Red Sky, Blue Mountain

2017
You Had Me At Goodbye


i've had many conversations with fellow native american artists and musicians about their worries of not being traditional enough or attached to their heritage enough to seem legitimate. i've also had these fears and worries. but i think, at this point in history, we have to look at where we are. many native american tribes have been stripped of their original songs, their original languages, their original traditions, and those left have little resources to recover these and bring them back to life. so, i think it is important, along with trying to preserve as much tradition as possible-when possible, to start creating new traditions and new art and new standards for our indigenous people. as a choctaw, i've tried over the years to find out as much about our tribes traditional music as possible but because of the white-washing and christianization of our people after the trail of tears and settling of oklahoma, many of the only existing recorded songs are just christian hymns sung in the choctaw language. so i wanted to write a new traditional in the choctaw language. i wrote the words and dora wickson, a choctaw elder, helped me translate them and work on pronunciation. the words, roughly translated are "a red sky, a blue mountain. the dream that is real. born to change the world. and we did. but what have we done". i wanted to communicate the importance of caring for the earth. we used to be so connected to it, and so intuitive to its changes but now we are so disregarding and out of touch with it. the red sky, blue mountain part, is supposed to conjure an apocalyptic image, basically unnatural and completely changed from how it was originally. i wanted to keep it simple enough for others to learn with ease and also approachable enough to encourage other indigenous people to learn and interact with their culture in order to create new culture.