Robbie Robertson & The Red Road Ensemble
Music For The Native Americans

I was born on the prairie where the wind blew freely and where there was nothing to block the sunlight. I was born where there were no fences and where everything breathed freely. I want to die there, and not inside these walls.” Ten Bears, Comanche Yamparika

What is it like to sit on the edge of the Grand Canyon listening to the wind, with eyes closed? Only the wind?
It all started with a journey to discover my American myths, specifically those of the United States. My myths are those of the American frontier, and I head into the heart of this strange homeland. Nevada. I want to see with my own eyes that enormous 30 km wide and over 1 km deep chasm at the bottom of which flows the Colorado River. I arrive with a rickety and perilous little propeller plane where you bump your head against the ceiling and sit with twelve passengers. The noise is so loud they make you wear headphones with mindless country music to distract you. Finally on the ground. So far, I’ve only seen stretches of woods and red lands. I get off the plane, and I’m hit by a cool, pine-scented, slightly sparkling air. In the wooden lodge they give me, in the midst of the woods, between black squirrels with long blue tails and low dark pines, I listen to the immense silence of these places. The next day we head to the Canyon. I arrive at the scenic balcony, a bit skeptical, and on this infinite precipice, I hold my breath. “It’s too beautiful” I think foolishly to myself. It is an immense chasm, brushed by the sunset sun, with yellows, oranges, reds, and browns at the bottom.

A Native American passes by and smiles at me; I smile back. A pang in the heart. They have lived here forever. I am strangely shaken. In the evening, I go for a beer in a local venue. As I enter, the smoke blurs the figures, laughter echoes among the wooden walls. There are people at the bar with full mugs, men and women playing pool. I realize they are all “Indians,” as vulgarly called. I am the only foreigner. I feel embarrassed and out of place. “Will it be dangerous” I wonder? And in front of my eyes flash dozens of western movies with fierce horseback warriors and white men's scalps. Terror and death brought by Indians. “Damn, I can’t remember who the ‘bad guys’ were, the Sioux? What were they called?” A burly man in his forties approaches frowning... I tense up. It seems to be going badly. Maybe they're Apache; maybe they are the bad ones. But the man next to me smiles and invites me to play with them. A girl with green eyes and ebony skin laughs at my ineptitude in the game; we joke, we get drunk. And that night, back in my room, in the silence of those woods that numbs the soul, I understood all the immense stupidity and wickedness of the white man. As if that black sky wanted to come down and crush me, as if millions of eyes were watching me desperately from among the pine needles. Greed, arrogance that makes one invade places, destroy and subjugate people. Their cultures. Everything. Killed, tortured, expelled, annihilated. Tears almost come to my eyes picturing myself as a child, in front of the TV, rooting for the “bravest” confederate soldiers in the old black-and-white Hollywood movies. With their horses, their banners, their bugles sounding silly charges.

Today, Native Americans live on subsidies. Segregated in animal-like off-limits zones for whites, in reality, small and cramped enclosures for them. Many American Indians get drunk, if not worse, begging for alms. Others try to integrate, but it is very difficult. Meanwhile, the white man continues in his work of conquest and destruction worldwide. The European white man first and now his descendant, the North American white man. Conquer, subject, destroy, annihilate, exploit, and become increasingly rich, selfish, and arrogant.

Robbie Robertson, leader of the glorious The Band, of Iroquois descent, decides at a certain point in his life that it is right to remember the Fathers with an album. The occasion is a documentary about Native Americans. And he composes a masterpiece supported by the best native musicians. To gain the right inspiration, he retreats for a while among the forgotten “redskins,” listens to their songs, stories, dances, absorbs their harmony, joy, despair, but above all, becomes the singer of the now-lost pride of these great peoples. The true Americans.

Electric, tribal sounds, sometimes ambient, chants, and ancestral suggestions. The first song, “Coyote Dance”, introduces us to a world alien to us that we should know with delicacy and sensitivity. Ancient instruments and songs envelop us like a sand vortex, dispersing us. “The Ghost Dance”, the most well-known, written, sung, and played by Robertson himself with typical arrangements, is a prayer for the survival of the great redskin spirit tormented by the white man. It is inspired by the cruel and senseless massacre of 300 unarmed Sioux, mostly women and children, at Wounded Knee in December 1890, for not complying with the government’s order to ban the Ghost Dance, their religious ritual. “The Vanishing Breed”, a memorable melody, delicate, flying lightly and surely between the red deserts and the rugged rocky mountains like an eagle, proud and unperturbed. “Cherokee Morning Song” is a real “aria” that opens and stretches over the listeners like a warm prairie wind, a song of thanksgiving for witnessing another dawn.

And the other songs that are prayers, hymns to nature, bitter tears, or proud war songs. Alone and with eyes closed. We listen. And the more we listen, the more we ask why? Why do we have this bestial instinct of destruction? This certainty of being the best, most advanced, most cultured people to wipe out people, lock them in cages when it goes well, torture them, not respect their essence? With the arrogance that our God is the best, the most righteous? Yesterday the Native Americans of North America; before that, the peoples of South America and Africa deported like animals to serve, as slaves, the modern white man. And, like a demonic sequence, up to today, the weakest, poorest, and most unfortunate peoples who have the misfortune of living in lands rich in some raw material. How will we ever atone for such sins?

The circle closes with news from these days: it seems that the grandfather of the current president of the USA, Senator Prescott Bush, a member of the infamous secret society “Skull and Bones”, stole the skull of the legendary red warrior Geronimo. So say the Apache descendants. True or false, they surely stole their soul.

“If you white men had never arrived, this land would still be as it once was. Everything would have retained its original purity. You called it 'savage,' but it really wasn’t. It was free. The animals are not savage; they are simply free. We too were before your arrival. You treated us like savages, called us barbarians, uncivilized. But we were only free!” Chief Leon Shenandoah, Onondaga