Rap, Rage, REDvolution
by Cristina Verán
April 20th, 2004 12:20 PM

Conjuring up the charge of cavalries and natives on some futuristic-western
warpath, OutKast stormed the 2004 Grammys in February with the brazenness of
the former, while bedecked as the latter. Resplendent in neon green
Halloween-Hiawatha approximations of Native American regalia—fringe, headbands, and
feathers—Andre and Big Boi rose before smoking teepees, prancing proudly through
their chart-slaying "Hey Ya!," the chorus of which is itself evocative of powwow
singing. Was it some kind of tribute, or did the winners of the Album of the
Year Grammy unwittingly channel Al Jolson's "Mammy"?

It's a question many Native Americans have considered, responding promptly to
launch boycotts and Web petitions voicing their collective displeasure. CBS's
brief, lukewarm apology—"if anyone was offended"—brought zero resolution,
particularly since OutKast themselves refused even to comment. Two months later,
people are still waiting; during an April 1 protest outside the network's
Minneapolis affiliate, one person was arrested.

"Janet Jackson's right breast was exposed for three-quarters of a second and
both the House and Senate convened hearings immediately, [yet] vulgarisms
about Native Americans are prime-time fare . . . and no one does anything," notes
Suzan Shown Harjo (Hodulgee Muscogee/ Cheyenne), executive director of the
Morningstar Institute, in her "Open Letter to Michael Powell, Andre 3000 and Big
Boi," first published in Indian Country Today.

Hip-hop, meanwhile, is speaking to the issue as well. "[It's] currently the
most popular music on the reservations," explains Don Kelly, executive director
of the Native American Music Awards. Litefoot (Cherokee), NAMA's Male Artist
of the Year for 2003, takes up the fight with his new single "What's It Gonna
Take": "We only good with feathers on/Don't exist when they're off/I punch the
remote/feeling like my whole race is a joke."

Among the masses descending this week upon Albuquerque, New Mexico for the
Woodstock-sized Gathering of Nations powwow will be scores of young folks
representing the burgeoning Native hip-hop scene on reservations and in urban Indian
communities across the continent. They're there not just for fancydancing and
fry bread but to catch live sets by headliner Litefoot and other key Native
rap artists like Shadowyze (Muscogee Creek/Cherokee) and Tac Tile (San Juan
Pueblo/Rosebud Sioux) at the Gathering's Reach the Rez concert, presented by
Native Style Entertainment and the nonprofit Association for American Indian
Development.

Beyond this forum, from the mouths and mics of other indigenous MCs like
Tribal Live and Natay (Navajo), B'Taka & Rollin' Fox (Chiricahua Apache), and New
York's own Warriors Blood (from the upstate Akwesasne Mohawk territory) flow
universes of verses about life on the rez and on streets from Albuquerque to
Tulsa, Minneapolis (home base of the American Indian Movement), even Newark. But
rapping about and sampling from their own culture—rather than, say, African
Americans'—has hardly earned them props from the mainstream rap world.

Among the handful of American hip-hop performers self-identifying as
indigenous who have achieved mainstream recognition, none has been a direct crossover
from the Native scene. Two—Taboo of Black Eyed Peas (Shoshone) and Tomahawk
Funk (Oglala Lakota) of Funkdoobiest—have been members of non-Indian-specific
groups. Still others have come up through largely Latino contexts. Kid Frost's
"La Raza" proclaimed, in 1992, "It's in my blood to be an Aztec
Warrior/Chicano, and I'm brown and I'm proud." Myriad West Coast Chicano crews like Aztlán
Nation, as well as some East Coast notables—think Tony Touch (Puerto Rican
Taino) and battle-rap champ Immortal Technique (of mixed Afro/Indian Peruvian
extraction)—have also promoted indigenismo.

"There is an unwillingness to give Native American artists credit for
expressing, really, what hip-hop is supposed to be about: the music and the heritage
of the people who present it," says Davey D. Cook, host of Pacifica Radio's
Hard Knock program and the authoritative hip-hop site DaveyD.com. "If an artist
like Litefoot doesn't come out with a song that has a James Brown sample or an
'Apache' bassline, people aren't trying to hear it," he says, appreciating
the ironic name of the Incredible Bongo Band's classic breakbeat. Regardless,
he's started spinning REDvolution, Litefoot's forthcoming, 11th album.

"The way (OutKast) were putting their hands over their mouths with that 'woo
woo woo woo' stuff," recalls Lance Gumbs, elected representative of Long
Island's Shinnecock Nation. "I couldn't even see them anymore. I just saw white
America, that same tired history." The former DJ, who would trek from the rez
regularly to attend Grandmaster Flash jams in the Bronx and Harlem during the
early '80s, emphasizes, "That these guys are African American made it even more
disturbing."

"I can relate to OutKast's irreverent approach in their stage performances
because I also use a lot of humor in my own art," says Bently Spang (Northern
Cheyenne), whose current Tekcno Pow Wow project melds aspects of hip-hop,
techno, and more traditional Native performance. "But in this case, they perpetuated
the same stereotypes we're fighting against," he explains, "like the
Washington Redskins, the Atlanta Braves' tomahawk chop, the University of Illinois'
Chief Illiniwek character."

OutKast's unauthorized inclusion of a sacred traditional Navajo "Beauty Way"
song in their performance was, itself, taken as serious offense. "I don't know
if Buddhists and Christians find those little Buddha statues and Jesus
night-lights I see everywhere offensive," says Raquel Chapa (Ledan
Apache/Cherokee/Yaqui), a photographer and collections technician at the National Museum of the
American Indian. "[But] Native Americans, for the most part, are more
sensitive in terms of our spirituality."

Anthony Lee Sr., president of the Navajo Medicine Man Association, made clear
to the Navajo Times that "it's not for the purpose in promotion of
entertainment. . . . [The song] must be kept in the proper respects, not to be taken out
of context—especially without consulting the Blessing Way chapters."

"Sinéad O'Connor ripped up a picture of the pope on Saturday Night Live and
there was an uproar, worldwide," notes Litefoot. "What Andre and company did
was the exact equivalent: outrageous, despicable," he says. "We as Native
Americans don't have the kind of political power and access that the Catholic Church
has, though." For more than 100 years, in fact, Christian churches partnered
with the U.S. government to forcibly remove Indian children from their
communities for spiritual, cultural, and linguistic "re-education" at boarding-school
gulags.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (April 26, in fact, has been
declared World Intellectual Property Day) and the United Nations Permanent Forum
on Indigenous Issues recognize a collective, perpetual copyright to distinct
indigenous cultural practices—sharply contrasting with U.S. copyright law's
temporally limited, individual-rights approach. Atencio López, a legal expert
from Panama's Kuna people, defines WIPO's dilemma as "wholesale plundering or
pirating of indigenous knowledge and products without any related benefits [or]
concern for the copyright of the peoples affected." Does irreverent, artistic
appropriation by pop stars fall into the same, er, canoe?

Black performers who have repped names, accoutrements, and "chants"
attributable to indigenous peoples of the Americas include Tupac Amaru Shakur, his name
thoughtfully bestowed by his then Black Panther mom out of respect for the
16th-century Inca who battled the Spanish conquistadors in what is now Peru. Far
less reverent have been the feathered headdresses sported by artists from MC
Pow Wow of Afrika Bambaataa's Soulsonic Force to hip-hop's quintessential
court jesters, Flavor Flav of Public Enemy and Biz Markie, to the late Lisa "Left
Eye" Lopes—while in a suede string bikini!—on a 1999 cover of Honey.
Recently, Vibe featured a headdress-donning fashion model of its own.

Some song lyrics have been equally questionable. Here's the Sugar Hill Gang,
in 1982's "Apache," after shoutouts to General Custer the Indian-killer: "I
sting squaws, then I run away/Hi Ho Silver, is what I say." Jay-Z, in "Girls,
Girls, Girls," states, "I got this Indian squaw and on the day that I met
her/Asked her what tribe she with, red dot or feather." Squaw, perhaps unbeknownst
to these and such other "s-word"-dropping rappers as Common, Foxy Brown, and
Chubb Rock, derives from an Algonquin term for female genitalia, but was adopted
by European fur traders to refer to Native women overall.

Biggie's "Navajos creep me/in they teepee" is also, at best, misinformed:
Traditional Navajo homes are hogans, not teepees. Boot Camp Click's Buckshot,
meanwhile, defines his "BDI Thug" alter-ego as derived from "Thugla, who were
wiped out with the Native Americans," oblivious to the word's origin not in the
history of American Indians but in that of the Indian subcontinent—an ancient
cult that engaged in murderous ritual rampages to honor Kali, the Hindu goddess
of destruction.

"American society . . . should understand that all of those images—from the
Noble Savage to the Bloodthirsty Indian—are based on not on our identification
but someone else's definition," cautions Spang, whose work was recently
featured in Only Skin Deep, the International Center of Photography's exhibition
challenging American notions of race and identity.

This country's "Black Indians"—descendants of Africans who were freed or
self-liberated during slavery and adopted into tribes like the Seminoles—
contributed to the debate last month when Hard Knock Radio brought together two such
figures: noted Bay Area activist Marcel Diallo and Shaka Zulu of New Orleans,
who dons full-feathered "Indian" regalia during annual Mardi Gras festivities.
They joined phone-in guests Litefoot and Ernie Paniccioli (Cree), a legendary
hip-hop photographer whose recent books include Who Shot Ya? and There's a God
on the Mic, for a two-part dialogue. "[Diallo and Zulu] thought the OutKast
performance was pretty cool," reports Davey D.

This echoes his experience at P. Diddy's L.A. Grammy Party, in fact. The
hosts "stopped the music there just so people could watch OutKast's performance,"
Davey D recalls. "Everybody clapped and cheered, saying 'Man, that was
incredible!' "

Nowhere has the chasm between Native America and black America been expressed
more divisively in a hip-hop context than during the "Big Ballers" concert
last May at Nassau Coliseum, featuring Ludacris, Busta, and other big names.
Lance Gumbs, the show promoter, was excited to include Litefoot on such a bill.
The predominantly black crowd, however, voiced its extreme antagonism toward
Litefoot—and perhaps all Native Americans—from the start. "As soon as we came
out onto that stage," he says, "people began to spit at me, throwing up their
middle fingers and screaming racial obscenities."

"Fuck you, prairie n_____s!" "Go back to your teepee, red motherfucker!" an
angry chorus of woo-woo-wooed boos—all of these were spewed before Litefoot
said even one word on the mic. Backed by a flawlessly choreographed stage show
comprising Ho-Chunk and Aztec traditional dancers and B-boy legends from the
Rock Steady Crew, Litefoot and company walked off the stage in disgust when the
third song had hardly begun. The 60,000-strong crowd of tittie-baring,
wannabe-blinging, "I'm a ho"-chanting Ludacris fans never even gave this Indian a
chance.

"I have never bought into that facile, disingenuous fable that oppressed
people cannot be racist," says Paniccioli, who was present at the Coliseum and who
has otherwise been warmly embraced by hip-hop's biggest stars and among many
sectors of the Black community.

"I've extended a sincere invitation to OutKast to join us at the Gathering of
Nations," says Litefoot, "and on next year's tour to over 150 reservations."
He makes clear that, in any case, an apology is still both desired and
expected by Indian country. "This would give Andre 3000 the perfect platform to say
what he has to say—to the largest predominantly Native American crowd he would
ever be able to gather in person."

Hey ya, OutKast. Are you listening?

by Cristina Verán