Gyasi Ross: When hip-hop came to the reservation and stayed

Truth is that, in 2014, if you go to any Indian reservation within the U.S. you'll find Native youth listening to hip-hop music en masse. You might even find some Native hip-hop artists (more about them later). Now, keep in mind that these are remote locations—hundreds of miles away from any urban centers, in the midst of acres and acres of forests, cows or sheep grazing and farmland—yet, hip-hop has a grasp on the young folks.

But at one time, our reservations were almost unilaterally more prone to listen to pow-wow music or country or guitar rock and found solace in the familiar stories of homes on ranges and horses and remote locations within those genres.

I remember the exact moment when Native youth in the most remote parts of the US began to find a strange affinity with young Black and Latino youth in the most densely populated metropolitan areas. We found our shiny thing, like the African tribesmen, and made up the context.

Now granted, we weren't butt nekkid in the African bush; still, we were in remote northern Montana (far too cold to be butt nekkid), a few miles south of the Canadian border, on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation (and many reservations nationwide!). We weren't completely unfamiliar with western technology—we had a TV, although there was no cable, with two TV stations (and one was in Canada so, y'know, take that for what it was worth). We had a car, a red Pinto that had an amazing ability to fit eight of us into it.