The Significance of Native Flute Music

“You know, a lot of people think of…American Indian music as kind of an anachronism and our languages [as]…anachronistic and maybe irrelevant. But the thing that I really feel any time I play the music or any time at a pow-wow–some of the dances–[when] the singers are really singing good and you get in there,…you can just FEEL the ancestors sitting rank on rank–and [they’re] joyful and jubilant!” This is what Kevin Locke has to say about his deep feeling for the music he learns and performs. (His tapes are available through Good Karma Publishing.)

Kevin’s involvement with the Native flute comes from his effort to preserve Lakota (and other Native nations) music–music that has become nearly extinct. That is why he chooses to work with traditional music handed down in the oral tradition instead of composing his own.

The melodies and words (songs were first sung, then learned on the flute) were part of a formal courtship ritual in a highly-structured society of the past; now, Kevin’s intent is to restore honor and dignity to a people who have been “broken-hearted” and “dispirited” for over 100 years. He feels that by sharing this beautiful music with the modern world, the Native people can offer a gift that brings back a small piece of the proud heritage they all have in common. When 6-10 Native languages are being lost per year, a great deal of information simply cannot be recaptured when one elderly person dies.

Kevin Locke has no need to get others to ascribe to a traditional Lakota way of life. Rather, he prefers to use the culture to “…penetrate to the core. If I can do that, then I can find, at the heart of that culture, that it’s the same and it hooks us up with all the other cultures in the world because we’re all essentially the same.”

The flute, as one of the harbingers of spring and new life–along with the thunder of the drum, the lightning of the voice, and the rain of the rattle–uncovers hope for a time of greater unity for all people in its “embodiment of the spring wind.”

Thanks to Kevin Locke and to Steven Smith of Minnesota Public Radio for information provided in an interview aired on March 16, 1991.

– Jean Katus

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“MAN DID NOT WEAVE THE WEB OF LIFE, HE IS MERELY A STRAND IN IT. WHATEVER HE DOES TO THE WEB, HE DOES TO HIMSELF.”

– Chief Seattle