Nahko Bear
“THERE IS A HUGE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BEING A MUSICIAN AND BEING A PERFORMER.”
Nahko Bear’s songwriting could be described in any number of ways, but one way to think of it is as storytelling in pursuit of self discovery and communal healing. Whether his compositions are pared down and presented on acoustic guitar or delivered in the company of Medicine For The People – with horns, violin, and full band –they are typically imbued with a sense of spiritualism.
Stylistically, there is a restlessness to Nahko’s writing, a sensibility gleaned from his travels, leaving home at 17, moving to Alaska, then Hawaii, on the road reading Kerouac and listening to Dylan, but maybe also from his search of identity. Nahko’s songwriting interrogates his sense of self, exploring his lineage as a sixth-generation Apache, born to a Puerto Rican/Native American mother and a Filipino father, and adopted by a white, Christian family and raised in Oregon. Again, it all comes back to the idea of discovery, healing, the stories we tell and those we are told.
One of the first things Nahko did when he moved back to Oregon was build a sweat lodge on his land. Nahko And Medicine For The People’s latest album, Take Your Power Back, draws upon his experiences in the sweat lodge, finding enlightenment in the heat and the dark of Native American ceremony.
“The whole album is speckled with references to ceremonies,” says Nahko. “There is a lot of mythology, a lot of spiritual storytelling in these songs. [The sweat lodge] is best described as a traditional North American Native practice of praying. It’s a metaphor. came from a vision, while references the sweat lodge explicitly, with a chorus coming from a tribal elder’s words.
