Native Pride Music Club unboxes this $10,000 surprise
Northwest Indian College’s Native Pride Music Club members unboxed a $10,000 surprise Tuesday, April 5 — equipment to launch the club’s new music and podcast studio at the Bellingham campus.
Club members hope the studio will become a space for Native people to explore their talents and record their own music — traditional and modern.
“This is all about the community,” said Justin Aceveda, a Tlingit student at the college. “There’s so many people in this area with stories and music to share and the music club can be a vessel for that.”
On top of using the equipment for music, the club sees an opportunity for language and culture revitalization.
“If it was up to me, the Tlingit language would be just as popular as Spanish. And the culture shared — elders permitting,” Aceveda said.
“Language is so important to our sovereignty and our strength as Native peoples,” said Skokomish student Meghan Peters. “I’m excited to learn more about my Coast Salish history.”
The club also hopes to host interviews with community leaders about Coast Salish and Native culture and history as well as bands traveling between Seattle and Vancouver, Canada.
In collaboration with Spotify, Adobe and the Hewlett Foundation, the American Indian Higher Education Consortium connected Tribal colleges and universities across the country with the opportunity for podcast training.
“They are trying to make it more accessible for Indigenous voices... Our music club said, ‘We need to get on this’,” said Gabriela Salazar, a communications faculty member at the college and advisor for the club.
Aceveda and faculty member Patrick Doran were selected to take part in the training and proposed a podcast featuring interviews with faculty, staff, students and the community. The pair made an itemized list of gear needed to launch the podcast and were overjoyed to learn it showed up at the school in March.
Aceveda and Doran are members of the college’s music club. After its founding in 2017, the club was on a short hiatus throughout the pandemic, but is back with consistent meetings using Zoom.
“Being a music club online is hard. So many technical boundaries we have to overcome, but it’s not entirely impossible,” Aceveda said.
The club’s transition to the online platform has had a fortunate effect. Students from all over the state, and California, are Zooming in to jam and talk.
“It’s been a great opportunity for students to express themselves through music — whether that’s traditional, contemporary or a combination of both,” said Peters, who joins in from the Mt. Rainier area.
The club was founded when Salazar saw Terry Williams, who is Upper Skagit and Lummi, using the library computers and microphones to record original raps. She encouraged him to find like-minded students and the pair launched the club.
“We started it not knowing that music and wellness aligned hand in hand. What I see from my perspective is a generation of youth using music for healing. Ultimately, the purpose of the club is to focus on well-being,” Williams said.
In 2018, the club started its annual spring event “Finding Your Voice Through Music” and received $2,500 in donations and funding to host a local artist. Along with a performance, the artist teaches students a musical skill with a workshop. This year, Bellingham artist and Colville Reservation Tribal member Grant Eadie, known as Manatee Commune, was the musical guest.
In addition to the annual event, the club hosts weekly meetings and its highly-anticipated karaoke nights. Students are also encouraged to share their musical talents and projects.
Aceveda, who has a background in audio engineering and electronic music, creates Indigenous-inspired beats created from natural acoustic environments, animal sounds and instruments as part of the music club’s library. Members of the club will hopefully get to re-record the beats together for use in projects with the school’s other clubs, like its recent collaboration with the American Indian Business Leaders.
With so many ideas for the new studio, the club members see it could grow into a performing arts center or radio and television broadcasting space with accompanying courses for students. The club is accessing $12,000 of additional school funds to include other media.
“It’s getting bigger and better and I’m excited to see that,” Williams said. “I’m proud to see it’s becoming more.”
Established by Lummi Nation, Northwest Indian College is one of only 37 Tribal colleges and universities in the country. With its main campus located on the Lummi Indian Reservation in Whatcom County, it is the only accredited Tribal college serving the states of Washington, Oregon and Idaho.
The college grew from the Lummi Indian School of Aquaculture, founded in 1973, and was chartered as Lummi Community College in 1983. In January 1989, in acknowledgment of serving Native people through the Northwest, it was renamed the Northwest Indian College.
The college now includes six full-service satellite campuses located in Muckleshoot, Nez Perce, Nisqually, Port Gamble S’Klallam, Swinomish and Tulalip.
This story was originally published April 10, 2022 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Native Pride Music Club unboxes this $10,000 surprise."
