The Warpath of Loretta Lynn
How Indigeneity and country music collided for me
One of the more amusing, if not confounding parts, of growing up in a rural reservation is just how much of the music we listened to was the same music white people in the border towns listened to as well. Specifically, country music, or as my mother used to call it, Country & Western.
For all my love of wacipi, opera, cumbia, folk, rumba, electronica, and all those other genres that defy description, country was the music I was surrounded with, it encapsulated all my feelings of love, loss, and moving on in my early teen years.
While I could fall asleep to the pounding rhythm of the drum at a wacipi, my mother would often tell me that my first concert experience was Johnny Cash when he played Digmann Hall in St. Francis in 1983. “You were bouncing around like mad,” she’d tell me, “I knew you’d be a Johnny Cash fan.”
As tween, I’d read Country Weekly every week to see what the most popular country songs were, and on occasion to see if my favorite teenage crushes were featured. I stumbled on an article about Loretta Lynn. At that time, she had become a fixture at places like the Grand Ole Opry and toured county and state fairs and while she seemed old fashioned for me, her music still resonated with my mother’s generation and my mother still spoke of her with admiration.
In the article, she acknowledged her Indigenous roots—something unheard of in the 20th century by such folks—and that she had set up a scholarship fund for Indigenous students. It struck me as odd, considering one of her early songs (“Your Sq*** Is On The Warpath”) was both offensive and earned a collective shrug by the adults around me. “It was a different time,” is all my mother would say about that song. “But you can see it in her high cheekbones.”
My mother would talk about “One’s On The Way,” “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ On Your Mind)” or “They Don’t Make ‘Em Like My Daddy” as the songs that scared her right out of marrying at a young age and holding any potential suitor (my father included) to ridiculously high standards set by my kaka. Her music, despite its torrid relationship with present conscientiousness and understandings, spoke to the women of my mother’s generation both in solidarity and in warning.
Loretta Lynn’s reported philanthropy moved me to write my first letter to the editor (and, ultimately a lifetime of expressing opinions that no one asked for) to say how much The Queen of Country’s acknowledgment of her Indigeneity and philanthropy meant to me as a young student. They even published a now-forgotten photo of her posing with a shawl and dance fan that someone had gifted her during her storied career of touring.
When it was published, everyone who read Country Weekly would tell me how much they liked seeing my name in print. Loretta Lynn’s philanthropy gave me the thrill of print writing I’d chase the rest of my high school and college years. As I got older, I’d start to question the wisdom of uplifting a country music star’s connection to Indigenous people, especially when so many of the people who listened to her music couldn’t stand Indigenous people.
With time and experience, so much of the irritation, anger, and trauma I endured encompassed folks who came to think of Indigenous identity as a membership club (even the words we use when describing tribal citizenship have been formed by white federal employees who drafted our constitutions based on their social club bylaws) and would ask inane questions from that premise. “How much free money do you get?” was the most common question but the heartbreaking ones were when someone would talk about their ancestry in terms of trying, and so often failing, to reconnect with their roots.
There remains an intertribal dance that we all do when our Indigenous descendants attempt to find a place among us. We move in opposite directions, we who grew up in culture sometimes tire of answering inane questions because we know their aim is to be an expert at being Indigenous, instead of just being Indigenous. They can’t see why we can’t just be more like white people and lift ourselves out of poverty or addiction, as if white people in the border towns didn’t suffer the same realities.
They have been raised and indoctrinated into a colonized mindset, a good many of them looking for ways that being Indigenous can profit for them. When I worked for my tribe, I would answer the switchboard when we got shorthanded and too often I’d field calls of interest from folks far-flung who’d ask, point-blank, how much money we received in benefits if they enrolled today. I’d chuckle, say, “It doesn’t work that way, but I can transfer you to the Enrollment Department and they can answer your other questions.”
The desperation that this colonized world causes us to experience is overwhelming sometimes, scarcity is baked into so much of what we have to endure. It never occurs to any of us that we do indeed have enough, just for today sometimes, but enough nonetheless. And that requires authentic examination of oneself in a loving embrace.
What I appreciated about Loretta Lynn’s music is that it was brutally honest and dignified above it all. Loretta Lynn bowed to no one but the lord. She didn’t complain or bemoan anything beyond some Jezebel hussy trying to take her man. Even her lovesickness in “She’s Got You” is an impassioned accounting of things, but it’s all statements of fact, “she” does in fact have “you.”
When the hipsters of my generation rediscovered her after Jack White cut “Van Lear Rose” with her, my favorite defining song was “Family Tree,” because it summarized her attitude and outlook cultivated through a lifetime and career of bearing the mediocrity of others so succinctly. She was a bulwark for us all.
As she makes her transition to the next life, I will say that I’m grateful for her music giving the women of my mother’s generation somewhere to feel witnessed and validated and for the folks of my generation to sit and dive deeper into the concepts of belonging.