Loud, Angry, and Indigenous: Heavy Metal Takes on Colonialism and Climate Change
February 05, 2025 at 02:04AMIn this deeply researched piece for Grist, Taylar Dawn Stagner surveys the history of Indigenous heavy metal bands and how they’ve used music to give voice to Indigenous experiences and rail against climate change brought on by white colonizers and capitalists. Given abuses against Indigenous populations including genocide, land theft, and abject disregard for self-determination and sovereignty that continue to this day, Stagner looks to metal as a way to deal with her anger through art.
Winterhawk, led by Cree vocalist and guitarist Nik Alexander, explored similar themes in 1979 on Electric Warriors, an anti-colonial, pro-environmental message that could have been written today. “Man has his machines in mother earth, murdering the balance weaved destruction in our doom,” Alexander sang on “Selfish Man.” The song interrogates whether nuclear energy is worth destroying the land: “They say nuclear power is alright, like light to make the night bright. But it doesn’t mean you can have my birthright, does it, selfish man?” (Then, as now, Indigenous peoples were at the forefront of opposition to nuclear power.) The band was popular enough to perform with the likes of Van Halen and Motley Crue and earned a slot at the US Festival in 1983, but broke up a year later.
The lights dim and my pupils dilate. The band starts and my adrenaline spikes. The music is loud, but I don’t care. I push toward the stage, the sound becoming a roar, thrumming in my ears. A circle opens in front of me. I’ve reached the pit, where dozens of bodies swirl in a vortex, pushing and colliding with each other in a communal dance called moshing that is both an individual act of catharsis and a collective expression of emotion.
Excitement pounds in my chest. It’s been another rough day, in a series of rough days. I’m Arapaho and Shoshone. And like all Indigenous peoples, our land is exploited, our sovereignty denied, our future imperiled. But it’s the accumulation of everyday microaggressions that make me angry. I not only live with this, I write about it, and I can’t help but get mad.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/02/04/loud-angry-and-indigenous-heavy-metal-takes-on-colonialism-and-climate-change/
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