Earlier this summer we had the great opportunity to work with students at the Native American Youth and Family Centers – Early College Academy. The academy is a culturally specific alternative high school serving students that represent tribal nations from throughout the country. We offered a two-session Roots and Beat workshop in two separate cohorts for students enrolled in the Resurgence School summer program at the ECA.
This summer was the second year that NAYA hosted the Resurgence School summer program, which started as an education initiative launched by the National Urban Indian Family Coalition in 2018. The Resurgence School is a comprehensive summer program for urban American Indian and Alaska Native youth that incorporates seven culturally contextualized primary domains of learning, that include social, emotional, intellectual and academic goals. The program is hosted at NAYA – Early College Academy in Portland, Oregon, as well as American Indian OIC – Takoda Prep school in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The theme of this years Resurgence School program at NAYA was “Through what lenses do we see ourselves and the world?” Roots and Beats Project met this question by exploring cultural presentation through music. We introduced the students to a variety of young musicians from across the Americas use their art to bring their cultural identity to the forefront while defining their experience of urban indigenous identity on their own terms. With this inspiration as our starting point, we took time to learn the basics of beat making, learn microphone basics for recording acoustic instruments, and sampled those recordings to trigger in MIDI controllers for spontaneous electronic compositions.