Dred Scott

Mni Wiconi

The Standing Rock Reservation straddles the North and South Dakota borders. The people who live there, known as Sioux, are from the Dakota and Lakota nations. The Black Hills, considered to be sacred land by the tribe are located in the center of the territory awarded the tribe in 1868.

In 1874, General George Custer discovered gold in the Black Hills and touched off a gold rush. The US government tried to buy the Black Hills from the Lakota but Sitting Bull, their spiritual leader refused. A war erupted, culminating in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, also known as Custer’s Last Stand, one of the most famous Native American victories in their otherwise tragic and genocidal history. But it wasn’t long before the resources of the federal government forced the split of the Great Sioux Reservation into 5 smaller parcels in 1890. Since then, the US government has systematically eliminated their heritage, forcing them to abandon their horse culture and nomadic lifestyle for farming and raising livestock. Their children were forced to attend boarding schools where they learned English and Christianity.

In the 1960’s, the Army Corps of Engineers built five large dams along the Missouri River, flooding more than 200,000 acres of the Standing Rock Reservation.

In 2015, the Dakota Access Pipeline was rerouted near the Reservation because it was too close to Bismark and was deemed a danger to the water supply. After a very visible and sustained protest that saw more than 700 people arrested, the pipeline was completed in 2017 and began delivering oil. To date there have been 350 accidents along pipelines built by and operated by Energy Transfer.

The Lakota say, “Mni Wiconi.” Water is life. (pronounced, “mini wi-choni.”)

I turn on the faucet in my apartment building every day and don’t give it a second thought. I assume there are protections in place to keep my family and me from drinking poisoned water. But time and again, our government has failed it’s citizens, choosing money over safety. The list of incidents is long and some are familiar – the most recent and famous being the poisoning of the water by the government in Flint, MI., which started in 2014 and is still an ongoing public health crisis.

I was awarded this grant from the Jazz Coalition to make some new work. They weren’t very specific and that lack of specificity paralyzed my creativity at first.
We have been in Covid-19 lockdown 10 months. I’ve done exactly 5 gigs in that time – all masked and with no audience. All of my production work has gone completely remote. It seemed if I thought about it a little, I actually had several creative parameters, among them the fact I could not get musicians together in the same room to record them. I am high-risk and have one kidney. Covid likes to eat kidneys.

I realized I have several world-class musicians in my building and another two who just live down the street. What the music would sound like began to come into focus as I just wrote down who could play what.

When my daughter began studying the Algonquin and Iroquois nations in her fourth-grade class, we looked around for ways to supplement her learning. We came across some Lakota tribesman dancing and singing on YouTube and that lead to a conversation about reservations which lead to the story of Sitting Bull and Custer which lead to the Standing Rock protest and the DAPL pipeline. The singing we saw in the video haunted me and I looked around for more inspiration and found many resources for traditional Lakota music. I was being pointed in a direction, so I followed. This piece of music is the result.

My building is called, The Colonnades, and it was erected in 1935. The attached pictures are from the original brochure. This is the first song in a series that will involve all these musicians who live around me and will be called The Colonnades.

Thank you to the Jazz Coalition for helping me kick-start this new project and thank you to all the cats involved. Everyone was recorded remotely by me or by themselves. No musicians were harmed during the making of this jam. Special thanks to my long-time collaborator, Ben Rubin, for mixing and mastering the track.

Joe Magnarelli – Trumpet
Mike Fahie – Trombones
Patrick Cornelius – Alto Saxophone
Matt Pavolka – Acoustic Bass
Akiko Tsuruga – Organ
Russ Meissner – Drums
Amie Amis – Voice
Akiko Pavolka – Voice
Dred Scott– Piano, Drums, Celesta, Electric Bass, & all Percussions