Thursday, June 15, 2006
Full Circle
We watched Sherman Alexie's disturbing video Business of Fancydancing last night. Not the bundle of laughs his book by the same name evoked. However, a pleasant surprise in the form of 1.an undisclosed cameo appearance by Alexie himself, and 2.the rediscovery of Lummi Nation violinist Swil Kanim, whom I first met at a benefit for my friend Sherilyn Wells just before I moved away from Salish country.
To my delight in looking up Swil on Google, I found the following reviews of his music done in collaboration with my old friend Cha-Da-Ska-Dum Which-Ta-Lum, now deceased, who was honored at a ceremony I was fortunate to have attended in May 2001. Known in the 1970s as Kenny Cooper, we first met when he was a tribal fisheries police officer and I was operating as an unlicensed fish-buyer on the rez. Many years later, in front of Whatcom County courthouse, at a drumming ceremony shaming some dreadful racist politicians, Kenny and I reunited and laughed heartily that it took us two decades.
A year before that, I had mailed Kenny a photo Marianne and I took of a beautiful canoe on the Quileute reservation on the Washington coast south of the Makah. After asking the canoe owner if he knew my friend from the Hoh rez down coast, he told us that Kenny grew up next door to him, so I sent Kenny the photo. Kenny phoned me and gave me a gift, too--the story of how he used to scuba dive out there and sit on the bottom of a bay eye-to-eye with Gray whales that came in to rub barnacles off their bellies on the steep, gravelly slope.
I can't wait to listen to his voice and the music of his family and friends. http://www.soundings.com/reviews.asp?rd=list&aid=72
To my delight in looking up Swil on Google, I found the following reviews of his music done in collaboration with my old friend Cha-Da-Ska-Dum Which-Ta-Lum, now deceased, who was honored at a ceremony I was fortunate to have attended in May 2001. Known in the 1970s as Kenny Cooper, we first met when he was a tribal fisheries police officer and I was operating as an unlicensed fish-buyer on the rez. Many years later, in front of Whatcom County courthouse, at a drumming ceremony shaming some dreadful racist politicians, Kenny and I reunited and laughed heartily that it took us two decades.
A year before that, I had mailed Kenny a photo Marianne and I took of a beautiful canoe on the Quileute reservation on the Washington coast south of the Makah. After asking the canoe owner if he knew my friend from the Hoh rez down coast, he told us that Kenny grew up next door to him, so I sent Kenny the photo. Kenny phoned me and gave me a gift, too--the story of how he used to scuba dive out there and sit on the bottom of a bay eye-to-eye with Gray whales that came in to rub barnacles off their bellies on the steep, gravelly slope.
I can't wait to listen to his voice and the music of his family and friends. http://www.soundings.com/reviews.asp?rd=list&aid=72
