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 Identified
as a poet, a leader for Native American rights, a powerful
speaker, and an "extremely effective" communicator, John Trudell
calls himself "a blue Indian." Indeed, Trudell is the complex
sum of all that he's seen, endured and accomplished in his
53 years. Much of that life experience is reflected in Trudell's
newest release, Blue Indians. The album, as explained by Trudell,
"is literally about the technical world as an industrial reservation.
This time everyone plays the part of the Indian with their
range of feelings and attitudes." Produced by long-time friend
Jackson Browne, the new songs represent the latest of Trudell's
independent efforts.
John
Trudell did not set out to be a poet. He took that road primarily
through a series of detours, and his poetic and political
sensibilities were forged by the remarkable, sometimes horrifying
circumstances of his life.
Born
on February 15, 1946 in Omaha, Nebraska, Trudell grew up on
and around the nearby Santee Sioux reservation. (His father
was Santee, his mother's tribal roots were in Mexico). Trudell
became acquainted with economic hardship at an early age;
his mother died when he was six, leaving his father to care
for his large family.
During
the years that followed, Trudell's contempt for the dominant
"American way of life" deepened, along with his outrage at
poverty and racism. In 1963, Trudell found himself in the
military. "I went in for economic reasons and picked the Navy
because I wanted to minimize my chances of becoming a rifle-toting
target. But the experience did teach me that what was happening
to me as an Indian, a prisoner of America, was happening to
others all over the world." A resume he put together for a
press kit a few years ago contains the following listing:
1967-1969:
Jobs, School, Disillusionment
"I
was in a holding pattern," he says, until 1969, when he found
himself on the front line of an event that brought plight
of Native Americans to mass consciousness for the first time.
That event was the Indians of All Tribes Occupation of Alcatraz.
"From the time I had gone into the military in '63 to the
time I went to Alcatraz, I had been away from any indigenous
roots and connections. So, I went there, trying to find something,
and I found a whole lot of other people like me. And we hadn't
surrendered, whatever our frailties were."
National
and international media flocked to the island to cover the
story. Along with the media came attention from the U.S. government,
particularly the FBI "It took the non-indigenous community's
support to allow us to do what we did," says Trudell, who
acted as National Spokesman for the occupation force. "The
government called us 'militants,' attempting to discredit
us and ostracize us from the overall community. "
The
occupation eventually ended in 1971, but something more lasting
was poised to replace it: the American Indian Movement, A.I.M.
Trudell served as National Chairman from 1973-1979; with this
high profile position came increasing attention from the U.S.
government, more notably the FBI, which has compiled a 17,000-page
file bearing his name. The government response to A.I.M. was
swift: As Trudell bluntly states, "They waged a war against
us. They hunted us down. They killed, jailed, destroyed by
any means necessary."
In
1979 that war took a terrible personal toll on John Trudell,
in the form of an almost unspeakable tragedy that changed
his life forever. While incarcerated in the Springfield Federal
Prison Hospital in Springfield, Missouri in January of 1978,
Trudell had been warned to watch what he was saying, or better
yet, "to not say it at all." On February 11, 1979 Trudell
led a march to the FBI headquarters in Washington D.C. He
delivered an address on the FBI's war against Indians, and
burned an American flag that he felt had been desecrated by
racist and class injustice. Approximately 12 hours later in
the early morning hours, a fire "of suspicious origin" burned
down Trudell's home on the Shoshone Paiute reservation in
Nevada, killing his wife Tina, their three children, and Tina's
mother. The Bureau of Indian Affairs officially declared the
fire an "accident" and the FBI declined an investigation.
But Trudell flatly states, "It was murder. They were murdered
as an act of war."
Devastated
by this loss of his family, Trudell withdrew from the world;
"writing words" became his way "to keep some sanity" and continue
to survive. "The writing, the poetry came as a surprise to
me. I had done political writing, in the form of speeches,
but not anything that I thought of as poetry. But about six
months or so after the fire, when I was really down, the lines
came. The lines were my bombs, my explosions, my tears, they
were my everything. Gradually I started trying them out at
my speeches, asking myself 'Is this my own private madness
or is this something the people can understand?'"
What
began as a form of therapy soon turned into much more: the
words poured out of Trudell and his works were well received.
In 1981, Trudell published a book of poetry, Living in Reality,
yet by 1982, he had decided he wanted to combine his poetry
with music. "In April or May of '79, I met Jackson Browne
at Mt. Taylor in Grants, New Mexico. He allowed me room to
roam around in his world. So I was around recording studios
and musicians. And I've always liked rock 'n roll anyway.
So I began to think about joining the poetry with the oldest
indigenous musical forms and the newest musical forms." First
came the recording, Tribal Voice, at Jackson's studio putting
the poetry with the drum and chants. Later, after Trudell
met Jesse Ed Davis, came the rock 'n roll.
Jesse
Ed Davis, himself a Kiowa from Oklahoma, was something of
a musical legend. Getting his start in 1966, he was known
for playing with everybody. Jesse had recorded and toured
with the likes of Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Rod Stewart, John
Lennon, Jackson Browne (the memorable guitar solo on Browne's
first hit, "Doctor My Eyes," was by Davis), Taj Mahal and
countless others. His innate understanding of blues and rock
'n roll turned out to be just what Trudell had been looking
for. "When we met in 1985, he told me his name and then he
said, 'I can make music for your words.' With Jesse and me,
we each came from our collective Indian experience, and had
our individual experiences in the non-Indian world. We had
both literally been to the last door of hell, opened it, and
saw what was inside."
The
Trudell and Davis union of poetry and music yielded a powerful,
instinctive sound that led to a first album in 1986 titled,
AKA Grafitti Man. The album, released on Trudell's own Peace
Company label in a cassette-only format, gained critical attention
even with its limited distribution. In a Rolling Stone interview,
Bob Dylan called AKA Grafitti Man "the best album of 1986,"
and had the album played over the P.A. system during intermissions
on his 1987 tour with the Grateful Dead.
Trudell
and Davis released a second album together, Heart Jump Bouquet,
as well as another recording in the Tribal Voice series, titled
. . . But This Isn't El Salvador in 1987. Then suddenly in
1988, Jesse Ed Davis died. While shaken, Trudell resolved
himself to go on. He began to collaborate with Mark Shark,
the Grafitti Band's rhythm guitarist. "When Jesse died, Mark
just kind of carried it on from there. So it was a continuation.
The musicians changed, but you listen to Mark at times, and
you'll hear the Jesse Ed influences in there, very strong."
A
1988 tour as the opening act for the popular and highly politicized
Australian band, Midnight Oil, gained Trudell and the Grafitti
Band some mainstream exposure. In 1991, with Shark, Trudell
recorded a third album, Fables and Realities. And in 1992,
Trudell and Shark (a.k.a.IKTOMI) produced a third in the Tribal
Voice series, titled, Child's Voice:Children of the Earth.
Signed
to Rykodisc in 1992, Trudell was introduced to an international
audience, receiving worldwide distribution for the first time
with a re-make of his original AKA Grafitti Man, produced
by Jackson Browne. Gaining wide critical acclaim as a poet,
Trudell was cast in two movies, one fictional (Thunderheart),
and one documentary (Incident At Oglala) - both dealing with
Indian clashes with the U.S. government during the 1970s.
Trudell
released a second album on Rykodisc in 1994, Johnny Damas
& Me. Most recently, in 1998, Trudell was cast as the Radio
DJ, in Sherman Alexie's award winning Sundance film, Smoke
Signals.
With
his newest project Blue Indians, produced by Jackson Browne,
Trudell's powerful fusion of poetry and music comes from the
heart and spirit of a "blue Indian." "I see a real future
for spoken word with music. Poetry is based on the oldest
oral traditions. In music, lyrics are written to what the
math of the music allows us to say; poetry is what we need
to say. And to me . . . it's a canyon worth of difference.
"I'm
just a human being trying to make it in a world that is very
rapidly losing its understanding of being human."
http://www.JohnTrudell.com
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