Tiana Spotted Thunder
Meadowlark
2020 | Indigenous
— track 3: “Dancer’s Prayer”
Tiana Spotted Thunder: My Lakota name is Good Voice Meadowlark Woman. I come from the Oglala Lakota people, and I live in Rapid City, South Dakota. I am a Lakota recording artist, I record Indigenous music, and I am also a backup singer for powwows all throughout North America. I haven’t been to a powwow yet in Mexico, but I’ve been to some in Canada and, of course, all around the States. I enjoy working with youth in my community, and trying to teach as much as I can, that our people can reconnect to our culture, especially here in Rapid City, it’s a more urban area, we’re more disconnected from the culture, as the reservation is kind of more connected.
I have had a long journey, and a tough journey with my singing. So, I started singing approximately when I was 13. And when I started singing, it was hard for me to develop my voice, I guess, trying to find where my voice fits the best. So when I first started singing in front of people, I was very shy. When I was learning how to sing backup behind the drum, I went off of example, so I would look at other backup singers that were in the little, local, powwow scene, until I was encouraged to sing next to them. I waited until I felt welcome. And I knew songs, I grew up with songs. I grew up spiritually with ceremony, and around powwows, and stuff like that, but it was hard for me to break out of the shell to sing on my own. What really helped me to break out of my shell was joining my school’s hand game club. And if you don’t know what hand games or stick games are, it’s a traditional game where we play with sticks as points, and when you get all the sticks you win, but all throughout there will be singing. So that is a huge impact in my life, just playing hand games and singing hand game songs with my friends. [For the recording of the song] “Tricky,” there’s two girls on it who are very special to me. Their names are Jeslyn and Joslyn [Felix-Bear Looks Back] and they were youth that I helped in developing, I guess, just more of a confidence in singing. I was there to guide them in whatever they needed help with in singing. They’re really awesome young Lakota ladies, and they grew up to be good role models. I admire them for taking that courage to learn how to sing and to sing in front of people, as well as be Lakota women singers who sing alone. So I chose these two girls to be on my album, and they were really happy to be part of this. In the midst of learning this song we kind of got tripped up, we kept losing track with the singing and how the song went, and they said, “This song’s, like, really tricky!” I didn’t think it was tricky, because, you know, I made it, but that’s why I named the song “Tricky.” For this song, particularly, I use this rattle here. In our culture, men are the ones that use the drums. Particularly, women don’t use drums. There are some exceptions here and there, depending on your family’s teachings, but primarily I was told to stay away from using a drum. And I was shown a rattle by a grandma and it was a turtle shell, then she showed me another one and it was these really pretty shells on a stick. And she said, “These are what women’s voices resonate with, and primarily what we sing with.” So I decided to learn how to use a rattle to sing along with my hand game songs. Singing hand game songs with men, it’s so much more fun if you have a rattle and you’re able to just get down and shake your rattle, and when you get the sticks you shake it harder. You go to hand games or stick games around the country, primarily in the Northwest, or more Northern, and you’ll find these women mainly using these rattles to sing with. And different tribes have different teachings, I understand, and I respect that. So whatever tribe you are, just follow that, and also just follow your heart, if you feel like something resonates with you more than the other and you feel like you need some guidance whether it’s okay or not, just reach out to an elder. It doesn’t hurt to ask more about what that means for where you come from. So that’s more about the hand game song composition, it’s all about the beat. It’s a little, fast, double beat, and then I would think about the melody or how other song composers made their songs, and I would kind of go off of that. I really enjoy just humming alone in my car, thinking of something, and then maybe making a beat on my steering wheel, and then something just comes out of that. There’s different endings to a hand game song, but you just have to listen to a lot of hand game music and see how you resonate with it if you want to compose your own hand game songs someday.
I kind of got back into dancing at powwows and singing at powwows, and in my ceremonial journeys I was more involved in the Sun Dance. I used to dance jingle, and then I went to traditional for a little while. I love the jingle dress and respect it so much. There’s so much that goes into jingle dress dancing because it’s a medicine dance. The traditional dance is more pertaining to my people, the traditional dress with the breast plate and the braids, there’s a meaning behind every single piece of the regalia as well. So I decided to get more spiritually in-tuned with what our culture entails about dancing, and I learned a lot of history about what it means to be at a powwow or to Sun Dance. And in this day and age, the word for that is šaíč’iya. Šaíč’iya means “to make yourself red,” because we went through a time where we couldn’t be red, we couldn’t be Indian. So when they said there would be some kind of a powwow or Sun Dance somewhere, they would say, “We gotta šaíč’iya now, make ourselves red.” So I made a song that talks about how dancers will dedicate their passion for this way of life into their dance, and they’ll use it as their prayer. The song’s called “Dancer’s Prayer.” The song means, “On this day I will paint myself red and dance and pray. I want to live the Lakota way of life so that the people may live.” So that one’s more like an encouragement song for yourself.
There’s different kinds of songs in Lakota culture: honor songs, prayer songs, of course hand game songs which I mentioned earlier, and there’s encouragement songs. There’s a song for just about everything. The feelings that you get from songs is called ičhiŋ olowaŋ. So olowaŋ means “songs,” and ičhiŋ means more like the feeling in your heart from it. Then there’s another teaching that goes along with songs, it’s called čhaŋtiyapȟa. So čhaŋte is “heart,” and iyapȟa is like your heartbeat, so it’s kind of like how your heart resonates with a song, and I guess how songs can resonate with your feelings. So a lot of times, especially with men, they kind of have an etiquette with how to express emotions. And singers, they have a way to empathize with people. The way to do that, to be there, is through song, to express something. To have a thought for somebody through a song is a very honorable thought and a good way to be as a relative in your community. And another teaching I have is, if you feel like taking on the ways of singing, there’s also a lot of honor and thoughtfulness that you adopt into your own heart, a lot of empathy that you adopt into your own heart. You’ll feel the feelings of others, and you’ll want to be there for others in a whole new different way, you’ll have a gift to share with them. As a singer in a community, people are going to love your singing, they’re going to enjoy it, they’re going to be entertained by your singing. They’re going to have this ičhiŋ olowaŋ or čhaŋtiyapȟa in their heart with the song. Especially if you’re a singer with the drum, or a backup singer or something, just from a woman’s standpoint, being a backup singer is a very important thing. Your voice is something that belongs to the people. It’s going to be there for the people, and when you’re called to sing it’s an honor. When you’re called to sing it’s almost like your duty and your service. Sometimes it’s very heavy, because you’re singing for maybe somebody who’s having a hard time, somebody who’s mourning, somebody who needs encouragement. You know, maybe they need a prayer. So that’s another thing, and I only encourage that because it makes you stronger, it encourages strength within yourself, especially when you’re singing for people in your community.
But when I was taught some things by prominent female figures in my life, I acknowledge their strength before me. They went through a lot before I was able to sing, maybe they were scared to sing because of the colonization that happened to our people, and not to mention the way we treat the Earth. The way we treat the Earth is almost the way that we treat our women. The way we treat our women today, especially our Indigenous women, it seems that there’s a mirror effect that’s happening with our own Mother Earth, our Grandmother Earth. In our culture it’s Uŋči Makȟa, “Grandmother Earth.” So one of my grandmas, she taught me some really strict teachings growing up, she was very stern but she loved to laugh, I love her a lot, I don’t see her very often, her name is Regina, Regina Brave. I have a lot of grandmas, they’re not my parents’ parents, but they’re just my grandmas because we have such a broad family system. Our blood relatives that are elders in our family are our grandparents. I like her because she was in AIM [The American Indian Movement], she helped occupy Wounded Knee in ’73 with AIM, and she’s strong, she’s a fighter. She went to Standing Rock in the time that we were protecting our water, and she was there until the very, very end. She was one of the last ones to be taken off the grounds there at the camp and arrested. So she sat in jail just to protect our Mother Earth, our Grandmother Earth. And I had no idea, not knowing that she was arrested, I was composing this song about our Grandmother Earth and our grandmothers. I was just finishing it up and wanted to make sure our Lakota language was correct, so I called my dad and I sang it to him on the phone, and he’s like, “That sounds really good, my girl! And speaking of that,” I could just tell his finger was going like this on the phone. He’s like, “Your Grandma Regina, she was arrested yesterday.” I said, “Oh no! Really? Oh no!” He said, “Yeah, she was up there in Standing Rock and they took her away, so I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know if she’s still in there or what happened.” So, you know, there’s no coincidences, I happened to finish this song and I felt like it was meant to happen that way. So I dedicated this song to her. The [lyrics of “Unci Song”] means, “Grandmother Earth, I love you. You give me life. I will stand with my Grandmothers.”
Now, there’s a reason why I put extra words on the end. It’s called a tail. So in the composition of songs, when you think of a song like that with a straight beat, it kind of resonates with the drum beat. So you think of the parts of a song: there’s a lead, so it will be like a call and response, it will be like that part again when there’s more singers. And then they would join in the rest of the song, they usually call that a cut, so it would be similar to a verse, so half of the verse would be the vocables, and the other half would be the words. It’s not always that way, because with “Dancer’s Prayer” I have two sets of words, but they’re separated. It signifies that that half of the song is done and then we’re starting the next half. So when you sing those two halves then you’ll come again in with that lead. So, with the lead, the cut, and the two parts of the verses, that’s one pushup or one start. It’s easy to come up with that much of a song, but what’s harder is keeping the key in the beginning and the end so that it will flow back in when the lead comes back in. For Natives, we know these songs so much already, that we kind of know the flow of things, or if you listen to the music enough you’ll know the flow of how to compose a song. And that goes for hand game songs and round dance songs.
I don’t know how many are familiar with round dance, but I think it’s pretty popular in Native country. They’re particularly known for their lyrics that sound like love songs, however, there’s a bit of different cultures that have their influence on round dance. The first teachings of round dance was given to me from the Cree people in Canada. They use this dance to help those who are in mourning. They use this dance to encourage them, and bring the passed-on loved ones to come down and dance with us and sing with us. So there’s a lot of spiritual aspect to round dance, and there’s a lot of social aspect to round dance as well. In Lakota culture we have the kahomni and we have the rabbit dance. Kahomni means “round,” so it kind of works just like round dance. And then rabbit dance is a couple’s dance. I think about blending those two, how my culture, Lakota culture, has a lot of love songs pertaining to this round dance, and the Cree people, they have a lot of culture relating to a lost loved one and encouraging them. What I wanted to do was fit these two together so that the words will work with both cultures. So tokša akhe means “later again,” basically how you say bye. How you say your well wishes when you’re going to be leaving. “I will see you again later on.” So I wanted to make this song about those who are missing somebody, it doesn’t matter who. It could be your loved one who’s gone on to the spirit world, or it could be your sweetheart, so it can go either way. The song, it means, “Always I will hold you in my heart. I will miss you until we meet again.” So that’s a round dance song. There’s a lead, and then there’s a part where others come in if there’s a group, and then there’s a cut which is two verses, and of course one verse is just vocables and the other verse has words. So I guess for me, what comes to mind more first is the melody, but sometimes the lyrics come first. I think of a purpose of the song, I think of, “Why did this thought come into my head for this song just now?” So I make some words, maybe I’ll tweak them here and there, and I’ll try to fit them in where the melody is. Then making the tune also, the melody is complex because you can manipulate the vocables however you see fit. But for our Lakota songs, the beat is a little bit different, it’s a slower double beat. I don’t hear much newer songs made in that style. It’s just really nice to hear the old songs and just have the respect for them that they deserve, and keep those songs alive as well. So however round dance is for your culture, just study how the songs are made, study the beat. Although I do not drum, I just hit my leg or hit the steering wheel when I’m driving, you know, I just try to think of the beat in my head when I’m composing the song. And for any of us young ladies out there, it’s okay if your culture allows the drum, that’s fine, I encourage that for you. However you see your expression of cultural teachings as well as an interest in singing and composing songs, I encourage that, because as a youth, as a young man or young woman, it is very honorable, and a form of resilience that you’re even willing to take that on. It’s a beautiful skill to use, and it’ll be helpful for your people.
Some of my influences include a couple of singers from my own territory, Sissy Goodhouse and another one is Cheryl Between Lodges Two Bulls, and then Nellie Two Bulls. It took a lot of courage to sing alone as a woman, and they’re a few of the more prominent Lakota women singers that sing alone. Also I really look up to Fawn Wood, I really look up to Kit Landry (Largo), and Penny McGilvery of Northern Cree, and Delia Waskewitch, she’s a backup singer and a solo artist who sings alone round dance songs and also sings along with her guitar, sings gospel and country. Then I also look up to Jackie Bird, she’s also Sioux Dakota, she sings really well too and she has albums of her own out as well. I recommend any of them, I love their singing. Getting into singing at powwows is a great act of courage in itself, but it’s so fun and exhilarating, and if you get into it, I commend you on that and encourage you.
TIANA SPOTTED THUNDER’S ESSENTIAL SOUTH DAKOTA ALBUMS
Buddy Red Bow — BRB (1980)
SOURCES
Spotted Thunder, Tiana. “Indigenous Song Presentation and Songwriting Process with Tiana Spotted Thunder.” Sol Collective. 12 Nov. 2021.
