Parallel Inspiration

Troy Eagle Chasing's career as a native Hip-Hop artist began soon after his career as a graffiti artist dribbled to an involuntary end. While growing up on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, Eagle Chasing became known as an avid artist with a can of spray paint. So when graffiti writing showed up on buildings around the town of Eagle Butte, it didn't take long for the law to catch up with Eagle Chasing. The teenager had two options: pay heavy fines he couldn't afford, or spray over his creations. He opted to spray, not pay. But after working at a grocery store, Eagle Chasing earned enough money to buy a turntable and a tape recorder, and soon was recording his own rap albums flavored by his Mnicoujou Lakota tribal heritage. At the age of 17 or 18, he cut his own compact disc album and managed to sell about a hundred copies over the course of a year-not big, but a start for Eagle Chasing, who performs as Maniac The Siouxpernatural. "There's literally hundreds and hundreds of Native American (Hip-Hop) artists out there and nobodies ever heard of them..." Eagle Chasing told an audience of more than 200 hip-hop fans at a conference Saturday at Concordia College.

HIP HOP: Career began mostly out of necessity Although many native rap artists meet with initial disapproval from traditionalists, reservation life has striking parallels with the conditions in urban ghettos that inspire black hip-hop musicians, Eagle Chasing said. These parallels include high rates of poverty, suicide, crime and addiction. "Our cultures have a lot in common," he said. Eagle Chasing collaborates with Gabriel Night Shield, a native hip-hop producer and Sicangu Lakota who grew up on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. Night Shields musical career began as a disc jockey at high school dances in St. Frances, S.D. His performing career; like Eagle Chasing's, began out of necessity: for a college class in musical production, he needed a group to record, so started his own with some friends. "We decided we might as well do it ourselves," Night Shield told the gathering of the Hip-Hop Congress, a national group devoted to the musical genre, meeting in Minnesota for the first time. "It spread like a virus," Night Shield, Eagle Chasing and their fellow panel speakers at the Hip Hop Congress predict that its only a matter of time before a Native Hip-Hop artist gets a hit on MTV.

Brian Frejo, a Pawnee Seminole originally from Oklahoma and member of a hip-hop group called Culture Shock Camp, told the conference audience that music can be used to promote political and social activism. Native and black hip-hop fans can work together. "You guys are hear for a reason," he said. "We have an opportunity to do something really good." Frejo's entry to hip-hop came in the 1980's, when he started break dancing, an interest that evolved from the "fancy dancing" he did on the pow-wow circuit. He performs native hip hop with his brother Marcus Little Eagle, and both are also actors who appeared in a recent movie, "The New World" about the story of John Smith and Pocahantas in 1607 in the Jamestown settlement of Virginia. Both brothers continue to blend traditional native and hip-hop cultures, and find growing acceptance for what they're doing, both in the hip-hop and native worlds. Frejo, sometimes called one of the "founding fathers" of native hip-hop, said music helps him keep free of alcohol and drugs, problems that afflict to many American Indian youths. "I said Im not going to be one of those stereotypes," he said. Im going to be somebody differant. "It's been hard" Frejo added, noting native rap has yet to find its break-out star in mainstream pop music. "But it's going to happen"

©Copyright 2002 NightShield.Net