‘Atawit Nawa Wakishwit’: Collective songwriting with Native American youth

Abstract

This article chronicles a four-month facilitative teaching collaboration between a music education team from the University of Washington and youth enrolled in a Native American tribal school in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. The collaboration embraced a creative process honouring student voices, community values, principles of indigenous pedagogy, and an earnest effort to support student expressive impulses that blend their Native American heritage with a pervasive interest in popular music. A collective songwriting process with roots in indigenous practices from Chiapas, Mexico was employed as the framework through which students confronted social and cultural matters. The school is located in a community where language and ways of living are threatened – a concern upon which students reflected in writing a song partly in their endangered Native language of Sahaptin. The process is described as a pathway to the use of creative avenues that address social issues among marginalized youth towards artistic and sociomusical ends.