We Are Still Here began as a therapeutic improvisation on Indigenous People’s Day, 2021. I revisited the idea and it evolved into a piece for trumpet and fixed media exploring a complicated relationship between indigenous identity and a colonized world. Originally inspired by the grief and sadness surrounding the news of mass graves discovered at numerous residential schools across the United States and Canada, this music depicts an arc of cultural identity. First in a harmonious state, then deprived and suppressed by forces seeking to eliminate Native American cultures, and finally reclaimed in a way, but forever changed.
We Are Still Here is dedicated to the victims, those who died and the survivors, of residential schools in the United States and Canada.
We Are Still Here began as a therapeutic improvisation on Indigenous People’s Day, 2021. I revisited the idea and it evolved into a piece for trumpet and fixed media exploring a complicated relationship between indigenous identity and a colonized world. Originally inspired by the grief and sadness surrounding the news of mass graves discovered at numerous residential schools across the United States and Canada, this music depicts an arc of cultural identity. First in a harmonious state, then deprived and suppressed by forces seeking to eliminate Native American cultures, and finally reclaimed in a way, but forever changed.
We Are Still Here is dedicated to the victims, those who died and the survivors, of residential schools in the United States and Canada.