“By witnessing, you take the thing into yourself but without the avaricious asymmetry of ethnography’s past and present. Witnessing makes you into an ally. The witness doesn’t stand alone. The witness brings collectivities into being. The listening witness takes the moment into herself.” Deborah Wong, Witnessing: A Methodology (2021)
Songwriting and Performance:
Practice-Led Research and Public Scholarship
I completed my comprehensive exams in February of 2024. For one exam, I wrote songs and produced a performance. I wrote four songs the month of my exams and put them together with eight more to create the performance set list. The four new songs brought together my coursework and focused on relational ecologies as interventions to colonial and carceral logics. I created in a contemplative space, bringing together Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s notion of solidarity as radical dependence, and freedom making as an ongoing process of securing possibility through relational and material resources, imagination and care.[1] I also considered the history and present reality of the colonization of the land and people and a question kept emerging over and over again: how do I practice and live relationship with the land and more than human kin, having been socialized in racial capitalism which depends on disconnection with land and objectification of it and its living ecologies. Even if I awaken to connections that have been severed and desire to practice something different, I live in a car and consumer centered geography. A critical aspect of spirituality is relationship with the land and more than human world, the capacity to see oneself as part of a larger ecology. My front yard and garden is an ecology I can witness and participate in, but still feels wildly insufficient when I consider all the intention and care I put into cultivating my human connections. Ubuntu is a deep knowing that “I am because you are,” and is a theological and cultural foundation for liberative relationship and action.[2] How do I cultivate ubuntu with the more than human world?
Drawing from Indigenous cosmologies and visionary fiction, I imagined a world where grassroots organizing included more than human beings as autonomous and generative characters. I overlaid the story of Elijah McLain, with the story of uranium mines on Indigenous lands in northern Arizona, with the spiritual crisis of our time: most of us do not know who we are or where we come from. Loneliness giving way to despair is world ending too.[3] The collective organizing set its sights on what severed connection between them and what continues to drive them apart if they live in the story and relational framework of racial capitalism. The triumph is in working, journeying, creating, and finally singing, together.
The Revolution by Tracy Howe © 2024
Who called the cops on Elijah McLain?
Who sold the sacred land for a uranium mine?
Who told me I was in this world alone?
The violence sinks so deep into my bones
How is our struggle to survive
Any different than the monarch butterfly’s?
Their time on earth is coming to an end
If we don’t organize the revolution
So for Elijah and the land and the monarch butterflies
We started having meetings in the desert late at night
The roots of a mesquite tree kept us warm
And a five striped Sparrow opened us with a song
Person to person to flowers to the bees
Our movement grew and grew with people and the trees
The soil and the rocks showed us who we are
The mushrooms and moss showed us what we’re fighting for
So finally together we marched in the streets
We flew in the skies and swam with the ocean jet streams
The children, the penguins and the panda bears went to DC
And the rabbits and the creosote bushes started to sing
And we sang so strong the empire fell down
The billionaires and oil executives they drowned
They couldn’t breathe in the song we sang
Giving every living thing a place in our family again
The land we live on holds us a part of itself
Renewing and healing us with the stories it tells
For Elijah and the land and the monarch butterflies
We go on singing and living this life
With a similar vision of solidarity, I then turned to the literal struggle between the Santa Cruz river, in whose water shed I live, and the threat of the construction of a new jail on its shores in Pima County. The photos I have seen in archives of the families swimming in the Santa Cruz river where it ran through downtown Tucson don’t seem real to me, someone who came after the water was extracted again and again to build and then sustain a city in the desert. It looks like most of the washes in the area, bone dry unless flooded by a summer monsoon storm. In the past several years I have followed the community group, Reconciliación Rio San Crúz, on social media. Some fellow Tucsonans struggled with a similar question to mine, about living in relationship with the land we are on. They started visiting the river near downtown. They hosted trash pickup parties and learning hikes and mostly just encouraged people to be together and enjoy the river. Their advocacy and work resulted in signs of resurgence in the ecosystem.[1] Then another threat to its existence: the county approved land adjacent to the river for the construction of a new jail.
I had been organizing with No Jail Deaths for the better part of a year at that time, a local abolitionist group drawing attention to the high number of deaths in the Pima County Jail and working for its closure. Carceral logics suggested that spending more money and building a bigger jail would solve the problem of death and negligence. NJD disagreed and mobilized a coalition against it, including Reconciliación Rio Santa Cruz. In my visioning, not only was the jail a machination of human death, but ecological death. And, as those most impacted, the currently and formerly incarcerated and their families, were leading the efforts of No Jail Deaths, so too, I imagined, the river acting towards life and justice. This song weaves abolitionist commitments with ecofeminist and decolonial theologies.
Santa Cruz River by Tracy Howe ©2024
Let’s make some freedom together with the Santa Cruz River
Learn to care for one another for the present and future
Don’t need a new jail; don’t need the one that stands now
We gotta clear the way for the water to flow
The history of this place repeats time and time again
Take captive the poor and incarcerate the land
But freedom doesn’t have a fence; its nothing that you buy
You make it with your friends and kin, with water, land and sky
Blood free in my veins, water flowing in the streams
Roots pushing through the ground, children free to play around
Let the poor sleep in peace; let the birds have their trees
Let the migrants come and drink and forget the police
Let’s make some freedom together with the Santa Cruz River
Learn to care for one another for the present and future
Don’t need a new jail; don’t need the one that stands now
We gotta clear the way for the water to flow
By witnessing, you take the thing into yourself but without the avaricious asymmetry of ethnography’s past and present. Witnessing makes you into an ally. The witness doesn’t stand alone. The witness brings collectivities into being. The listening witness takes the moment into herself.
-Deborah Wong, Witnessing: A Methodology (2021)
Wong helped me recognize my songwriting process includes witness and contemplation. This methodology also requires understanding my relationship to what I am witnessing/writing and the subjects with/in relationship. I have also participated in and trained people for “public witness” to in/justice. I write and compose out of these experiences as well. My positionality within the creative work might change, but I have found the nature of my writing, songs, liturgy or prose, to be consistent: a witness to both loss and possibility. My work engages the world searching for the possibility of transformation with/in suffering or injustice, primarily through appealing to relationship and connection. Ubuntu: I am because you are.
Theologically, my process parallels that of Libby Byrne, though we have different mediums. As a studio based visual artist, she engages materials and embodied knowing in the pursuit of a theological question. “Somewhere in the interdisciplinary boundaries between art and theology the scholarly practice of artmaking resides, offering those who are willing to engage the possibility of a material and contemplative practice of prayer and an embodied approach to theological enquiry.”[1] The summary of my theological inquiry in my songs is this: Where is God with/in this, this being the mess of so many severed relations across history, land and people.
I have been an advocate for a free Palestine for years. I had the privilege of sharing original songs as part of a theological gathering of Palestinian and US Christians in 2012. Palestinians taught me, and I witnessed, the violence of settler colonialism and its multiple world ending strategies, from kidnapping children, to destroying cultural and food resources, to stealing land, displacement and more. It was through that understanding I was awakened to the malformation, the insidious lies of my own childhood (mis)education. I was taught that settling the United States indeed involved displacing Native peoples, and yes there was a lot of death, and yes it was very sad, but it is way in the past and over now. Furthermore, we had clearly evolved because we would never commit that kind of violence now. Being evolved bestowed on us freedom from responsibility. I grew up in the South Platt water shed, the very river where upon whose tributaries the Sand Creek massacre occurred.[2] But as a child, we never visited the site. We did visit the Argo gold mine in Idaho Springs and were given gold pans to play with in a pond stocked with gold dust for tourists. We also went to the Denver Mint to see how money was printed and be impressed by how much gold bars weighed. We walked downtown to the Louisville museum which celebrated early miners as pioneers and mentioned nothing of the exploitation of people paid in script or the poisoned waters along the way. All of this groomed me to see the world in a very particular way. I did not see myself as a colonizer but rather I had a legacy of exploration and upward mobility to continue. Sand Creek was one of many massacres that blurred together in a single sad history of Native people I felt no connection to or responsibility for in present day Boulder County. This is the spiritual violence we, the descendants of colonizers, the current settlers of the land, inherit. We are dead to our relationships with the land and water and people past, present and future, who we are deeply interconnected with. And equally true, I was severed from their love and joy, the resources and gifts of their cultures and lives, stories that would bestow me with a spiritual security beyond anything I can build, by myself, in this lifetime.
As I began working more closely with Apache Stronghold I understood more of the spiritual security and cultural treasures I had lost and that colonization seeks to destroy everywhere. I started to understand because I was invited into a community that protected their own spiritual and cultural power and treasures, as much as possible, despite all the horrific violence they were, and continue to be, subjected to. Colonization of Turtle Island is not over. The US is still stealing land and displacing Indigenous people. What is more, it happens over and over again to whomever falls out of white security.[3]
[1] (Byrne, L., 2017).
[2] Notes on sand creek
[3] Explain more
Olive Tree written by Tracy Howe © 2024
All I need to survive, to provide for my family
Is this olive tree, strong in history
A legacy of my land and people
So will you let live what I need to live
Will you let grow what I nurture in the soil
All I need to survive, to live and be whole
Are the stories we’ve made, our ceremonies and our grain
A legacy of my land and people
So will you let live what I need to live
Will you let grow what I nurture in the world
So much is already lost I barely know who to trust
Except myself and the rain and the stars
And those who fight for more than themselves
All we risk and create in love will always be a part of us
Alive in some eternal place of compost and soil and death and grace
So will you let live what I need to live
Will you let grow what I nurture in the world
So will you let me live so you too can live
Will you let me grow so your children can grow
In my continuing quest to understand my relationship to the more than human world and my relationship with the land, I started to seek out more ritual and practices affirming the sacredness of death. In capitalism where production equates to ontological value, dying is the ultimate sign of weakness and worthlessness. But forests, ecologies, traditional cultures and religions all practice and proclaim something different. I have known this for quite sometime, however in my body, I still feel severed from a process that includes both life and death. What will nurture a transformation in the perception of my body? How can I move from the experience I have being formed in a story that devalues death towards a story, to feeling/perceiving/existing in my body in an interdependent story where death is part of collective life?
In Charlottesville…
So I wrote about my own death, in the song that follows and also in my life writing.
All Flesh is Grass written by Tracy Howe ©2024
All flesh
All flesh is grass
All grass returns to seed
And so it is with me
Laid in the ground to sleep
I lay
I lay forever
Forever is a breath
And so it is with me
My breath leaves my body
For you
For you I tried
I tried to love enough
Enough will fill my soul
As I return to bones
Let grow
Let grow the next life
The next life flows from me
Here now I have become
The grass you stand upon
All flesh
All flesh is grass
All grass returns to seed
And so it is with me
Laid in the ground to sleep
The performance took place in March 2024. I was accompanied on some songs by my artist/friend Lara Ruggles. We played in the small stone chapel at Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church in Tucson. The chapel had chairs that were placed in semicircle rows facing the front. Tables were setup in the back with markers and large sheets of butcher paper with prompts including, “What is beautiful?,” and “What work are you a part of in the community you want to invite other people in to?” There was also a snack table with fruit and cookies, tea and sodas. People gathered and mingled for the first 30 minutes before I started playing. The people gathered were a mix of neighbors, friends and colleagues, both from the University of Arizona and clergy colleagues from the greater Tucson area. Photos were taken and my friend filmed and recorded everything to revisit and share.
The set list was organized into groups of three songs each. I have found, after decades of sharing live music, people can take in a good story no more than every three songs. As I could tell long stories about where each of my songs came from, I chose with care where to place each song so that stories and songs and banter with the audience would all serve to cultivate attention and listening, expectation and response, in silence, applause or laughter. I listened to the audience as they listened to me. I prayed the same prayers that I prayed when some of the songs were written, each one a vibrant imprint of memory and meaning. People left, some telling me they had been deeply moved but were leaving encouraged and alive. I was filled with gratitude.
Set List:
1. So Much Beautiful
2. The Revolution *new song
3. Way Out of No Way
4. They Lifted Their Hands
5. Wash Away
6. Take My Hand
7. How Can We Sing
8. All Flesh is Grass *new song
9. Let It Ring
10. Santa Cruz River *new song
11. Build the World
12. Olive Tree *new song
Findings
Abby Dobson asks these questions: What is the responsibility of the artist to her community/communities and how can music call for and help make freedom real? Her essay, From Baldwin to Beyoncé speaks about the necessity of sonic intervention in trauma and above all, cultivating empathy. A “sonic intervention [is] a tool for awakening and inspiring a civic-minded and engaged community of everyday folk. It is a call to (re)membering. It is a call to acknowledge [humanity.].”[1] Through the lens of spiritual formation and the stories and relationships we live and practice, it is a disruption of a status quo that buries harmful stories and relational frameworks in commodity comfort. It is a disruption of the illusion of separateness and otherness that draws close new stories and the subjects within them. It is a space to empathize and in doing so affirm a connection, be it living or haunted.
As the performer, singing the songs makes public the stories I witness, enter, or am a part of. I also testify to my part or relationship with/in them. The public and collective action becomes a kind of commitment, dare I say a promise, to not only tell the stories, but to know them, to live them. These stories imprint through an embodied process of performing, and being held accountable by the audience. While I might not live up to everything I sing about, the public performance has oriented me towards a story that calls me to do just that. Whereas the writing of the song was a space of contemplation, visioning, prayer and theological inquiry, the performance is claiming the story and relationality of the song. The performance is not a conclusion, a definitive answer or truth. Within me, the performer, it is like the force of the magnetic North Pole orienting me with ever more certainty into a story and relational framework.
For a listener, a song can take on multiple meanings, the words and melodies engaging the lived realities and imagination of the listener. Within a performance space, though, the nearness of other bodies and the collectivity and ritual of listening and applause make way for formational spirit. The songs and performance do what art does and make the ordinary strange so as to re-encounter it. And in that disruption, empathy and inspiration, or anger and disgust depending on the song, can shake and contribute to the reorientation of the stories and relationships one lives and practices.
[1] Cite this