DISCUSSION GUIDE Table of Contents Using This Guide 3 Indie Lens Pop-Up We Are All Neighbors Theme 4 About the Film 5 From the Filmmakers 6 Artist Profiles 8 Background Information 13 What is Indigenous Music? 13 Exclusion and Expulsion 14 Music and Cultural Resilience 15 The Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee 16 Native and African American Alliances 17 Discussion 18 Conversation Starter 18 Post-Screening Discussion Questions 19 Engagement Ideas 20 Potential Partners and Speakers 20 Activities Beyond a Panel 21 Additional Resources 22 Credits 23 DISCUSSION GUIDE RUMBLE: THE INDIANS WHO ROCKED THE WORLD 2 USING THIS GUIDE This discussion guide is a resource to support organizations hosting Indie Lens Pop-Up events for the film RUMBLE: The Indians Who Rocked the World. Developed primarily for facilitators, this guide offers background information and engagement strategies designed to raise awareness and foster dialogue about the integral part Native Americans have played in the evolution of popular music. Viewers of the film can use this guide to think more deeply about the discussion started in RUMBLE and find ways to participate in the national conversation. RUMBLE: The Indians Who Rocked the World is an invitation to come together with neighbors and pay tribute to Native influences on America’s most celebrated music. The film makes its PBS broadcast premiere on the Independent Lens series on January 21, 2019. Indie Lens Pop-Up is a neighborhood series that brings people together for film screenings and community-driven conversations. Featuring documentaries seen on PBS’s Independent Lens, Indie Lens Pop-Up draws local residents, leaders, and organizations together to discuss what matters most, from newsworthy topics to family and relationships. DISCUSSION GUIDE RUMBLE: THE INDIANS WHO ROCKED THE WORLD 3 INDIE LENS POP-UP WE ARE ALL NEIGHBORS THEME During this season of Independent Lens, participating communities are coming together around a central inquiry: What does it mean to be a neighbor? During a time when many of our communities are experiencing increasing polarization and division, audiences will have the opportunity to discuss this question at hundreds of film events convened by Indie Lens Pop-Up partners in 60 communities throughout the United States. Films like RUMBLE, Dawnland, Charm City, The Providers, and Wrestle have been selected from the Independent Lens season to inspire conversation. Please join in at a screening near you or online at #WeAreAllNeighbors. For more information and the list of neighborhood screenings, check out pbs.org/independentlens/indie-lens-pop-up/. To see what’s coming next to Independent Lens, visit pbs.org/independentlens and to follow on social media @independentlens DISCUSSION GUIDE RUMBLE: THE INDIANS WHO ROCKED THE WORLD 4 ABOUT THE FILM RUMBLE: The Indians Who Rocked the World is an electrifying Native Music Icons Featured in RUMBLE: look at the Native American influence in popular music—despite • Buffy Sainte-Marie (Cree) attempts to ban, censor, and erase Indian culture. The film reveals how early pioneers of jazz and the blues had Native • Charley Patton (Choctaw) American roots and that as the folk-rock era took hold in the • Jesse Ed Davis (Kiowa / Comanche) 1960s and 1970s, Native Americans such as Peter La Farge and Buffy Sainte-Marie helped to define its evolution and Native • Jimi Hendrix (Cherokee) musicians such as Link Wray, Jimi Hendrix, Jesse Ed Davis, and • Link Wray (Shawnee) many more forever changed the trajectory of rock and roll. Their stories are told by great American music legends who knew them, • Mildred Bailey (Coeur d’Alene) played music with them, and were inspired by them, including • Pat and Lolly Vegas / Redbone (Yaqui / Shoshone) George Clinton, Taj Mahal, Slash, Jackson Browne, Buddy Guy, Quincy Jones, Derek Trucks, Tony Bennett, Iggy Pop, Steven Tyler, • Randy Castillo (Isleta Pueblo / Apache) and Stevie Van Zandt. • Robbie Robertson / The Band (Mohawk) • Taboo / The Black Eyed Peas (Shoshone) DISCUSSION GUIDE RUMBLE: THE INDIANS WHO ROCKED THE WORLD 5 FROM THE FILMMAKERS “In North America, each corner, on each piece of land that we tread, where Indigenous people lived and thrived long before most of our ancestors did, lies a musical history that is precious. “We feel that it is important for everyone, and especially Native youth who have so few pop culture role models, to have proof, through the icons we feature and the famous people that give our story credibility, that Indigenous cultures were an integral part of the evolution of popular music. “The truth that we want to expose in RUMBLE is that the attempted erasure of Native American people, their culture, and their music, didn’t work. As Robbie Robertson said in one of our interviews with him, ‘You wouldn’t let me talk about it before— well, now I’m going to talk real loud.’” Catherine Bainbridge DIRECTOR, WRITER, AND EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, PEABODY AWARD–WINNING FILMMAKER OF REEL INJUN, CO-FOUNDER OF REZOLUTION PICTURES Alfonso Maiorana CO-DIRECTOR AND DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY DISCUSSION GUIDE RUMBLE: THE INDIANS WHO ROCKED THE WORLD 6 FROM THE FILMMAKERS Stevie Salas Tim Johnson EXECUTIVE PRODUCER (APACHE) EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR (MOHAWK) “I was playing sold-out arenas and stadiums with Rod Stewart, “While serving as associate director overseeing exhibitions and and while on the road across America, I started to wonder, why programs at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum are there no other Native Americans in the biz? So after a bit of of the American Indian, I directed productions representing digging, I discovered there were indeed others who, for reasons myriad orientations, ranging from ethnography and history to unknown to me, people didn’t know about. In fact to my surprise, contemporary arts. One of our most engaging programs focused I was playing guitar parts on Rod Stewart songs that were on contemporary Native American music. recorded by a Kiowa Indian named Jesse Ed Davis—and I had no idea! “It was during that time and within that context that Stevie Salas first came to my attention. On a recommendation from my wife, “Canadian writer Brian Wright-McLeod asked me to be in his who learned of Stevie’s work to help establish a recording studio book The Encyclopedia of Native American Music, which included in my home community, Six Nations of the Grand River, I read up the little-known Indian heritage of so many famous musicians on his career. in pop culture, and from that book, that’s how Tim Johnson and I created the Smithsonian National Museum of the American “I hired Stevie as my contemporary music advisor and thus Indian’s exhibit Up Where We Belong: Native Musicians in was formed the creative and structural confluence that would Popular Culture. lead directly to the development of our popular Smithsonian exhibit, Up Where We Belong: Native Musicians in Popular Culture, “To our surprise, many of the many legendary music and the follow-up documentary by Rezolution Pictures, industry friends—like Steven Tyler, George Clinton, Jackson RUMBLE: The Indians Who Rocked the World. Browne, Eric Clapton, Mike Inez, Taylor Hawkins, Slash, Taboo, and others—were really excited to talk about the influence that “It’s been a remarkable and rewarding journey, one that all began these Native American musicians had on their art and their lives.” with a planned introduction in a Native community.” DISCUSSION GUIDE RUMBLE: THE INDIANS WHO ROCKED THE WORLD 7 ARTIST PROFILES “I love Charley Patton, his spirit, and his music. “From 16 to 20 years old, that’s the only thing It just connects me right back to where I I listened to—Mildred Bailey. She sang perfect come from, you know? I can hear all those old for me. She was a great jazz singer!” —Tony Bennett traditional songs.” —Pura Fé, musician, singer, songwriter (Tuscarora/Taino) Charley Patton (Choctaw) Mildred Bailey (Coeur d’Alene) 1920s “FATHER OF THE DELTA BLUES” 1930s JAZZ PIONEER DIVA Charley Patton (1891?–1934) was a seminal influence on Mildred Bailey (1907–1951) has been praised as the first the careers of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf non–African American jazz singer to successfully adapt the and, by extension, an influence on future rock and roll artists, rhythms and improvisational flavors of Dixieland and ragtime most notably the Rolling Stones. Patton spent his formative into swing jazz. Bailey started out with some of the best jazz years with his family at Dockery Farms in Mississippi and is a musicians in New York City, where she was a regular act at the product of the little-known mixture of cultures that found stable first integrated speakeasies. Bailey’s unique style of singing, work and secure living conditions on plantations like Dockery. the lilt and glide of her notes, is now a standard for jazz singing. He raucously played the 1920s delta roadhouses Her style was uncannily similar to the style of singing she would and juke joint scenes, banging on his guitar, swinging it have heard on visits to the Coeur d’Alene Indian reservation with around wildly, and even playing it behind his back. During an era her Native American mother. when the U.S. government had banned Native Americans and African Americans from drumming and dancing, Patton creatively used the guitar as a percussive instrument. DISCUSSION GUIDE RUMBLE: THE INDIANS WHO ROCKED THE WORLD 8 ARTIST PROFILES “‘Rumble’ had the power to push me over “‘Universal Soldier’ on, she was an activist. She was the edge, and it did help me say, the first woman of activism that had an audience.” ‘Fuck it, I’m gonna be a musician.’” —Gary Farmer (Cayuga) —Iggy Pop Link Wray (Shawnee) Buffy Sainte-Marie (Cree) 1950s ROCK LEGEND 1960s FOLK HEROINE Link Wray’s (1929–2005) song “Rumble,” an instrumental, was Buffy Sainte-Marie (1941–) is one of the greatest folk singers of banned from radio for fear that it would incite teenage violence.