I was looking for sounds to soothe my soul. I went on YouTube just searching for sounds, anything in nature, flute, drums, different kinds of drums, soundbaths. I believe sound is medicine. If you frame it through a Native lens, it draws Elders in a way nothing else quite does. I started thinking about a playlist - Spotify, YouTube, whatever people actually use, because not everyone reaches for the same thing: full of Native drumming, flute, soundbaths, stories. Not just the drumming either. We do our praying with drums too. Imagine a playlist like that helping someone drift off at night, carrying teachings with them while they sleep. There’s a belief that what you listen to while you sleep gets installed in you. Native stories have so much to give. I think it could become part of someone’s life without them even realizing it happened — real healing.
I care about this because I lost so much of it myself. My grandmother passed when my mom was only three, and our Native ways went with her. On my grandfather’s side we grew up more Mexican than Native. My mom’s side is Diné. I had to learn what little I know as I went, piecing it together on my own. There’s a lot of healing medicine I missed out on growing up, herb medicine, prayer medicine, beading as communion. There’s nothing like a grandmother’s love, and I never got that piece of it. There’s one photo of her floating around in the family. That’s most of what I have.
Because what’s mine is lost, I’ve held on to connection wherever I could find it. I’ve done a lot of healing research, and I’ve adopted others and let myself be adopted in return, my friends have become family in the way blood family should have been. My own grandmother was an orphan raised in the Catholic Church, and some days I feel like an orphan myself, being adopted in, grateful for it and grieving what made it necessary at the same time.
Our people are dying off with their stories still in them, and the younger generation doesn’t get to have them. It leaves a hole. It makes people hard. It makes the gap to their own history feel impossible to close. That’s why I think about getting the stories out there before they’re gone. They should be written down, but also recorded, since we have social media now and a video can be passed down the way a story used to be told around a fire. There’s a huge gap for people who are Native but feel completely lost from it anyway. The resources need to be there for when they’re finally ready to reach for them, whenever that is.
For myself, I want to get back to drumming and beading. I’m in the middle of cleaning out storage units right now, and I’m hoping that I can actually sit down with my crafts again. It takes patience, concentration, the color alone sparks something in you. If you don’t use that part of yourself, it’s like a caged bear or a wolf that never gets to run. You don’t get to be free, to be you, to express what you need to express. It isn’t only that the medicine heals you. Who you give it to heals you too.
We all learn differently, and that’s what belongs in the toolbox. Flutes, drums, soundbaths, meditation, all of it, because not everyone reaches the same door the same way. Music is the one thing that feels close to universal to me.
