Wake up, and speak loud, like a Thunderbird

Interview by Jeremy Harpe of CFWE-FM
Windspeaker.com Contributor

N’We Jinan is on a mission to bring the arts into the Indigenous classroom, and for now they are doing it one four-day project at a time.

The N’We Jinan team helps Indigenous youth create songs and music videos that help build their confidence and capacity.

With each project, N’We Jinan director David Hodges can see how competent the young people are, and he imagines what they could do if they were given the tools and opportunities in education with artists programming that was integrated throughout the school year, he said.

Readers may have already seen on social media the music videos produced by Indigenous youth through the N’We Jinan projects.

A recent video was done through Ochapowace, a project supported by the Treaty 4 Education Alliance, a non-profit organization that supports 13 schools in the Treaty 4 region, specifically on reserve schools.

A lot of the alliance’s focus this year is to bring the arts into the schools as part of a language revitalization piece and for youth empowerment.

“Thunderbird” is a music video produced at the Kakisiwew School Ochapowace Nation in Saskatchewan.

There, Hodges met with 10 young people who were interested in music, creative writing and in putting a professional music video together to gain that experience. Then the N’We Jinan team went out Feb. 6 to Feb. 9 and workshopped, created and recorded the song. Then they shot the music video, all within four days.

The song’s name, Thunderbird, was specific to the name of the school, which in Plains Cree translates into “loud voice” in English. The song is about the students not feeling like they had that loud voice, said Hodges, and they wanted to rise up and be able to speak their mind and to speak with a powerful voice.

The Thunderbird song was workshopped with a language specialist, who talked to the students about the Thunderbird philosophy and the legend.

The team then started to work on the Thunderbird concept, “having that loud voice.

“You want to sing loud like a Thunderbird. Rise early in the morning and establish your place on the land,” explained Hodges.

‘Wake up’, the students tell their audience. It’s a call to all youth.

“It’s time to wake up and rise up… represent who you are as people and have a loud voice.”

In another recent music video entitled ‘Worthy’ the N’We Jinan team worked with a group composed of nine girls ages 13 to 15 from Adams Lake First Nation.

Hodges said when the N’We Jinan team goes into a community they bring with them no preconceived notions about what the song will be about.

“In this community, one of the main focuses of what these girls are really going through is those harder issues—suicide, depression and anxiety.”

He said the younger generation is confronted with so many difficult things and have to make hard decisions very early in their lives.

“They’re put in these circumstances where they have to kind of rise up or it’s going to just be hopeless for them.”

Some of the girls within the group had been in counselling for their anxiety and had learned tools for coping which they shared with the group to help in a positive way to start thinking about the music video.

“We came up with the concept of ‘worthy’ because we realized a lot of kids out there feel worthless, especially in those moments when they feel one of those things—they feel suicidal, they feel depressed and they don’t even know why they feel that way.

“So the girls are like, ‘we have to make them feel worthy’,” Hodges explained. “‘Let’s remind them that they are important and there is more to look forward to’.”

Hodges said it’s reflected in the music video the girls produced.

N’We Jinan’s music video projects are just the beginning, said Hodges. It’s the starting point of a larger conversation about what youth want in their communities and how they themselves are reflected in their communities.

The music video process is very quick at only four days. The N’We Jinan objective is to follow up with the projects they are producing and showcase what the youth can do.

But what he really wants to achieve is to “give kids more access to professional working artists that have all these skills in all disciplines in the arts… and build those competencies with the kids… allow them to express themselves in the way that they want to express themselves.”

Visit the N’We Jinan website for information http://nwejinan.com/

Watch the Worthy music video here