Indigo Girls
Epic Music
2002
In the words of the title track, “it took a long time to” Become You. It?s been almost three years since the densely-layered rock of the Indigo Girls’ last album, Come On Now Social. With this new release, they’ve revisited the more spare instrumentation of their earlier releases, but with a greater lyrical and musical palette.
In particular, the vocal arrangements will please those who gravitate to the soaring harmonies that have become the Girls’ trademark. On “Deconstruction of Love,” they bob and weave around each other to bring out the emotion in a tale of love’s collapse.
Amy Ray’s songs on Become You tend toward the jaunty side, from the Memphis-style soul of “Moment of Forgiveness” to the more country-flavored title track and “Yield.” Fans of Ray’s usual intense style of songwriting will more likely prefer “Starkville”’s elliptic lyrics and haunting melody—it reminded me greatly of Testimony-era Ferron.
Emily Saliers’ selections are generally more subdued than Ray’s musically, while packing a painful lyrical punch. Taken as a whole, they present a song cycle of love lost and balance slowly, painfully regained. “You’ve Got to Show” offers a Latin tinge to two lovers trying, but afraid, to meet in the middle, while “Our Deliverance” gives a portrait of an unexpected awakening out of grief. These songs were so deep in that experience and so of a piece that I was convinced Saliers must have broken up with her partner recently (a theory that was happily refuted in a recent magazine article about the album).
The Indigo Girls have spent the better part of the last decade expanding their musical horizons from the two-singer/two-acoustic-guitar format they began performing with—from bouzouki to electric guitar to drum loops, they have brought a vibrant energy to all of the musical camps they keep their feet in. With the back-to-basics approach on Become You, they show that those musical journeys are explorations from a strong, deep root of human experience.
[Originally published in Reclaiming Quarterly #87, Summer 2002]
Winona LaDuke
South End Press
2000
This is an inspiring and frightening book. We are more aware than ever, as we unlearn schoolbook history, of the incredible devastation the settling and expansion of the United States had on the indigenous peoples of this continent.
But that is a general understanding, and based in the past; in All Our Relations, Winona LaDuke makes it more specific and ties it tightly to the present and future. The devastation is still happening now, and is well beyond the point where Native Americans are the only people affected.
The structure of the book is simple but effective—each chapter discusses the history of a tribe from the time before white settlement to now. In particular, LaDuke goes into some detail about each tribe’s understanding of their native ecosystem and their place in it, and constrasts that sharply with the attitudes of the European settlers who claimed and colonized it. From the Seminole to the Cheyenne, the pattern is distressingly similar: white colonization of native lands (usually by military force), Native Americans killed or moved to reservations, and extreme environmental destruction of their former lands through industiral development and its subsequent pollution.
It’s not hard to see how LaDuke can make the case that the disregard for the Native Americans and for their land went hand-in-hand. And that disregard continues now not just for them, but for anyone who would suggest putting limitations on the almighty corporation. That’s the frightening part. The inspiration comes from her accounts of how many tribes are fighting (and have historically fought) to keep their lands unpolluted. Tribe after tribe is putting itself ont he line all over the country to hold industrial polluters and the government accountable to environmental standards, and in some cases there have been victories.
As LaDuke says in conclusion,
There is, in many indigenous teachings, a great optimism for the potential to make positive change. Change will come. As always, it is just a matter of who determines what that change will be.
[Originally published in Reclaiming Quarterly #80, Fall 2000]
