We are excited to play this year’s Brooklyn Americana Festival on Saturday, September 23rd @ 7pm @ the 68 Jay Street Bar. Our friend Alex Battles is also in the lineup so looking forward to a fine night out of twang. Come & catch us there! – A’ho*
Latest
Another Country / Have a good summer!
Howdy y’all…we’re still glowing from performing at the first annual Another Country twang festival in Brooklyn. It was a day full of alternative country acts unknown to us & we had a lot of fun discovering new music before our headlining set in the evening. Here’s some press below that gave us a fine mention:
CACTUS ROSE cited in the Village Voice
For the rest of this month you can catch us at some local powwows but no more shows for a spell as we enjoy a much needed summer break. Hope you are enjoying the best the hot season has to offer! – A’ho*
Cactus Rose live dates upcoming for June & July
We are looking forward to the 15th annual Drums Along The Hudson powwow — after a jaunt down South Dixie-way — & then gearing up to play some shows around the 5 boroughs. Come on out & catch us when you can! A’ho*
(Jeff McLaughlin – Guitar for Cactus Rose)
(Ben Killen – Banjo for Cactus Rose)
(Kandia Crazy Horse – Vocals & twang concepts for Cactus Rose)
June 10: Art In The Garden @ RING Garden, Inwood, Manhattan @ 5:20pm
June 21: #MakeMusicNY – 2 sets: UGC Eats on Park Avenue @ 1:30pm & Morris-Jumel Mansion, 64 Jumel Terrace, 6:15pm
July 2: Another Country festival @ Littlefield, Brooklyn (doors 2pm, $10-20)
Spring Has Sprung!
Well, in our NYC weather finally crept above 70-degrees this week so we found ourselves out in living color (pictured above) having big fun upon The Highline in Chelsea. We of Cactus Rose are getting ready to play a private event for our elders at SAGE Harlem at the end of April & gearing up for some festival dates soon come! For my part, powwow season starts here next weekend in Harlem, followed by my attendance at a slew of indigenous women’s events for the environment starting with Winona LaDuke’s talk at NYU and the march at the United Nations on the 26th. Getting some new regalia ready and meeting lots of new friends that I am welcoming into our local Native circle — looks like it’s going to be a great season! I look forward to seeing y’all out and about – A’ho*
March 4th For Standing Rock NYC
Some scenes from yesterday’s march through Midtown Manhattan in support of Standing Rock. I spoke in front of the main branch of the NYPL on Fifth Avenue & 42nd Street about multiple pipelines afflicting Turtle Island, the Ramapough Lunaape Split Rock Sweetwater Prayer Camp & the role of my fellow musicians in this resistance. I was also later interviewed by BuzzFeed on the approach to Columbus Circle. Video to follow. Despite the cold, we had a pretty good turnout & the freewheelin’ jazz band held us down, dancing at the rear of the column. ‘Twas another great day to be indigenous & help spread awareness – A’ho*
(All photographs by Kandia Crazy Horse unless indicated)
(Eagle Woman o’er my right shoulder & Kandia Crazy Horse w/ her handmade sign @ NYPL Fifth Avenue & 42nd St before the speakers & march)
Throwback Thursday: Emergency Rally for Standing Rock NYC 2/22/2 #mniwiconi #NoDAPL
The forced removal of Indigenous people from our own land (although we don’t have the sense of ownership of Turtle Island that the dominant culture does…) at #StandingRock is part of a time-worn historical continuum of violence that this country operates on. A trail of broken treaties ghosted yesterday’s actions in North Dakota, the water protectors camps engulfed in flames as per this Time footage
( Kandia Crazy Horse @ Emergency Rally for Standing Rock @ Union Square (yesterday) in NYC, by Zapotec photographer & artist Javier Soriano from Puebla, Mexico )
Last night on Wednesday, February 22, I joined a group of water protectors gathered in Union Square to stand in solidarity with the water protectors at Standing Rock, as we had been alerted via digital smoke signals to the 2pm deadline for forcible eviction. Yesterday, the remaining core of water protectors were evicted from the camps — including Oceti Sakowin — near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota. It was also an occasion to enjoy some of the unprecedented pan-indigenous unity we’ve been experiencing, including Zapotec brothers from Puebla in Mexico to queer Pinoy activists holding forth about the conflict in Mindanao in the Philippines. I & a Lakota brother from Red Warrior Camp are both affiliated with Split Rock prayer camp in NJ & spoke to that at the rally to encourage our local tri-state sisters & brothers to engage with the fight against our own black snakes afflicting the Hudson River and surrounding areas — the resistance is not over yet, upon any part of Turtle Island. As one of the youngest speakers at the rally, Abby, mentioned, many of us come from so-called minority populations & indigenous communities disproportionately affected by environmental racism, and we cannot let it stand – A’ho*
A reminder: “The Oceti Sakowin Camp: a first of its kind historic gathering of Indigenous Nations. The most recent such assembly of Tribes occurred when the Great Sioux Nation gathered before the Battle at the Little Big Horn.
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe supports the peaceful and prayerful message of the Oceti Sakowin leaders. The on-reservation camp allowed the tribe to explore longer term ways to meet the needs of the community that is 100% off-the-grid and features Solar & Wind power generation.”
See some of the photographs that Brotha Javier took of the rally here:
http://www.javiersoriano.com/2017/02/23/standing-rock/
Cactus Rose @ Branded Saloon, Brooklyn 2/17 – Black Hillbilly live for Black History Month
Join us of Cactus Rose band for our first show of 2017 this Friday night! We are celebrating #BlackHistoryMonth with our own cosmic twang contribution to the #BlackHillbilly tradition & looking forward to reaching out farther with this advocacy into the national & international music scene during this year. Follow us on Instagram: @cactusroselovesyou
#CactusRose live @ Branded Saloon
2/17/2017
603 Vanderbilt Avenue, Brooklyn NY
10:30pm
More info/directions: brandedsaloon.com
( Black stringband in 1900)
Black History Month 2017: Drum & Spear – from DC to Dar-es-Salaam
Kicking off #BlackHistoryMonth with this remembrance of Drum & Spear bookstore+press, co-founded & run by my parents in Washington, DC (with an outpost in Tanzania) along with their dear #SNCC veteran / Civil Rights Movement friends of Afro-American Resources, Inc. — including our cited neighbors of Adams-Morgan & Mt. Pleasant, writer/journalist Uncle Charlie (Cobb) & my girlhood idol in black boho Judy Richardson. This article below by a Maryland scholar interested in activist entrepreneurial projects of the Long Sixties traces their beginnings in that august revolutionary year of 1968. From DC to Dar-es-Salaam, they did great thangs that have continued to have a big influence on me as I navigate creative & activist spaces; I am very proud of their achievements — especially with my dear mother now gone to the Spirit World. Someday, I shall still replicate what I grew up dreaming about Drum & Spear as a creative entrepreneur in my own right…
Yours In Struggle, K* #DaughterOfTheDream #BlackPower50
READ: DRUM & SPEAR vanguard black bookstore & press of the 1960s-70s
A shoutout from California Coastopia from one of the Drum & Spear Circle, Daphne Muse (via my twin sister’s Facebook): So proud to have served as a manager of Drum and Spear and serve an incredible community of people throughout DC, across the country and around the world. I worked with an intellectually fierce group of people including Charlie Cobb, Courtland Cox, Juadine Henderson, Jennifer Lawson, Judy Richardson, Ralph Featherstone, Joe Gross, Freddie Biddle, Don Brown, Williard Taylor. Anne Holloway, Marvin Holloway and Mimi Shaw Hayes were the driving forces behind the parent company AAR and Drum and Spear Press. All, so committed to LIBERATION.
I Still Stand With Standing Rock #NoDAPL
There may be a new administration in Washington & they are obviously in cahoots with the corporations behind the #KeystoneXL & the #DakotaAccessPipeline — but we of Indian Country & our allies are still determined to stop all black snakes from afflicting Turtle Island. I have received communication from LaDonna Brave Bull Allard of Sacred Stone Camp & others to come stand with our precious water protectors @ Standing Rock — or to organize actions locally to support them. I am pondering the latter with my fellow Afro-Native bandmate of Cactus Rose & some of my Tri-State Native Circle. We all must do our part, when they are raiding camps & dishonoring rights. We cannot let this stand. And I shall still be acting in support of the Ramapough Lunaape @ Split Rock with their efforts to #StopSpectra here in NY/NJ/CT. See you on the frontlines! A’ho*
Kandia Crazy Horse x Prince x David Bowie @ BlackStar Rising & The Purple Reign
Hope y’all enjoyed the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday; I spent mine meditating on the post-60s emanations of The Dream — as well as its limits as manifest in the oeuvres of Black Atlantic & Heartland rockstars David Bowie & Prince. I am finally at liberty to invite y’all to join us in New Haven @ the end of the month for the “Blackstar Rising & The Purple Reign” rock conference. Courtesy of an invite from my longtime dear friend of the Black Rock scene, former Princeton professor turned Yale scholar Dr. Daphne Brooks, I shall be presenting on Prince & activism @ Yale University; my evening program on 25 January also features Solange (Knowles) as keynote speaker & former SPIN magazine editor Alan Light.
The program also includes Sheila E., Kimbra, Questlove & others + a closing concert by TV On The Radio. More info & registration instructions linked: KANDIA CRAZY HORSE presentation @ YALE UNIVERSITY for Blackstar Rising & The Purple Reign 1/25
Looking forward to my rebirth in the purifying waters of Lake Minnetonka: HARTFORD COURANT on BLACKSTAR RISING & THE PURPLE REIGN
HAPPY NEW YEAR & #NoDAPL 2017!
Happy New Year, y’all & best wishes as the seasons unfold. I hope you had a grand ole holiday time; for my part, I finally got some much needed rest & a spell to rotate some albums of 2016 — especially country releases — that I never got to hear during the course of last year. We of Cactus Rose are taking some time to conjure, connect culturally & write songs during January & then we will be doing two shows on the Brooklyn Country scene in February. I will be making my first live appearances of 2017 in upstate New York & in Connecticut — the latter being a major event I am not yet at liberty to share details about. Stay tuned to this page &
…In the meanwhile: hope can rope yer hearts to join Jonathan Demme & myself @ the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, NY next Saturday for his western movies screening series / live event “Saddle Up Saturdays.” I will serve as the guest artist / interlocutor for the presentation of Dixie lore & Lakota-themed Run Of The Arrow starring Rod Steiger, Brian Keith & Charles Bronson — followed by a discussion + Q&A. The screening will be preceded by Jonathan’s Standing Rock documentary: Protection Not Protest: The People of Standing Rock
Neither I nor my fellow bandmates in Cactus Rose, Jeff & Kimberly/KAR, have forgotten about Standing Rock or Split Rock, despite the switch in focus to Aleppo or the trend hoppers moving on to the next new thing; and we remain committed to helping stop all the black snakes threatening Turtle Island. So this event will be a good opportunity to come and hear about the Split Rock actions & other causes of Indian Country as well as how it was for me to grow up Indian loving the western genre & cowboy music in the Vietnam Era when antiheroes dominated horse operas while there was a revival of Native American consciousness in the real world beyond celluloid. A’ho*
#IStandWithStandingRock
Tix & more information available here: RUN OF THE ARROW w/ KANDIA CRAZY HORSE 1/14 @ noon JACOB BURNS FILM CENTER
Throwback Thursday: Kandia Crazy Horse’s top albums of 2016 x Other Music NYC
I have been mostly focused on the Red Road > powwow highway > doing activism on behalf of Indian Country especially for Standing Rock / #NoDAPL during 2016. Yet once I was a rock journalist & music editor in a previous life, and I perpetually remain a vinyl collector & music fanatic. Amongst the many losses to the music world this year was my dear folks’ seminal record store in the NoHo section of downtown NYC: Other Music. I bought my last hauls of records there back in the spring/summer & we feted their existence with a great parade down the Bowery, followed by a concert @ Bowery Ballroom starring Yoko Ono & many other artists. So it’s now bittersweet to be closing out the year by voting for my most memorable recordings of 2016 in company with the OM fam — here’s my list:
KANDIA CRAZY HORSE 2016 ALBUMS (I will shortly be submitting ballots for the Village Voice Pazz+Jop in Manhattan & the Nashville Scene country music critics poll for Nashville, TN as well…)
& the other Other Music staff + fellow update contributors’ choices can be read HEREIN
& some scenes from the closing of Other Music…A’ho*
( Kandia Crazy Horse & Other Music staffer / WFMU DJ / Bim Marx producer Duane Harriott inside Other Music’s East 4th St store on the final day of operations )
( The last 2 physical copies of my debut album Stampede for sale @ Other Music NYC )
( Other Music co-owner Josh Madell & I outside the Bowery Ballroom on Delancey Street, after the parade / before the farewell concert started )
( Other Music staffer / bandleader of Chouette Amanda Colbenson & I outside the Bowery Ballroom after the OM parade down the Bowery, NYC )
( The banner that used to hang above the entrance @ Other Music on East 4th Street, NYC )
“Manhattan Given Back To Indians…” & Benny Andrews’ Bicentennial Blues & Frohawk Two Feathers’ Frenglish New York
Given that I was out all day yesterday — primarily attending an uptown art salon in Lower Harlem, where I sang — I completely missed this odd bit of NYC local news: MANHATTAN GIVEN BACK TO INDIANS (well at least a part of it)
Although I have some close ties with the Ramapough Lunaape and am acquainted with Chief Dwaine Perry, I have not to my knowledge crossed paths with the New York Post article’s cited chief Anthony Jay Van Dunk nor have I met the cited son of artist Louise Bourgeois — I have been a fleeting fan of hers due to her longevity/continuing to create but expertise on her life & oeuvre lies with my twin sister, the art historian — Jean-Louis Goldwater Bourgeois. I don’t know quite what to make of this transaction, but if the ultimate result is a patahmaniikan (prayer house) then fine. I did not get to participate in the Ramapough winter ceremony this past Saturday out @ Split Rock, for it was cancelled due to snow/inclement weather; so I have not heard any direct commentary from the Source, as it were.
The article says Bourgeois fils has been a Standing Rock benefactor, yet I was more interested to learn of other Natives’ participation in the Occupy Movement for in all the months I was involved in it, particularly Occupy Music, I never met any. Now, if only this M. Bourgeois would get behind the fight to establish Indigenous Peoples Day in NYC. Overall, it was just a little odd piece of news to be sent to me by other Urban Native friends, at the end of the year when Standing Rock has become such a Hollywood trendy Cause (Elvis’ grand baby appearing at hyped LA benefits) & indigenous chic itself has been atomizing err’where — especially on the backs of musical artists with no Native roots including hip-hop ones & judges of The Voice like Alicia Keys — but I am still encountering folks who never heard of what’s going on with the Dakota Access Pipeline (or any other of this land’s black snakes). It’s weird to be revisiting the apocryphal sale of Manhattan by the Lenape to the Dutch, even as our Tri-State news is dominated by news of president-elect Trump’s vast real estate holdings here, the need to barricade Trump Tower in Midtown, and the ongoing discussion of the City as Trump’s fiefdom. I hope the Ramapough do not get targeted by limousine liberals, due to their local residence. Meantime, instead of hashtagging activism, focus & funds need to be directed to the many Native protectors of Standing Rock who are now facing felonies / about to have their cases trafficked through the courts in North Dakota — and there’s inadequate legal representation for most. Some of us staying woke despite the narcotic of holiday cheer.
#IStandWithSplitRock
(Chief Van Dunk, Ramapough, & art patron/architectural historian Bourgeois via New York Post)
Anyroad, I believe this story jumped out at me due to a long conversation about Native American roots out of the Mid-Atlantic and “outsider art” creation we had on Friday afternoon in Chelsea, on the verge of a gallery crawl through the ‘hood to see Titus Kaphar’s opening @ Jack Shainman & the great Bicentennial Series show of one of my favorite painters/fellow Georgian Benny Andrews @ Michael Rosenfeld Gallery. Some strange confluence out of the dialogue and Early Colonial (Kaphar) plus Bicentennial/Jim Crow reflection (Andrews) stirred things up…& made me recall the peculiar but beautiful work of Frohawk Two Feathers who was de vogue a few years back, with prominent Chelsea gallery representation & who I have never met but this particular project is extremely similar to my inner imaginorium/worldview – although he is younger than I, born (interestingly) in the year of the American Bicentennial, 1976: Heartbreaking and shit, but that’s the globe. The Battle of Manhattan
(By Frohawk Two Feathers)
Chicago-born, LA-based Frohawk Two Feathers is the alias of Afro-Native artist Umar Rashid (who also does vanguard and alt-hip-hop music under the monikers Kent Cyclone & Tha Grimm Teachaz); and the 2014 culmination of a series of his work blending Afrofuturism and fact / fiction of early settler colonialism in the Americas caught my notice for decades prior to my arrival in New York City — in part due to my Native American great aunt Helena’s residence in Harlem since the 1930s — I had been an (alternative) history buff preoccupied with the lore of the Ramapough, Jacks-and-Whites / other isolates of the area; the apocryphal sale of Manahata and the Algonquin villages of the landmass; and the religious/occult traditions arising from the upstate Burned-Over District. [Which also drew my interest to the now-defunct Sundance network show The Red Road, which focused on Ramapough, starring half-Hawaiian actor Jason Momoa who claims Native American & for which my cousin’s wife Marcey Tree-In-The-Wind served as a consultant.] Two Feathers’ work seemed to at least gloss similar concerns:
“Bonnie Prince Johnnie, flamboyant pharaoh of New York; Francesca, a.k.a. Tisiphone, Native American assassin; Maurits de Wolff, former slave and soldier extraordinaire; Akosua Van Der Zee, wrathful feminist and malicious schemer.
These are a few of the characters in a wildly original telling of the fictional Battle of Yonkers in 18th-century New York; their portraits and those of other tattooed warriors, misled rulers and vengeful women…
…[final] installment of “The American Proteus: An Invocation and the Wars Between the Rivers,” an alternative account of the colonization of northeastern North America that is both written and visual in form, epic in scope, and built around the imaginary Republic of Frengland (a combination of England, France and Ireland).”
There were paintings that were meta portraits or sometimes reminiscent of historical battles depicted on deerskins or echoing ledger art, mixed with art forms of ancient KMT & tipis on display as well. They were somewhat unnerving, for it was like an unknown Spirit had excavated my interior landscape & reproduced it for all eyes to see. And I will leave it at that for now, for there’s far more concerning this work that I wish to explore…A’ho*
(By Frohawk Two Feathers)
@ Split Rock Sweet Water Prayer Camp in the territory of the Ramapough Lunaape
#IStandWithSplitRock
Although Standing Rock has most captured the souls & minds of Indian Country during 2016, there are many black snakes afflicting Turtle Island — & I have been standing in solidarity with the Ramapough Lunaape water protectors of the Split Rock prayer camp in New Jersey that are trying to stop the Algonquin Pipeline project threatening the Hudson River & the surrounding lands of the Tri-State & New England. I & my band Cactus Rose have pledged to Ramapough Chief Dwaine Perry to be of support to Split Rock, as they hold the space & unite with other allied environmental and social justice groups of the region to stop this black snake. The news that Red Warrior Camp is leaving Standing Rock & withdrawing from the #NoDAPL fight there, even as they turn their energy & focus to other frontlines of Indian Country, has underscored the need for all of us pan-indigenous united folks to tend to the issues in our own backyards/home locales. Here’s some images from my visit to Split Rock this past weekend; all photos by me, except the 2 where I am pictured – by Hugo Kenzo
I will be addressing this activism tonight at my conversation/concert on protest music & activism @ Decolonize This Place in TriBeCa. Looking forward! A’ho*
( Kandia Crazy Horse & Jonathan Demme @ Split Rock Sweet Water Prayer Camp in the land of the Ramapough Lunaape, NJ – by Japanese-Brazilian filmmaker Hugo Kenzo )
( The donations for the Ramapough Lunaape of the camp from me/my band Cactus Rose, @ my flat before the trip )
( #DefendTheSacred in the tents @ Split Rock prayer camp )
( Kandia Crazy Horse, water protector & Indian Country activist, @ Split Rock Sweet Water Prayer Camp in NJ – by Hugo Kenzo )