Atawit: Collective Songwriting at the Yakama Nation Tribal School

Another illustration of the Collective Songwriting process as a direct manifestation of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy is a project within a program of music educators with students of the Yakama Nation Tribal School. This “Atawit” project, which resulted in the composition of the song, “Atawit Nawa Wakishwit” (Our Sacred Lives), featured a group of university-associated students and faculty music educators with youth enrolled in a Native American tribal school in Washington state. In an ongoing partnership known as Music Alive! In the Yakama Valley, the long-standing program shifted gears several years ago from the provision of fundamental applied lessons by university students for

Yakama Nation students to a compositional effort that would engage adolescent students, ages 13 to 18 years, in expressing their views, in their words, with their preferred melodies, harmonies, and rhythms (Campbell, Mena, Gestsson, & Coppola, 2019; Igari, Vita, Flesher, Armstrong, Gestsson, & Campbell, 2020). The project was aimed at honoring student voices, community values, and principles of indigenous pedagogy, and was intended to address social issues among marginalized youth in their rural and remote community on the Yakama Reservation as they could be expressed in musically artistic ends.

Over a period of four months, the visiting music educators facilitated the process of determining which issues were emerging as important to the Yakama youth, and that they themselves saw as important to express in a musical form. The conversation initiated with student talk about preferred listening choices, then graduated to academic and social challenges at the tribal school, and finally extended to student concerns for health, education, employment, and their own future prospects on and off the reservation.

Several teachers and staff of the tribal school, as well as visiting tribal elders, were present in the spaces in which the conversations emerged, observing and only occasionally interjecting a thought (sometimes in the language of the Yakama, Sahaptan, or Ichishkin). In a series of one-day sessions, poetry was shared, recordings were exchanged, and basic skills of poetry writing, guitar-playing, and percussion techniques were developed. A three-day period then ensued, in which a full-fledged collective songwriting workshop transpired.

Students found their ways into core groups of lyric- writers and instrumentalists, where with continued encouragement by the university team of music educators (as well as modeling, or “prompting,” or suggestions of trialing one idea and then another), there arose a workable set of lyrics, melodies, chords, and rhythms that students found satisfying. Yakama teachers and elders were present, too, and students looked to them for translations and pronunciations of Sahaptan/Ishishkin words that would communicate the sacred images of Yakama culture. A portion of the song, partly sung, partly rapped in rhythmic fashion, appears below. A violin, synthesizer, cajon drum, guitars, and the Yakama drum were called in to envelop the lyrics.

We believe and perceive.
We will not grieve or leave.
One nation that’s alive:
We stand for our land tonight!
Land is our pride and joy.

Our land is scared and
Is not to be destroyed.
Natives don’t want to be hated.
WALK TALL, THINK STRONG.
Atawit nawa wakishwit.
We love our lives.
Forgiveness to those who don’t see us thrive.

The university team musically engaged the students of the Yakama Nation Tribal School in listening, vocalizing, employing body percussion and movement, and the playing of instruments. The music took on a combination of sounds emanating from the experiences of students, with the creation of a conglomerate of sounds that mixed current popular music idioms of their choosing with Yakama musical (and lyrical) sensibilities.

Over the course of the Atawit project, students grew in their functional capacity to play instruments and to sound out their ideas in ways that were expressive, colorful, poetic, and deeply significant to them. They recognized the power of their music to fully connect to the meaning of the text, and that they could musically express their native pride and sense of Yakama identity in the collective song they had made.