Wanbli Ceya finishes 2nd video
Lakota singer will spend three months in EnglandBy James Giago Davies
Native Sun News Today Correspondent
nativesunnews.today RAPID CITY—“Identity is really such a sketchy place,” Jacob Helvick once said. “Imagine your mind being a perfect smooth piece of dough. It’s all good. When this experience happens, when that experience happens, you shift away from that. You deviate from what you were, what you are, with each hit.” When he spoke those words, Jacob had just left his recent past behind. He had been raised in Humboldt, Iowa, by Wasicu grandparents who had adopted his Oglala mother as a baby. This was not a healthy time for him emotionally. He was a lost soul. After getting his mental health house in order, Jacob returned to the Oglala people he had never known. As Wanbli Ceya, Crying Eagle, he discovered that whatever it takes to completely rewrite the Oglala out of a person, ripping him away from his people, raising him in an alien culture where he never fit in and was never happy, was not near enough to accomplish that rewrite. Fact is, Wanbli Ceya is so firmly melded to his Oglala heritage it would be hard to have separated him from it had he been raised on Mars. After his Lakota identity, the thing that has had the deepest influence on Wanbli Ceya’s life is music. His musical identity was shaped by his Iowa childhood: “As a way of coping, while I was going through a lot of things, I would sort of makeup characters. They were extensions of the kind of person I could be. Julie and Quincy, they were sort of like a duo.”
That was how Wanbli Cheya created his third name, Juq, by combining those names together. Juq received four award nominations in 2017: at the Indian Summer Music Awards, Best in Pop for two of his songs, “Luta” and “Callingbull,” and nominations for Best Pop Recording (“Tempo”) and Debut Artist of the Year at the Native American Music Awards. His second music video, “July,” drops at 9 a.m. on May 11. His first music video “pupyluv,” was released in late 2017, and is available for viewing on YouTube. Filmed at Pine Ridge village, “July” features Juq, and winyan friend, Chyler Weston. It was directed by Bryan Douglas Parker with aerial drone shots by Arlo Iron Cloud. Juq wanted to stress the traditional importance and strength of Lakota women in the video, and so it opens with Weston trundling him through Pine Ridge in a shopping cart: “Women are a goddess; the grocery cart and the woman carry the man, in a sense.” A recurrent theme in Juq’s music, is to open with a deeply personal, often disturbing aspect of his own life, and then transition into a tribal perspective, address deeper, cultural and social imperatives: “The light that we carry between us, could be a light that casts out all the darkness, the imbalances that have come about because of the Wasicu. All my life (the month of) July was a transitional period for me. I can speak to this darker scenario, but my focus is on how we can find a way out. You can choose our ways, you don’t have to cherry pick our culture—you can have everything, the way of living that exists with the language.” Even as he focuses on the traditional nurturing role of women in Lakota culture, Juq’s perspective on men, on his personal responsibility is logically forced into the picture: “I want every step I take to have consistency and meaning to it. Too many people flip flop, and their vision gets skewed. I’m not trying to be a lecturer or preacher, I am trying to be as true and sincere as I can.” According to Juq, men have a nurturing role in Lakota culture as well, but he feels “the toxic masculinity that our men have accepted” prevents them from fulfilling their role as co-nurturers. Forever in search of positive symbols of those fundamental truths, Juq finds them in a pair of moccasins: “My auntie, Josephine Standing Soldier, made my mocs. On them there’s a tipi, which symbolizes getting back to our traditional ways, and (the word) Naghi—‘spirit.’” The moccasins are a big hit when Juq tours the reservation schools, sings his songs to kids, and shares his hope and vision.
NATIVE SUN NEWS TODAY
Support Native Media!
Find stories, opinions and more on Native Sun News Today
Join the Conversation
