S2E6: Dan Nanamkin (Colville Confederated Tribes)

2023 Cultural Capital Fellow Dan Nanamkin (Colville Confederated Tribes), an artist who creates with his hands and heart, shares his journey, which has led him to create work centered on the intersection of tradition and contemporary education, focusing on empowering Indigenous youth. He candidly talks about the trials of racism and the transformative power of composing songs in his tribal language - a process filled with nuances that could change a song's meaning.

Chapters

• 0:02 Empowering Indigenous Youth Through Cultural Education
• 8:42 Creating a Collective Spirit Podcast

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

As an educator, presenter, I talk to you to empower our youth and communities to stand up, and a lot of the things that we do today in our longhouses are the teachings from the elders, and these are the things that maybe I'm like a bridge between that generation of some of these last ones that had to endure the hardships. So I create this bridge and connection between our traditional forms of education, as well as the excitement that kids love to see in today's technology.

Speaker 2: 0:53

The West Peoples Fund presents the Collective Spirit Podcast. The Collective Spirit moves each of us to stand up and make a difference, to pass on ancestral knowledge and simply extend a hand of generosity. The Collective Spirit Podcast features Native artists and culture bearers who discuss the power of indigenous art and culture.

Speaker 1: 1:19

Why I call this conference is because I'm here today to introduce you to Dan Nnamke. Thunder and Lightning is my Indian name and I am here from the Calville Confederated Tribes or homeland based in the Spillum, washington, and I am very grateful and honored to be here with you all today. My artistic medium is a performance artist, so I do a combination of theatrical stage performance music, indigenous music that I compose and dance, and performance art and education. Well, when I was a young boy, my mom used to read to me our creation stories, which we call Chapkeek, my great-great-grandmother. Her name was Comissimus Morning Dove and she was the first Native American female author in history and she composed and wrote our creation stories. These are the things that really caught my interest at a young age. As well as performing a few times in school some of our creation stories, I've always honored the values and the teachings that are shared in these stories. So today I utilize these stories to share education with our children, because I also was a teacher and I know that a lot of indigenous education and worldview is left out in the school's education to our youth. So this is my goal is to create something so awe-inspiring and just a jaw-dropping that it's going to be something that kids love to see in their schools. I'm composing songs that talk about a lot of the struggles and hardships and challenges and the things that indigenous people are overcoming in faith and things like water is life Missed and murdered, indigenous women, land bat in our boarding schools and so on, and these are songs that are composed, in some of them, in my tribal language.

Speaker 1: 3:53

I went through school, dislike anybody else In my time. You know there was forms of corporal punishment. You know my school mascot had grown up as a kid was savages. We used to get punished, you know, by our schools, and there was a lot of different racism from boarder town schools. So growing up, you know, we endured a lot of challenges of racism, and these are things that I want to also write about, because I know that our kids have high dropout rates Peer pressure, bullying and so forth, and these are, as an educator presenter, I talk to to empower our youth and communities to stand up, and a lot of the things that we do today in our longhouses are the teachings from the elders and these are the things that maybe I'm like a bridge between that generation of some of these last ones that had to endure the hardships.

Speaker 1: 5:06

So I create this bridge and connection between our traditional forms of education as well as the excitement that kids love to see in today's technology. So these are things I utilize, as well as the regalia and the artistry of dance and music and the eloquence of our words, from our elders to the youth. They can do it, it's possible, it's attainable, it's not out of the grasp. So this is new. I think it's going to be something exciting and educational and also creates awareness to the issues that Indigenous people are facing today. Being at Standard Rock, for example, I was there for seven months and I know that was one of the largest movements ever and that was initiated by Indigenous youth and the elders in a prayerful way. And I go to these schools and I ask kids raise your hand. If you ever heard of Standard Rock and through the areas that I've traveled, very few kids ever have their hands raised, sometimes none of them. They are not being taught current events of the Indigenous people. They are not being empowered and inspired that Indigenous youth can create something that impacts the whole entire world.

Speaker 1: 6:58

I'm composing songs in our Enselkjin language, which is a salish dialect. It's not hard meaning one little nuance of one syllable, for example, could change the entire meaning of a song, and so I've been going a lot up into Canada to where a lot of our fluent language speakers are and really trying to harness the words, because it's been really stressful for me Because when you get up in front of fluent speaking elders and you're singing a song that you've composed in your language, you have to be spot on. So this has been a great labor of love to maintain and our culture and but also to be creative in it and creating songs of today. It's taken a lot of rewriting and reediting and so I've really been doing that work and I'm really excited to be able to purchase the supplies that I'll need for the videos and creating the art that I have in my mind here and to be able to put that all together and make it really something that's going to be unique. Yeah, it's been again a lot of planning up to this point and barren and writing and now just getting ready to order different equipment and schedule my time into the studio.

Speaker 1: 8:42

Perhaps the start non audio book. So these are the ideas that I mentioned in my proposal and these are the things that I've been working to create and to write and to visualize and prioritize what can come first. Right now I'm ready to get down and get started and get rolling. My hope is to be able to create this music, but more so I want our youth to carry it on. You know, I visualize a time when these songs are just not sung by one person all alone, but I visualize a whole gym full of people just singing together.

Speaker 2: 9:44

The Collective Spirit podcast is produced by First Peoples Fund, whose mission is to honor and support Indigenous artists and culture bearers through grant making initiatives, culturally rooted programming, and training and mentorship. Learn more at FirstPeoplesFundorg.