageous example that I first realized that we had to empower our people to stand up for ourselves. I remember I felt all the mixed emotions back then: part of me felt like crying, another part felt like going out on the street and kicking ass. Instead of scrapping, though, we felt we should raise awareness through means other than violence. So we got out the spray paint and literally painted the town red, with all types of slogans, everywhere!

Transmuting my anger into graffiti was, perhaps, indicative of the path I would walk later in life, a path which led me to create the hip-hop collective known as Tribal Wizdom.

Of course, I had already discovered hip-hop: Public Enemy, Ice T ... I still consider Eric B. & Rakim's "Paid in Full" to be a masterpiece. My parents had also exposed me to folk artists like Bob Dylan, as well as pow-wow music. I saw from an early age that music was a universal language, capable of touching many people and conveying powerful messages.

Traditionally, indigenous people utilized oratory teachings, visual and performance arts and music to educate our young about our way of life. In the past, however, traditional ceremonies were banned by the governments of both Canada and the United States. Today, though those bans have been lifted, we are still deprived of many of our ancestral teachings. As a result, many of our young people have turned to drug and alcohol abuse, suicide and violence. This is all due to their lack of traditional knowledge, and is really a reaction against the damaging effects of colonialism.

To combat these negative effects that have been introduced to our people, I feel it is imperative that we begin to revitalize our traditional educational practices. For the benefit of Indigenous and non-Native youth alike, we need to acquire a truthful account of the history that has lead to our current existence within this colonial society. In order to overcome the atrocities that Native people have endured, we must now face with honesty the misconceptions and harmful tactics that have been imposed upon us and together seek positive and beneficial solutions. I have found, in my experiences, that hip-hop is a very powerful medium for affecting this kind of change.

When I first moved away from my parents' home, I got a job with Dream Speakers, an aboriginal film festival that took place once a year in Edmonton. That was also where I first saw Native hip-hop performed live. It was this MC named 'Plex." Since the experience with Dream Speakers, I have always been involved in Native organizations in one way or another, usually as a voice from the Native youth perspective.

In 1994 I moved to Vancouver, where I became part of a group called the Native Youth Coalition (NYC). We would have meetings once a week and

there would be only three or four of us there talking about being Native youth and feeling the effects of residential school, the loss of our identity as a people, police brutality, racism, and all the other issues that affect us.

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