KEXP's Sound & Vision airs every Saturday morning from 7-9 AM PT, featuring interviews, artistry, commentary, insight, and conversation to that tell broader stories through music, and illustrate why music and art matter. You can also hear more stories in the new Sound & Vision Podcast. New episodes are out every Tuesday. Subscribe now.
Calina Lawrence might be the first person to ever record vocals on a hip hop track in the Lushootseed language. Lushootseed is a Coast Salish language. It’s the language of the Duwamish and Suquamish people, as well as other nations around the Pacific Northwest. Calina grew up on the Port Madison Indian Reservation in Suquamish. It’s on Puget Sound’s Kitsap Peninsula near Bainbridge Island. She was part of the first class to go through Suquamish’s Tribal High School. She was able to learn Lushootseed during her time there.
It’s a language that was almost lost. In the 1990’s, it was said that there only 60 fluent speakers of Lushootsed alive. In this Sound & Vision interview, Lawrence talks to Gabriel Teodros about the power of language.
It’s the main tool of ethnocide and genocide, is to attack the language of a specific landscape, of a specific people, right? And you will talk to so many different indigenous peoples across this continent, across the world, right? That says that language belongs to the land and, because we say we are of the land, that we belong to the land, so we belong to a language.
It’s not the first time it’s been done in terms of native language and hip hop. There’s so many, so may dope artists who have done it and I’ve heard them and it’s inspired me, right? Like Tall Paul and Supaman. And so many folks who have already done this with their languages. And I’m thinking, okay, well, I’m not fluent by any means, I’m a lifelong student.
“I wouldn’t say that my dream is to be a fulltime musician, my dream is to make a song in my language that I can perform or just, you know what I mean, use. And the cool thing is that like, here is maybe the first time in my life where I could say like, I literally had a dream manifested into reality and like, here I am. For the first time in the history of this city, since it’s been birthed, a hip hop song in Lushootseed, which belongs to this land is going to be aired, you know. And we’re in 2019. There’s a lot to be said and that can be interpreted a lot of ways, but we’re here and we’re doing it and I’m really, really blessed to be a part of it.”
KEXP's Sound & Vision airs every Saturday morning from 7-9 AM PT, featuring interviews, artistry, commentary, insight, and conversation to that tell broader stories through music, and illustrate why music and art matter. You can also hear more stories in the new Sound & Vision Podcast. New episodes are out every Tuesday. Subscribe now.
Hozoji Mathison-Margolis of Helms Alee tells KEXP about her day job as an independently contracted shellfish biology diver.
In an interview at Capitol Hill Block Party this past summer, KEXP DJ Gabriel Teodros chatted with the group about their genre fusing style and the stories behind their music.
