Pomo, California

Transcription

My name is Ras K'Dee, I'm the son of a Lorelei Elgin [assumed spelling] and Audrain Cunningham [assumed spelling] and my father is African, my mother is Pomo California native from the Dry Creek band of Pomo Indians, in our language [speaking in foreign language]. The community here is mixed. There's people that have been relocated in the sixties and the seventies from the Relocation Act, people that have been removed from their traditional tribal territories, Sioux Lakota, Dineh. You have various tribes that are here in the bay area. [ Music ] There is an experience here and so, like, it's not necessarily all about just being urban, all about, you know, getting your Latte and then, you know, going to work maybe at the Native American Health Center, the Friendship House and some of the larger Community Centers here, but there's also a community of people that are dedicated to not only their cultural experience of bringing the traditions and the culture to the city, but also, you know, just bringing the whole way of life, you know, the spiritual practice, the dance, the ceremony. [ Music ] In my culture, we believe that the soul is everywhere, it exists in everything and all beings at one interconnected time. And so, there's no, like, individual soul, it's like, your soul is connected to, you know, what's going on outside of you externally in the plants and the earth, in the trees and in all these different things. My mother, bringing me up on a lot of culture and traditional songs and my family being a family that prays and sings and dances together, also gave me, like, kind of a well rounded perspective. [ Music ] And then I have this whole alternative education from my mother and my grandmother and my great grandmother. One of the first ways that I learned about how songs can have power is through going to the ceremonies and going to see my grandmother heal people with songs. I didn't-- it took me a while to understand that those songs, not only did they sound good and they had meaning to them individually, but they also were meant for healing and they were meant for power, you know and that's one of the ways my community has helped me to utilize some of that energy into my music.