FW: I am Frank Waln, I am a Sicangu Lakota hip-hop artist, musician and writer, storyteller from the Rosebud reservation of South Dakota. I will say, for me, each of us are an example of living, breathing and walking the answers to that, and I think it starts with being rooted in your home community, being rooted in your culture. We are born and raised in these places, so it is easy to carry that with you and through art because it made you who you are, it's like if you are from Durham, and you are born and raised in here, you are going to  represent Durham in your art unconsciously, even if you don't even think about it. I think being rooted in that culture, being rooted in those communities, is also understanding that history and how it ffects those communities and affects our reality and influences our art. I feel comfortable in expressing that, also I feel comfortable in expressing something new while drawing on our own personal stories, because it connects to that history, it connects to our culture. I have experiences of my time in college in Chicago that connect to massacres that happened on my home reservation hundreds of years ago, so I am just connecting those dots through our art, through our storytelling, through our performance. Just constantly as Native people, our ancestors were always telling their stories, and our old stories, we just continue doing the same, we tell our stories and carry those old stories.

I've been asked how as Indigenous artists we carry and represent our people, our culture, our nation, the history that our people how gone through in this country and before it, and also how we feel comfortable creating something new and bringing something new to the table. I think telling contemporary stories as Indigenous people, how we put the past, present and future together as artists.

A great example of that is my song ÒMy StoneÓ that I wrote for my single mother as a birthday present. I was dead broke at the time in school, so decided to use my gift of writing songs to create a gift for her. That song it about my personal storyÊabout me being raised by a single mother, and things we went through and how grateful I was, but the foundational concept of ÒMy StoneÓ people think is Ômy rock, the thing that holds me down,Õ but actually it came from our Lakota creation story which tells us that all of life was created from one source which was stone or rock. So that is an example for something we had gone through but connecting it to history, connecting it to the past. Every song, every step, every note we do is influenced by all of that. Something we do as Indigenous artists is that we carry the past, present and future with us at all times. Time was perceived differently for Indigenous Peoples and I think you see that in our art. For us, each of us are living, breathing examples of the answer to your question, and I think it happened that way because we had no other choice, and we wouldn't have made it this far if we were doing it any other way.
 

SS: My name is Samsoche Sampson. I am the elder brother of the Sampson Bothers. We are Muscogee (Creek) and Seneca.

LS: My name is Lumhe ÒMiccoÓ Sampson, I am the younger brother of the Sampson Brothers, a dancer by nature, but hoop-dances are our forte. 

SS: We are born and raised in California, our mother and our father met during the whole protest of Oakland-San Francisco area with the Aim Movement, and then our mother went to a boarding school in the Riverside California, called Sherman Indian High. That question goes along with what we do, as our father passed away when we were very young. I was just turned 4 and my brother was just over 2. The way our mother kept us involved with our culture was through the powwow culture. When you are in the city, and you have all these different cultures mingling around and coming together and expanding and contracting, the way our native people held on to their identity was through powwow.
 
Through Powwow our mother was able to keep us involved the Indigenous culture, and she did what she could to teach us of her culture, which is the Iroquois / Haudenosaunee culture from the back east of New York territory area. We are exposed to a lot of other things, like non-Indigenous culture, so our mom got involved with Lambada and Salsa. She was also a cha-cha instructor, so she brought that home to us and taught to find rhythm in other genres of music. Our people were not stoic or static, we were very dynamic and adaptive, so we took those influences and we adapted them into our dances. That allowed us to bridge into more genres and give a fresh perspective of Indigenous culture and other places where you wouldn't normally see Indigenous culture. It gave a cool fusion for people to find the way into the experiencing Indigenous culture. With that, and performing, we had to learn the culture and history of all the dances, so we had to be versed where these stories came from, where the dances came from, where the music came from. That allowed us to move forward, to bring something new, to create something new to share with our greater audience.Ê

LS: I think definitely when you talk about us being raised in non-Indigenous communities, something our mom made sure was that she instilled within us a sense of identity, meaning that we understood where we come from and who we were. The contribution that has to the greater society of the world. More importantly for us, was that actually did it gave us some roots to understand where we come from.

Whenever when we are asked "Are you Native" or "Let me see your dance", I would ask them the same thing. I will ask them "Okay, let me see whatever it is that you do", and it would put them in context, because they realized they didn't necessarily know that origin or that story or that part of their life, which is unfortunate, but I encouraged them to explore that. As I mentioned, we were born in Los Angeles, so we are born in modern towns, we weren't somehow magically teleported from a 150 years ago to the modern time. We grew up around hip-hop culture, we grew up with MTV, with radio, with all these other things, so anything that we do is influenced by that. That is literally the definition of culture, it is the accumulation of the arts, the intellect, everything that is part of our human existence, what we are aware of. If I were to do hip-hop music, inevitably it would be Native hip-hop music. If I danced like Michael Jackson, that would be like a Native Michael Jackson. No matter what I did, it would be the Native version of it, and it is just utilizing the modern tools, the modern media or platform to be able to tell these stories. It is kind of what it is, us telling our stories.

FW: Back to personal stories, we are asked about articulating on or talking about as artists regarding the criticisms of "not being Indian enough.Ó For me, that happened many times throughout my career, not so much within Indian community, it is always outside of Indian country. One of first the big times that happened to me was when I was doing the MTV Rebel Music Project, and we were filming a music video on my home reservation. There were two co-directors, one was [unintelligible] and one was a white guy. We were in editing, and it was the song for my mom, and I told you the story the song came from, it was an Indigenous song from an Indigenous concept, but it was a hip-hop song, and it was with a piano melody. The white director asked me if I could "Native upÓ the song a bit in the chorus. I didn't, but whenever I hear that, all I hear and see is stereotypes. Because that's the lens that people are looking at us, it's not Indian enough by whose standards, according to who? According to stereotypes. 

I am a whole Lakota no matter where I go from the day I was born, no matter what I am wearing. I don't have to wear feathers and leathers to be Lakota. When people say that to me or have that take on our art, for me, it's always coming from a lens of stereotypes, a lens of genocide, aÊ lens of a colonial history of defining who is Indigenous or not, non-Native people saying "this is an Indian" and "this isn't an Indian.Ó It goes down to the history of how that is how the government handled us, even look at how people perceive our art. It's tied to that history.

Again, it goes back to your question, it's easy for me to articulate on the history because it comes out in almost every space we go, because people don't realize they are looking at Indigenous people as humans and our art through a colonial lens all the time, no matter what. Unless you are an Indigenous artist trying to change that narrative from the inside looking out. 

For me, I deal with it often, but I just see it as that colonial lens, trying to keep us in our place, and keep us silent and erased, but it isn't going to work. We definitely have been pushing back against that in spaces and places that it's happening, here at the Nasher Museum, showed me that in my lifetime things are changing. We are starting to see the results of us as Native artists, defining our own narratives and pushing back against that sort of "not-Indian enough."

SS: No matter what I do, it's going to be NativeÉ

FW: Éeven when your dad got nominated for an OscarÉ

SS: That was the craziest thing. My dad being who he was and from the industry, he broke a lot of stereotypes by doing what he did, by changing narratives. Even in the movie 'White Buffalo,Ó you may or may not know this, but the white buffalo is actually a very sacred being to Lakota and people of the plains, for that movie to portray the white buffalo as the demon or as the evil, the antagonist if you will, they very well changed the narrative about how we talk and how we represent ourselves. My dad sought to have that rectified, but of course he is just an actor, and he doesn't have the ultimate saying. In the editing process, they edited out all the parts that he would have had inserted, which would have alluded to the fact that we see this animal as a sacred being, very positive to us, and never necessarily in that negative connotation. My father always tried to do was to voice his advocacy for not only for his own people, his own tribe, but also other tribes as well. Because he very well was that go-to imagery, again somehow one guy got to be all these tribes, in that same stereotype where we assume all of us look the same, we assume we all have the same cultures.

It's crazy for me to think that here in North America, it's more than 565 different tribal nations. If you look at Europe and all the different countries and sovereign nations, and compare that in size to the US, it's dwarfed, it's like a third, maybe a fourth of it. To imagine that we recognize this many different people and cultures in one small area, but we turn them into one monolithic people here in North America. How do you define what is that? And again, certain photographers and historians misrepresented a lot of tribal nations and gave us that one monolithic stereotype which wasn't nearly the truth of what was being represented. Again, here we are having to rectify these stories of what is and what isn't Native. For us, just being alive, we don't get a choice, we don't get to turn it off. We canÕt just say ÒIÕm just going to be brown guy today,Ó I stick out like a sore thumb no matter where I am. Because I wear my culture on my body, on my attire, in my hair, everything is emanating. Very seldom do I get that, but when I try to modernize things they say something similar to "could you make it more Native looking" cause I want to do things in a more contemporary context, to show people that we are alive in this modern time. We have cell phones, we have cars, we have Wi-Fi. For me to do a performance in a hip-hop setting, with modern clothes, people say "oh well, that is not Native.Ó ÔBut who are you to tell me that I'm not Native doing what I am doing?Õ Anything I do is Native, it just happens to be that. My perspective of what that means is definitely misconstrued by what the general consensus is about who Natives are and what that really means.