- On this "Native Report," we highlight the DNE band Sihasin whose blend of punk-folk and traditional Navajo creates space for others to learn about culture.

And we learn how artist Louis Still Smoking brings history to life through his portraits and murals.

We also learn what we can do to lead healthier lives and hear from our elders.

- [Announcer] Production for "Native Report" is made possible by grants from the Blandin Foundation, Anishinabe Fund and Alexandra Smith fund in support of Native American Treaty Rights, administered through the Duluth Superior Area Community Foundation.

And generous support from viewers like Jack and Sharon Kemp.

DSGW Architects, personalizing architecture, online at dsgw.com.

And viewers like you.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - Welcome to "Native Report" and thanks for tuning in.

I'm Rita Karppinen.

The Dine band Sihasin made their ways to the shores of Gitche Gumee for a special concert in Minnesota.

The group's blend of punk-folk and traditional Navajo creates space for others to learn about culture while acting as a call to action for issues such as climate change.

We got to sit down with the band to learn about how they started making music and what other passions drive them in spreading the word about the people.

(gentle music) (band warming up) - We are Sihasin from the Dine Nation, bonjour.

I know we're so excited to be here in this part of the world, the Great Lakes, for us, yeah, this is amazing just to look out and see so much water.

It's incredible.

- We are here to play music and to hopefully connect cultures and just enjoy the celebration of resilience that exists amongst our people.

♪ Forced to choose ♪ (indistinct) restitution ♪ Why are we listening?

♪ Why are we listening?

(singer chanting) - We first started playing music as a call to action.

We grew up traditionally back home in Black Mesa at the front lines of marches with our elders, with our grandmothers.

Over 14,000 of our people have been forcibly relocated since the 1970s in order to extract coal from our homeland.

- In the 1970s with the multiplier effect, 14,000 people becomes hundreds of thousands of people that have been displaced over generations now.

- That voice for us was really important to utilize I think any means possible to get the word out that these atrocities were happening.

It was like here, now, when we were growing up, it wasn't something that was in the history books that people read about that they thought "oh, how sad that this is happening to indigenous people".

But this is happening today, modern times where indigenous people are being forcibly relocated from our traditional homelands.

And so music for me was a way to amplify that kind of truth that people weren't seeing anywhere else.

- Well, as an indigenous person for us, I think story, song, it's all oral tradition, so there's a natural progression of wanting to document what is happening within our communities and to sing about it, it's just kind of this natural progression.

Our singers are called Hatatii so a lot of our traditional histories are all kind of embedded throughout the songs.

Then contemporary, I felt like it was just, it wasn't like a decision or a choice, it was just like this is what we know.

So we just kind of started to write about it.

(upbeat music) ♪ Lay down your fight ♪ Breathe in the light ♪ The way to make it right ♪ Is gentler than night ♪ The way to make it right ♪ Is gentler than night - When we started playing music, I was I think about the age of eight and my sister is my older sister.

So we didn't have a lot of resources and access to instruments, so we just kind of found anything to play on.

I had some pots and pans or just drummed on just the soles of my shoes, whatever I had, and then started writing and making music and it was something that we kind of picked up from our mom.

She's a folk singer-songwriter, and our father, he's a traditional singer.

So we grew up going to ceremonies, but also in the power circuit.

So for us, just expression and using creativity using songs was a natural format.

We just started writing songs like "Resist" or "Fence" or songs that spoke about the atrocities that we were seeing and the sound that we developed was just kind of this natural process of finding who we are, part of our path in life, our identity there.

(singer chanting) - As Sihasin, we travel as three generations, our parents and their grandchildren, and it's incredible to be able to be out in the world and to continue that cycle of education.

When we are back home, our cultural lens is this small, but when we're out in the world, our cultural lens is so much larger and I feel like that experience is something that we're missing a lot in today's societies that we're not able to connect the generations or people just... Maybe it's more so that people are not connecting these generations when they need to be connected.

- Part of our traditional philosophy as Dine is K'e, which is just family and it's the relations beyond just blood.

We have a clan system, but there's still that recognition, even if we're not clan related, there's a family structure of looking at people with respect.

(singer chanting) (applause) - With our current band, Sihasin, it's about empowering people to take action, empowering people to find the knowledge to look to our elders, to look to our wisdom keepers to their reconnection with our beautiful mother Earth.

And so that's for me, when I play music, that's my hope is that people have a reconnection to culture and to the earth, and that to me is one of the greatest actions that we can take because it's like when you have that kind of foundation with you, then we recognize then that there are so many more possibilities in this world and that we are that possibility and that we carry that forward for our ancestors.

- Sometimes it's difficult, both music, you can cut across through any boundaries, any layers, and it's something that creates bonds and unity and it's a beautiful way of just sharing emotion.

♪ Everyone has a right to belong ♪ ♪ We the people, we the people - The word Sihasin means hope, which happens to be the main message they have been spreading.

With a desire to uplift youth and inspire them to tell their stories and act upon their dreams.

(upbeat music) - The first pacemaker was implanted in Sweden in 1958 and they're a wonder of engineering.

They correct slow or irregular heart rhythms and they have become relatively commonplace.

Symptoms of slow or irregular heart rhythms are palpitations, lightheadedness and syncope, or fainting, aging, heart muscle damage from a heart attack, certain medications, and some genetic conditions can cause a slow or irregular heart rate.

With aerobic exercise, your heart rate speeds up, but at rest should be 60 to 100 beats per minute.

Conditions such as sick sinus syndrome or heart block can cause the heart to beat too slowly to get blood flow to your brain and other vital organs.

There are medications to slow down some fast heart rhythms, but none to speed up slow ones.

A pacemaker is a tiny computer that monitors your heart rate from beat to beat and instantly decides if it should pace your heart.

If it does, it sends an electrical signal down a set of wires or leads that are implanted in your heart.

Pacemakers are about the size of a 50 cent piece and about three times as thick and are surgically implanted under the skin of your chest.

Most likely you'll be awake during the procedure, but sedated to help you relax and local anesthetic's used for pain control.

During the operation, the pacemaker is implanted close to your collarbone.

The leads are inserted into a large vein and guided into your heart using specialized imaging and are attached to the heart muscles.

The entire procedure takes a few hours.

You will likely be in the hospital for a day after the pacemaker is implanted so it can be programmed to fit your specific needs.

Pacemakers can help you live a more active lifestyle that can be monitored remotely by phone or computer, and your doctor will decide how often that is.

The batteries can last five to 15 years and will give plenty of advanced notice before they need to be replaced.

That requires another operation, but it isn't as complicated as the initial one.

The pacemaker gets changed and the leads are reused.

Worldwide, more than 700,000 pacemakers are implanted every year and they have a good track record.

As always, talk to your healthcare provider if you have questions, and remember to call an elder.

They've been waiting for your call.

I'm Dr. Arne Vainio and this is Health Matters.

(upbeat music) (gentle music) - Harte Butte Mountain is one of the sacred mountains that we go up and we do our fasting, you guys would call it a vision quest.

We go up there, we stay up there for four days and four nights to help us to... Like me being a lodge keeper of the sweat lodge, but I also use the herbs and the roots for doctoring sick people.

So I usually go up there to find out what medicines they're gonna get, what medicines they're gonna use for cancer, heart trouble or whatever.

Sometimes we just go in there just to cleanse our bodies, just to detox ourselves.

Other times we go in there to do what they call spiritual healings, prayer for somebody that's sick with maybe cancer or heart or something, we go in there and we pray for them.

In the sweat lodge, a lot of times too, it is just go in there and to help find our inner self.

Especially like now the economy's falling apart and you think it's the end of the world.

So this way you go in there and it helps you to deal with the stress and stuff that's related to everything around us.

We got what they call a mixed sweat.

That's where women and men can sweat together.

Then you got your warrior sweat where that's just all men and then you got your woman's sweat where it's just all women.

So it depends on what the occasion is.

Then we also do, a lot of the veterans, we do the sweat lodges for them and the spiritual doctrine in there, but we also use horses to help them to cope with the society around them.

And that's been really successful.

I'm known as a spiritual reader in the sweat lodge as well as in the medicines.

So in a way I'm kinda a leader in the spiritual world, but yeah, just a common mind in everyday life, huh?

(gentle music) - Native artist Louis Still Smoking brings history to life in his portraits and murals.

The Blackfeet Nation artist paints a realistic impressionism style and intends to spark interest in his native culture through art.

(gentle music) - We purposely put this here so everybody could see it.

We are in Heart Butte, Montana on a Blackfeet Indian reservation, and standing in front of one of the murals that me and Louis Still Smoking did for the Heart Butte School or at the Heart Butte Schools.

- My name's Louis Still Smoking.

I'm from the Blackfeet Nation, so this mural is part of the immersion class at the Heart Butte School, and I worked on it with John Pepion.

It's very unique how he draws these lines and I love that about his work and I think it ties in good with my work because my work is kind of graphic and it's like, sometimes it's lines, sometimes it's blocks of color, and sometimes it's tonal values, but it kind of really blends together nicely.

So they're very complimentary.

Yeah, I'm glad that we collaborate because it allows us to be creative and we have similar tastes, I think, but Napi, he's like a teacher.

He provides a lesson so the story would be attributed to a certain animal, the stories that they're learning, they'll see the animal and they'll see Napi, but each story has a specific moral to it.

The ability to create that for the children and they get that sense of the visual representation, rather than reading it, it's on the wall.

They can see it along with what they're actually reading and the Blackfeet words, the language that's also being incorporated into that.

And that's kind of our primary goal.

We wanna visualize the culture, well, our culture specifically because it's who we are, where we come from, and we want to show people that the culture itself can be visualized and it's kind of our job to present that in a way that's appealing to the eye, but you're also learning something through that experience.

My work is mainly figurative, it would be considered realistic impressionism, but it's done in a way where it seems like it's realistic, but it's actually an impression of what you're actually seeing.

Mine's almost graphic in nature.

The lines, the brush strokes, it's very Impasto.

I usually paint historical references of the Blackfeet people because they were photographed a lot.

I try to bring those black and white images into the forefront with color and I try to bring that person and their personality to now.

So it's kind of a contemporary reference to how it was captured then, which was a historical reference.

And I try to add more life to that image, and I try to bring them to the foreground and I put some of our cultural reference references into that, whether it be graphic or incorporating specific sights in this area.

So I think for the young artists, they see the work, and I think when we use cultural references to the work itself, I think it sparks that interest in the culture.

So I think it directly ties into the youth and it's exposing them to the culture but they can see it and it's visualizing what it could be.

It's who they are and where they come from.

So I think that's very important and I think that's a value we need more of.

Improving your ability as an artist is important, but it's also important to mentor and help the youth realize if they have a talent, where that can go.

So I think they see your accomplishments and I think that's good because then you represent your work in a positive way and you're also giving back to the community.

I have to do it, it's like who I am.

It's part of me and creating, whether it's imagery, a physical object, it's something that I have to do.

It's something in my mind where I have to create something that's just part of who I am.

- Louis was inspired to art by other talented family members and started drawing and painting at a young age.

(gentle music) - I am Linda LeGarde Grover.

I am a member of the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe.

I am a professor emeritus of American Indian Studies at UMD and I write.

It's a revised and expanded edition of a poetry book that was published in I think 2016 by a small independent press.

This one is published by the University of Minnesota Press and it has more poetry, it has a little reorganization.

I don't think that there is a single poem in here that does not have some sort of revision to it.

It's organized into four parts.

Much of my writing is organized into four parts.

Much of many Ojibwe people's writing is.

Four is a significant number in our beliefs.

The first section is kind of a storytelling of some of the ways in which the world was created and how it came to be the way it is today.

And so in the first section, I am trying to give the reader an invitation into the world of traditional Ojibwe ways of being.

The second section then is much of my boarding school poetry.

My family was a boarding school family for a couple of generations and many of the children in my family were removed from home and sent away to Indian boarding schools.

And so from family stories and from my own research, I have a collection of the impact of that really wrenching experience on individuals and families and communities.

Then in the third section, it is like the aftermath, trying to pull things together after a great interruption in the existence of native people.

And the fourth section is today, what we are today and how we live today and kind of reinforcing the values and ways of being that the collection started with.

And so some people have called this a collective memoir because it isn't poetry about me so much as it is about my extended family and community and tribe.

So Ojibwe language is laced throughout the collection and through some of the poems.

Sometimes there is sort of a translation in context, but often there is not something specific and it is really up to the reader to really look and think about this.

I've appreciated the opportunity to revisit and to rewrite and to bring in things that I had written since the time it was first published.

And I'm really very, very thankful for the opportunity to have been able to do that.

I will have a novel out this fall and I've written three fiction books.

My first book was published in 2010 and I was 59 years old when "The Dance Boots" was published.

And so I would like to encourage people who write to continue to do that and it's the most fun in the world to be writing something.

(gentle music) (gentle music) - My advice to young people is the world is so big and there are so many things that people can do, and I think that oftentimes as native people, either there are no expectations of us or there's very narrow expectations.

And I met a young man who's in his twenties.

He's a quantum physicist from the Dine Nation and it's like, you can be anything, you can do this.

So my advice to them would be to do, go, be bigger than what anybody's ever thought you could be.

(gentle music) - If you missed a show or wanna catch up online, find us at nativereport.org and follow us on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram for behind the scene updates.

And drop a comment on social media if you enjoyed the show.

Thanks for spending time with your friends and neighbors across Indian country.

I'm Rita Karppinen.

We'll see you next time on "Native Report".

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) - [Announcer] Production for "Native Report" is made possible by grants from the Blandin Foundation, Anishinabe Fund, and Alexandra Smith Fund in support of Native American Treaty Rights administered through the Duluth Superior Area Community Foundation.

The generous support from viewers like Jack and Sharon Kemp.

DSGW Architects, personalizing architecture, online at dsgw.com.

And viewers like you.

(gentle music)