No. 90 of 108
September 11, 2025
Lakota drummers and singers, playing alongside symphony orchestral players, will take the Lakota Music Project on a tour of South Dakota communities in October. The conversations started in 2004 and first played in 2009. “If we focus solely on our differences, we will probably never get along. So we have to focus on our similarities and how we make this work and how we do it in a positive way,” Emmanuel Black Bear, current drum keeper of the Creekside Singers said. “We’ve been doing this for so many years that a lot of us have become good friends with each other. We have that trust between us, so we’re able to come together with music.” “I heard this very powerful sound and I recognized that they [the native drummers and singers] were great melody writers. They were brilliant melodists, and that was the core. They produced these melodies that were like iron. They were solid. They were perfectly constructed. Like a tree trunk, they couldn’t be broken.” So said Derek Bermel, a composer from New York working on this year’s offerings.
Today is 9-11. The anniversary of the day the twin towers fell. The day after political violence and yet another school shooting. Realities continue to cleave, rearrange themselves, escalate and reflexively push back harder, with more judgement and violence. Easy to be caught up. Easy to despair. Today, choose instead to be inspired by Black Bear. “If we focus solely on our differences we probably will never get along.” Instead, create melodies between us; solid, like iron, a trunk through humanity that can’t be broken. In spite of. Because of. For the sake of.