HOME is a powerful song from the perspective of a person lost in the urban areas, as many of us Native’s find ourselves in living to survive in the 21st century.
The chorus is sung by Lihn Renkin in which she says “Home, I’m just trying to find my way home”. Lihn is a gifted vocalist, pianist and violinist. She offers an incredible sample of her vocal range on the outro of the song.
“We seen the world turn, our waters being burned, our mother being torn, industrial revolution. Steps forward or steps backwards? How we not listening to our elders, just cuz they don’t have a Masters (degree), who we fooling?, this living in excess and consuming, over population, pollution…” this is one of my favorite lines in the song because it came from an actual conversation I had with an elder,
Sunny Dooley, a Navajo elder and story teller shared her thoughts of her disappointment of the invalidating of knowledge of our elders because of their lack of western education. This she shared at the 2nd Elders Gathering I was honored to help facilitate at the banks of the Colorado River inside the Grand Canyon in May of 2010.
Sunny had said that “there are grandma’s out here that have an enormous wealth of knowledge to heal the world, yet their words are invalidated because they don’t have a Master’s degree, shortly after I wrote this song with those words in mind.
Also the part of the waters being burn is from a video I had seen of a river in the Midwest that was so polluted that it caught on fire in the early 90’s. Also touched on the of the wars that are tearing our world apart and the destruction happening from strip mining that is leaving our mother torn, our mother the Earth. I'm really questioning whether progress are steps forward for mankind or not?
This song is a longing for the feeling of what it would have been like in yesteryear without the modern technologies and the modern social ills. Also a longing to return home on the reservation where my heart and soul is, yet like many Natives of today I’m stuck in the city to be able to pursue a living, for now.
In the second verse I say “we come from a place where sisters are mother and mothers are fathers, we need to be raising our own sons and daughter”. This is a look at a ill that is all too common in communities on color not only in Native communities of the situations where sisters are raising their nieces and nephew and mothers are both mother and father to their children.
“Disconnect and reconnect, disrespect and re-respect” I finish the song with words of hope and in those words share the guidance that has been given to me in these trying times.
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