Bones
Contemporary Indigenous Fusion ~ a musical ‘non-re’~ mixed with elements of hip hop, carried with messages of experience, manifestations and visions. 2017’s ‘Bones’ is a follow up from 2016’s ‘More Medicine’, and reflects their evolution of collaboration.
Genre: World: Indigenous
Release Date: 2017
More Medicine
Hip Hop beats are the foundation the rock-folk-reggae-blues-country-jazz songs build on ,with vocal styles as individual as the artists themselves, weaving stories of life,love,freedom and justice with Indigenous voices.
Genre: Hip-Hop/Rap: Instrumental Hip-Hop
Release Date: 2016
The Gathering
When the collective developed more into a ‘band’ it had had more members.
This album is a fusion of different genres and voices that reflect the diversity of its artists, stories created musically through styles of roots, rock, hip hop, reggae and many things in between. After the making of this album, it was decided that the collective needed to get back to its roots, as a smaller group of 3.
Genre: Hip-Hop/Rap: Alternative Hip Hop
Release Date: 2016
Kiva joins
Beat Nation reflects a generation of artists who juxtapose urban youth culture with Indigenous identity in entirely innovative and unexpected ways. Using hip hop and other forms of popular culture, artists create surprising new cultural hybrids—in painting, sculpture, installation, performance and video—that reflect the changing demographics of Indigenous people today. Around the time this video was made, was when Kiva started working with the collective more in depth. The verse created during this session ended up being a part of a song called ‘Ghost’, which recognized the Indigenous presence as the most vulnerable and identifiable on the streets of our cities.
IndigenEYES
IndigenEYES was another series of workshops with Indigenous and Non-Indigenous youth facilitated by Meeka, Rob and Geo, teaching the significant story of genocide and colonization from an Indigenous perspective ~ through a variety of historical documents and story . The exhibition showcased the music and art of the participants, through their own processing of this history. IndigenEYES was a project developed over just under 6 months, included more than 50 students. These kind of workshops are integral to The Melawmen Collective’s body of work.
Mobile Collaborative Art & Music Tour Bus Project
The Collective continued as a group of artists hosting workshops that continued sharing stories around cultural identity and historical consciousness, to then process through music, art and writing. The collective received an award in the form of a grant from Canada Council of the Arts, to do a series of art and music workshops, but bringing these instead to rural Indigenous cultural events and communities, rather than having them come to a studio in an urban area . Meeka, Rob and Geo traveled throughout BC bringing with them a space to be amongst friends and contribute to an evolving story. The project carried on from the spring of 2010 until spring of 2011.
An Art Project
The arts project that was the inception to The Melawmen Collective started as a indigenous youth art project. A friend of Morgan’s kept saying he needed to connect her to a curator in the area, who then expressed that she was working with an artist on themes of space, territory, boundaries and narrative, specifically to Indigenous peoples, with a focus on Indigenous Youth. This is how she met artist Jayce Salloum who asked her to co-facilitate an arts project that would explore storytelling, identity, collaborative painting and the Indigenous contemporary culture.
“It really was the foundation of our work as The Melawmen Collective. The collective was created because we were coming close to the ending of these workshops, and the youth kept asking, ‘what is going to happen after these end?’ We didn’t know what to say… we knew it was needed and the work needed to carry on, so we decided after that, to found what we called: The Melawmen Collective. ‘Melawmen’ in Secwepemcstin (secwepemc language) means ‘medicine’. We thought of our collective as ‘gathering’ medicine, to heal, to continue to share, and we have been doing so since then.”
