John Trudell – a voice to be reckoned with

Celebrating his 80th birthday

John Trudell was an early member of and spokesman for the Native American rights movement and helped to promote a spoken word style that honors Native American oral traditions.

POETRY FOUNDATION

According to voice expert Rébecca Kleinberger, the voice with which we speak to others is a way of projecting (ourselves) in the world, a marker of (our) fluid identity.¹ But where does a voice come from? Can we piece together a puzzle of clues from somebody’s life and work out an answer to that question? In this article I continue to explore the theme of voice, and particularly how certain voices are good at making people listen.

John Trudell was a Santee Dakota spoken word artist who passed away in 2015 whose work lives on in multiple forms. His is a voice to be reckoned with. Today would have been his 80th birthday. Let’s look at some of his pasts and sees what presents are there which we can learn from for our futures.

A 500 year-old voice

I first noticed John Trudell in 1992, the year he released a CD called AKA Grafitti Man. And yes, that is graffiti spelt grafitti with one f and two ts, which was John‘s take on the word.

It was the wind and fury of Rockin the Res, heard on the radio, that first stopped me in my tracks. His was a voice. Almost conversational but somehow assertive. He seemed to be talking about life as he experienced it, but changing it into something wider which also took in our own. Back in 1992, the tension and poetry made you sit up and listen, and the music made you want to dance even if you didn’t know how. Listen to the song for yourself and see what you think.

And 1992 was certainly a breakthough year for John T, because he also starred in a movie called Thunderheart by Michael Apted. In one scene, Jimmy Looks Twice, the character played by Trudell, is arrested by FBI agents played by Sam Shepard and Val Kilmer. Jimmy defies their swagger with a swagger of his own by reminding them that his is a 500 year-old voice : a voice which can’t be silenced and should be listened to because it has been talking for non-Native Americans and their ancestors in 500 years of resistance since 1492. For the spectator, that voice is not just Jimmy‘s, it is also Trudell‘s.

Nearly 35 years on, examples of John‘s writing can be found on the prestigious poetryfoundation.org website. You can read them there, of course, but they will just be words on a page. Remember he was a spoken word artist, whose voice came to maturity as a result of the paths he trod, and it is when he performs his poems over music and breathes life into them that the words fly. Go the John Trudell YouTube Channel to hear him oralise them.

Now let’s see what clues we can find about where that voice came from.

Voice raised on the reservation

Born on 15th February 1946, John Trudell grew up near the Great Sioux Reservation which covers parts of South Dakota and Nebraska, a place where life could be grim for people who couldn’t make themselves heard.  Repeated breaches in the Fort Laramie Treaty, which created the Reservation in 1868, had led to sections of Indian land being sold for other purposes, farming among them. As we now know, some unusually wet years would lead mainly European settlers to intensify their agricultural methods in the region until high winds and drought would return in the 1930s. This created what the history books call The Dust Bowl, with all its attendant human and economic drama.

It took until the mid-1940s for the region to be definitively abandoned by those ruined farmers and their families. Who owned the lands they left behind? There were so many Native American claims for their restitution as formerly confiscated traditional lands that the Department of Justice was unable to deal with them all.

By 1946, nearly 200 claims had been filed under special jurisdictional acts, but the Court of Claims had awarded damages on only 29 of these claims. The fact that the “bulk of the rest” of the nearly 200 claims had been “dismissed on technicalities” led to demands for “revised jurisdictional acts.”²

US Department of justice, Lead up to the INDIAN CLAIMS COMMISSION

So John Trudell came into a world where Native Americans would begin to slowly see results from a long, patient raising of their institutional voice. The Indian Claims Act was voted in 1946, and while the slow burn of the judicial engines meant that most cases were only completed by the 1970s, the last one wasn’t closed until the 2000s.

Voice raised by Rock n Roll

John‘s mother passed away when he was 6. There are some things you can’t claim back. Fortunately, the affirmation of who you are also comes through hearing other people around you speaking up. While legal wrangles and the language of justice were certainly part of that in Trudell‘s formative years, this was also a time when rock n roll was shaping a new America.

The new music crossed social barriers, either by knocking them down or by simply ignoring their existence, offering a way to overcome what podcaster Anna Van Valin characterizes as the personal history and social conditioning which constantly stands between an individual and liking the sound of his or her voice enough to raise it.

And, of course, as rock n roll moved into the 1960s and became pop and rock, there was a whole new area of constantly changing cultural and personal expression waiting to be discovered. Plus, you didn’t need to worry about your inability to master what the dictionary defines as Standard English : the English language in its most widely accepted form, adhering to fixed academic norms of spelling, grammar, and usage in written and spoken contexts, and neutralizing nonstandard dialectal variation.³

Right from the mid 1950s, a successful artist could fast-track on social status through musical recognition. Who was Elvis Presley, after all ? A truckdriver, like his father before him.  But Elvis could sing like no-one, and this gift of a golden voice meant he could raise that voice and be heard – all the way to the Great Sioux Reservation where John Trudell was all ears.

You didn’t have to ask to become a member of this new movement, you simply decided you were one. John Trudell‘s classic Baby Boom Che shows what a huge difference rock n roll made to his life, revealing a new platform for speaking out, even though the song recognizes that Elvis got assassinated in all the fame.

Voice of a spokesman

But John would discover that you rock n roll wasn’t the only way to raise your voice and be listened to. Having left the US Navy in 1967 after a 4-year tour of duty in the waters off Vietnam, he chose to go to San Bernadino Valley College for two years to learn about broadcasting and discover how radio worked. The seeds of his political awareness may have been planted by the talk of justice and injustice he grew up with, but his years as a serviceman at such a crucial time would certainly have helped that awareness take on a shape all its own. Broadcasting would fine-tune his voice for the first time.

An ex-serviceman, fresh from broadcasting school, but also a Santee Dakota Indian, he found himself spokesman for a group of Native Americans who carried out a 19-month occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay from November 1969 to June 1971. Under the terms of the Fort Laramie Treaty, the group affirmed the right to take possession of what was effectively abandoned federal property and to reclaim it as Indian land.

The aptly named Radio Free Alcatraz had John Trudell as presenter, and his calm, clear, determined voice reflected the spirit of the occupiers. As the actor Lou Diamond Phillips would put it decades later : for the first time we saw young natives standing up and saying we have rights, we have rights to the land … to our own government … we want to be listened to and we will be heard.

The Alcatraz action would be followed by others as the 1970s rolled on, the occupation of the town of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in the spring of 1973 being particularly well documented. Following arrests among the leaders of The American Indian Movement, John Trudell was promoted from being spokesman to becoming AIM’s National Chairman from 1973 to 1979.

The speech that changed everything

Ten years of activism would see him become a recognized defender of Indian rights, who learned how to make people listen with a voice that rarely seemed to tremble.

Then, at the end of a speech in front of the FBI Building in Washington DC in February 1979, he set fire to the American flag to protest at the continuing bad treatment of Native Americans. The consequences would be dramatic.

The next day, John’s wife Tina, his mother-in-law and their children all died tragically in a house fire. Was it the accident described by the inquest? Or were the government fighting fire with fire and putting an outspoken Native American back in his place? Whatever the dark truth, Trudell lost his loved ones.

Refusing to give up his fight for justice, but unable to carry on leading AIM, he disappeared from official activist circles. In his own words, he went into crazy time, in search of himself.

Voice of a spoken word artist

About six months after the fire, I was with Dino Butler in Vancouver. He was the one who took care of me after the fire. And I was really desperate. I didn’t know anything, not even what reality was. Anyway, we were there in Canada, driving around, and I was feeling really bad. It was very overcast outside, and these lines came into my head and something told me to write them down and not to stop writing them. And I started writing my lines, the car poems. But in reality they were lines that were given to me to hold on to, these were my hanging-on lines. And I know that’s real to me, that this is something that Tina gave to me as a parting gift and, somewhere in that haze and smoke, I recognized to follow where this writing would take me, to follow it, to just go with it, whatever the madness, whatever the extremes I had to bounce around to follow the writing and, maybe some day, I’d find some kind of centre.

John Trudell, extract from the Documentary TRUDELL, 2005

The AIM spokesman of the past began to develop a new voice, first speaking to and for himself, then gradually to audiences through poetry performances. Initially these were accompanied by recordings of traditional musical forms. But remember that Trudell had grown up with rock n roll. A friendship begun with singer-songwriter Jackson Browne in 1979, opened up the world of recording studios and he began to wonder : Could there be a connection between poetry and rock music? Not immediately.

That connection would not become reality until Trudell and the celebrated Native American blues-rock guitarist Jesse Ed Davis met in May 1985 at a California Native American Rehabilitation Center where Davis was following treatment for the serious addiction problems he had been having since 1975.

As Jesse Ed‘s biographer Douglas K Miller explains, this would be a turning point for both of them : Hearing Trudell perform his poetry to backing tapes of traditional traditional pow-wow music, Jesse told him he could put his music to poetry.⁴

Put his music to poetry? Shouldn’t that be said the other way around? Don’t we normally put words to music or poetry to music? It depends who you are talking to. In 2008, John Trudell explained I’m not a poet or a song writer – I write lines – I guess you could call me a liner (laughs). What’s great is that they work with music. The way we work as a band is that I write the lines first and then the guys in the band take them and we find the right texture to go with them. That way the music becomes an extension of the lines.⁵ Jesse Ed also understood that. He was a gifted musician whose art was of such maturity, right from the beginning, that his music was a magnet for others. Douglas Miller reports that Davis was actually part of a project to take a four-piece John Lennon Band out on tour – comprised of Lennon, Ringo Starr, Klaus Voormann and Jesse Ed – when Lennon was shot in December 1980.

The Grafitti Band, formed in 1986 with Trudell, was the moment when Davis finally resurfaced again in a regular musical project. The pair were an interesting mix. Davis was a musician who had always been secretive about his origins, and Trudell had been the voice of Native American activism but needed more mainstream music to carry his voice. Each brought to the collaboration what the other was lacking. Together they made and sold a cassette which gave the world the first edition of AKA Grafitti Man.

He was smaller than his voice had led me to imagine

Time passed, and the new poetry and music mix took shape and earned respect. Sadly, Jesse Ed Davis died of an overdose in June 1988, but Mark Shark, who was already in the band, having followed Davis note for note, stepped from rhythm to lead guitar and the project took on new life. That year The Grafitti Band played support on Midnight Oil‘s triumphant Diesel and Dust US Tour. John Trudell went on to record a new, augmented version of the AKA Grafitti Man cassette, produced by Jackson Browne, which got international release on CD and reached my ears in 1992, as mentioned earlier.

When John T came to France in 1995 with his band, now called Bad Dog, I went with my son Sam to see him live in Toulouse at the legendary club Le Bikini at its original site along the banks of the Garonne River. That was before the explosion of the chemical factory AZF destroyed it in September 2001, which is another story.

It was a late show starting at 10 pm, and the place wasn’t exactly full as the four musicians suddenly emerged from among the crowd, crossing the floor as one unit to climb up on stage.

Can you people understand any of what I’m saying?

There was a magic moment somewhere late in the concert when there was a lull among the audience after one piece. Trudell asked : Can you people understand any of what I’m saying?

How do you answer a question like that?⁶ Maybe we were a mainly French-speaking audience. Who knows? But when somebody puts words about love, tenderness, and friendship together, and contrasts these with some lines about suffering and heartbreak, while mixing in reminders about our common humanity and shared responsibilty for the environment of our planet, people understand across languages. Others have noted John Trudell‘s ability to reach across the age gap by his fusion of traditional and contemporary art forms, and across the gender gap by making sure the voice of women is heard.

In that audience fallen suddenly quiet back at the Bikini Club in Toulouse in 1995, how could we answer John‘s question? Could we understand any of what he was saying? As a teacher, I remember the day I decided to stop asking people Do you understand? because it dawned on me that people couldn’t really give a simple answer to that question for themselves. But here we had an artist wondering out loud whether all his words were in vain.

Slowly, there came a groundswell of applause and encouragement. His words were okay with us. We were with him. Where had we disappeared to? Something in the music? In the poetry? Or the voice?

You want my name?

It was a stunning performance. When Trudell came off stage, he stuck around, making it clear he was happy to talk. He was extremely approachable and respectful of what each person had to say to him. He apologized for not speaking French to people who had a lot to say to him but couldn’t speak English, and I offered to translate for them. I remember him pulling me close to his ear so he could catch everything from my own initially faltering voice. I then translated John‘s answers back into French. Finally, when everyone had gone it was our turn, but the club DJ had put the music on full blast so conversation was impossible.

We shook hands, thanked John for the concert. He said Thanks for helping me out with the language. We asked him for his autograph as a souvenir. His expression suddenly changed and he looked me straight in the eye and said : You want my name? He was speaking to me. What could I say? Your autograph, as a souvenir. He took the pen and signed the back of our concert tickets, changing Trudell to Trudall in the process. He handed them back. I looked at what he’d written. He waited, still looking at me, then said : Is that OK?  I had a piece of graffiti from Grafitti Man himself. How could it not be OK?

Not fade away

Souvenirs are one thing, but I hope that this attempt to mix personal and public histories has given you enough to want to know more.

John Trudell continued writing and recording right up to the end of his life in December 2015. And just to prove that John still means something, check out the thoughts from Chapter 40 in Bob Dylan‘s Philosophy of Modern Song published in 2022. The chapter focuses on Trudell‘s Doesn’t Hurt Anymore, and Dylan uses it as an enticement to encourage people to look further. Here’s what he says.

His words carry in their simplicity the confidence of ancient wisdom. He’s no rapper. More like an ancient Greek poet. You know exactly what he’s saying and who he’s saying it to … John was not mainstream. He didn’t talk about popular subjects… He wasn’t the sort of Indian to put on a head dress and perform in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show … Take a moment. Read a little more about John Trudell than what is offered here. He deserves it.

Bob Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 2022

John Trudell‘s final albums, made in collaboration with Swiss artist and producer Kwest, open a new chapter where the Jesse Ed Davis concept of putting music to words is put to work. Kwest uses electronic and ambient sounds in a way that brings Trudell‘s work truly into the 21st century.

Have a listen to these two extracts by way of example, and tell yourself that the music was put over the words. Like Broken Butterflies has an eery other-worldly quality which you can also find on Leonard Cohen‘s final recordings. But John Trudell continues to have a voice of his own. The use of pluralisation of nouns or nominal groups – Casting self-defences into heartbeats of dreams – was a trademark of Trudell‘s later writing which gives an all-embracing scope to his words.

The July 2023 release of a new documentary, Lakota Nation vs the United States, shone a light on the question of the fight for ownership of traditional American Indian lands. A legal agreement signed by two parties is generally binding for both but, as the Guardian report on the film showed, the struggle for recognition of treaties signed in the 19th century is not over yet.

Reading that film review made me want to watch the trailer for Lakota Nation vs the United States. I couldn’t help thinking that a voice was missing; the voice was that of John Trudell, the Santee Dakota spoken word artist. When you have a 500-year voice, of course, it never really fades away, so I’ll have to see the whole movie to check that out fully.

2026 is the year John Trudell should have turned 80. The USA has new leaders and new voices drown out old ones. What would he have made of America today? The best way to start answering that is to take Bob Dylan‘s advice from The Philosophy of Modern Song : Read a little more about John Trudell than what is offered here. He deserves it.

Yes, read a little more about John Trudell. And listen a whole lot.

Still want more?

Take a peek at this moving portrait written by David Kupfer in December 2015 and which I discovered after completing this post.

The Complete Trudell Archives are available online.

There is a very reliable John Trudell YouTube Channel making all his studio recordings easily accessible.

I have also compiled a John Trudell YouTube Playlist including all the videos given in this post.

Notes

1. More about her work as it applies to the teaching profession to be found in Teacher’s voice – friend or foe? ↩︎
2. For more details, see Final Report of the United States Indian Claims Commission, August 13, 1946 to September 30, 1978. ↩︎
3. To balance out with this dictionary definition, I recommend an article with aa self-explanatory title : There’s no such thing as Standard English. ↩︎
4. See video by Miller on Washita Love Child : The Life and Times of Jesse Ed Davis. ↩︎
5. Interview with John Trudell – An un-mined mind, 2008. ↩︎
6. I have been following tango, listening to it intensively since 1995, picking up Spanish along the way. Slowly, very slowly I am beginning to understand the lyrics of tangos I have been listening to for nearly 30 years. That didn’t stop me getting something, understanding something from the start. Language is not a problem when it’s put to music. ↩︎