I spent all day Saturday at the Fort Collins Indian Market, a gathering of Native artists and musicians, traditional and contemporary, drummers, rappers, Iroquois, Chumash, Lakota, Dineh, Pawnee, Shawnee, Cherokee, Crow, Ute, kids, teenagers, just-graduated CSU students and their parents, the surprised and curious, and everyone with their dogs. Brilliant blue sky and temperatures in the mid-80s.
I shot footage all day, we did interviews with some of the artists, but the best part for me was the last act of the day, Quese IMC and Bunky Echo-Hawk. Quese is a hip-hop artist from LA, and Bunky is a painter from Boulder. The cool thing about filming is that you’re thinking about the story as you watch the moment unfold; it’s different than being a spectator, somehow, more active; your eye is sharp for the details that will represent the feeling, capture your feeling, how it affected you. Like having to make up on the spot the answer to the question, what was it like? And instead of using words to describe it, you’re catching these images on tape that will answer for you.
So Quese is starting his rap, and as he’s performing Bunky is painting in response to the rap, just letting the paint fly over his canvas. There’s a knot of self-conscious junior high and high school age white Fort Collins kids standing off to the side, probably thinking, yeah, finally something we can relate to. But they’re shy. Their parents are probably watching. So they’re just standing there. But bit by bit, Quese is pulling them around to the front … engaging them … getting them to move … put their hands up … a little higher … now fists are pumping … now they’re jumping up and down and finally now they’re chanting along with him, call and response, and they’re just lit up, incandescent. It doesn’t matter that anyone is watching. This amazing energy thing is happening and the coolest thing is that I get to film it, watch it happen, respond in my own way by taking the pieces in through my lens and imagining how they will come back together to tell the story. I guess I’m doing what Bunky is doing with his painting.
These two guys, Quese and Bunky, are young, urban, cool and tough looking, yet still they seem tender to me in spite of the hip-hop attitude and regalia. I hope their own young people — the young indigenous kids on reservation and off — can look at these two guys and see the pride in who they are, the richness of where they come from, and find a way like Quese and Bunky have to honor the old ways and bring them forward.
And yeah, I bought Quese’s CD. My first-ever rap music. Yo. Representing the Middle-Aged Woman Nation. Dope.
Check out this video that Quese did for the Native American Rights Fund (the painter in the video is Bunky). And this painting by Bunky: “Custer’s Last Thought”
