Singers of Heavy Songs

They call them "singers of heavy songs" — the medicine people of the Blackfeet Nation.

During a Native meeting, our representative tells us that our numbers are dropping — she tells us there are just 600 original elders in the Eyak Nation, my mom among them. Our mortality rate, she says, is among the highest in the nation. Suicide, domestic abuse, addiction — the numbers mask the stories that we don't talk about.

It feels strange to hear this, so matter of fact, as we, the survivors take it in, count the names of the ones we've lost, a part of the business end of Native governance.

  A reservation where a 1/3 of the children report thinking about suicide or report depression has started a class on suicide prevention. They link the healing tradition of the medicine people, the singers of heavy songs, with the death grind genre, bands with names like Carcass, Exhumed, Xsyma. The music's aggressive, a muscle in a spasm of rage or meaninglessness, indistinguishable and loud. Kids start tapping their pencils, heads bobbing, and the teacher, too.

  James Brown's explosive shouts, grunts, and growls, they said, reached back to the circle, the gospel, and the slave songs.

A school in the Congo becomes a home for girls and women, victims of war crimes, rape, some bringing the children of violence, all carrying shame, and ostracised by their communities — some will write out their story, finding a song for it, to process, to survive, to name the beauty that exists and defies, persists.

            When the teacher turns off the music, the kids don't want it to stop, but maybe it needs to.

             They talk about the feeling, the pain. The hurt, they say. The hurt, someone says, does not exist to unmake you; it exists to bring you back to yourself.

                  You're a part of the world, they say, not apart from it.

                  They sing.