Posted 3:39 p.m. Friday, April 18, 2025
Singing at the Drum--Literacy Narrative
As I sit at the drum every Monday at 5:30 p.m, I feel a sense of pride and joy. I feel joy not just because I'm practicing my culture but because I can confidently lead my own drum group. It makes me happy to share what I know with my friends that haven't been as fortunate as me to learn their ways. So when my friends ask me” what are the words to this song” or “how does the beat go” I can tell them and point them in the right direction.
I remember the first time that I sang at the powwow in front of the whole tribe. It was, Labor Day powwow in Black River Falls, Wisconsin. It was a warm day with about one thousand natives from many different tribes and walks of life. As my brothers and I sit at the drum with my choka, which is Ho-Chunk for grandfather, the arena director, Boy Lad announces grand entry is at noon in ten minutes. Grand entry is the opening ceremony of a pow wow, where all the dancers line up in a single file line and enter the arena. He also says that he will be asking Black Deer (my drum) to sing grand entry. My brothers and I have spent weeks practicing grand entry and had it down perfectly. At this point, all 500 or so dancers were lined up in full regalia, so it was showtime. I agreed to take the second lead of the song (songs are sung in four parts). My brother took the first lead perfectly and my lead was coming up in a few seconds. Amidst the loud drumming and hundreds of dancers dancing around me, I can feel and almost hear my heart beat. I was so nervous, thousands of negative thoughts like what if I mess up started to flow through my head. When I go to sing my lead no words come out. At this point in time, I had completely forgotten the song. The entire powwow is at a halt. I frantically look at my older brother, and he takes the lead I was supposed to take and everything turned out okay.
The reason that I chose this story to share was because it shows how hard it is to learn how to sing at the drum. Singing at the drum has so many moving parts from having many different types of songs like a honor song, sneak up, crow hop, fancy, scrub. Not only does the drumming change throughout the song but words change. That story just highlights the trials and tribulations that come with learning how to drum.
Fast forward to months after the powwow, me and the boys decide we want to drum at Madison powwow. I feel that anyone else who had failed as catastrophically as I did would have never drummed again. As some of you may know, I am a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, some of the strongest and most resilient people on the face of the planet. So I wasn't going to let one bad powwow take away my pride and ability to embrace my culture. A growth mindset is required when it comes to making it in the world as a Ho-Chunk.
As you could have guessed you don't just learn how to sing and drum overnight. Back in the early stages of my singing journey I joined youth services, an after school program for Ho-chunk kids, for my first drum practice. It was actually my Choka Bobby who was teaching us. As all of us 11 to 13-year-old kids sit there bursting at the seams with excitement, all of us hitting drum uncontrollably, my Choka Bobby yells at us and tells us that that drum has a spirit. He also tells us about drum etiquette. He told us to never leave a drum unattended without a blanket around it to keep the spirit warm. He tells us to never place things on the drum because it's not a table. He told us to never just hit the drum, that you got to sing if you wanna hit the drum. Those are some words that stuck with me as I grew older. Occasionally at a powwow you'll see uneducated people leave their drum unattended--a big no no. As soon as one of the arena directors sees that they will ask you to leave powwow, or even worse the old mean chokas will simply take your drum. Even owning a drum in itself is an honor. Owning a drum comes responsibilities. Some of those responsibilities are to feed the drum.
Feeding the drum for me was fairly easy. Usually I would invite all my brothers over to sing. Our drum group name was the Uzzi boys. The Uzzi boys consisted of me and my brothers Silas, Jacob, Mathias, Bailey, and Avalon. If you're curious what Uzzi means in Ho-Chunk its butthole. The reason we got that name is because when we were younger we must've stank a little. Anyways back to the story. I would invite them over and we would go into the basement of my house and begin to try and sing. Occasionally my Tega, which is Ho-Chunk for uncle, would come over and teach us. He was one of my main teachers at the drum. He would teach us mostly all the old Ho-Chunk songs like the flag song, Navy song, Marine Corps song, Army song, even precolonial songs. My Tega was a good role model for us boys. One of the first times he came to teach, we were singing the song and he stopped it midway through and told me that I'm not drumming on beat. After he told me that, he said that I have to drum close to the edge of the drum until I can stay on beat. Since then I've always made it a point to drum on beat. It's a tale as old as time to make fun of a drum that can't stay on beat. Staying on beat is essential to sounding good. If you don't stay on beat, say goodbye to winning any singing contest at powwows. Fast forward to even last week. I was teaching my friends how to drum. My buddy Peter who grew up away from the rest of us in Black River Falls never learned how to drum. Same with my friend Evan. They were drumming so far off beat and it made me flash back to that day in the basement when I was doing the same thing. It was almost an ironic moment to think that the student became the teacher. Even when they went to take leads they forgot it on the spot. It's amazing that I've been able to not only overcome but master these skills. Now every Monday is the highlight of my week because of drum practice.
I wanted to highlight this paragraph from Koenigs “What I Found In Standing Rock,”
I’m one of about 60 Native American students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a school with more than 30,000 undergrads, and one of only about 40 Native American Division I men’s college basketball players in the country. I’m not too surprised that almost no one at school knew much about the Ho-Chunk tribe. My whole life, I’ve had friends and classmates ask me the most basic questions about my heritage. Did I wear feathers? Do my parents run a casino? One high school classmate even admitted that he didn’t think Indian reservations still existed. Before I got to college, I had rarely ever heard a mention of Native American history in school — all I remember from 11th grade is some reading about Native American agriculture and a couple of paragraphs in a history book on the Trail of Tears, the forced march on which all those people died in the winter of 1838.
This is basically the exact scenario that I'm in here at UWL. Not many people leave the reservation for obvious reasons. I was scared to leave home. When You leave home you are not just leaving your house, you are leaving your culture, language and people behind. When I came here at UWL I had a serious culture shock when I walked into a room and I was the only native. Back in Black River Falls, my hometown, half the class was Ho-Chunk. Not only that but we had Ho-Chunk language class, we got to play traditional lacrosse and over all we got to be Ho-Chunk. Not many people know or care that Native American students feel alone and unwelcome here. When I brought this up to other professors they all said to join the Native American Student Association, which was funny because they were so out of touch that they didn't even know that the club was disbanded over two years ago. So currently I am in the midst of founding the club. The way that I am going about it is to host drum practice for anyone to join. I feel that singing on the drum gives not just me but the other guys a sense of culture and comfort knowing we aren't in this battle alone. All said and done I'm extremely thankful to be Ho-Chunk and to have had that privilege to learn how to sing at the drum. Although it was hard to learn and I messed up alot it also brought me some of my best memories. Singing at the drum brought me closer to my culture and people and I'm confident it will in the future.
I feel that the trials and tribulations that I faced while learning how to drum correlate with my literacy situation in many ways. One of the biggest ways is the fact that I never gave up on drumming and I never gave up on going to school and attending my English classes. Even though it is hard to go away from home it's hard to learn new things in writing. I'm willing to fail and mess up no matter how big or how small I will always push myself to be better. A specific moment that this narrative would relate to is in this class is, I'm not very good at writing and this is the longest paper I've ever had to write. I'm still writing with the willingness to fail and improve. The willingness to fail and improve is in my opinion the only thing you need in learning how to drum.
Work Cited
Koenig, Bronson. “What I found at Standing Rock.” The Player's Tribune, 2 Dec. 2016, https://www.theplayerstribune.com/articles/bronson-koenig-wisconsin-basketball-standing-rock. Accessed 13 February 2023.