Julia Keefe is a Native American jazz singer, actor, activist and educator who grew up on the Nez Perce (Nimiipuu) Indian Reservation in Kamiah, Idaho. The 35-year-old musician is now based in New York City, where she leads the Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band, made up of 16 indigenous jazz musicians from a variety of tribes. The ensemble is performing at Stanford University’s Bing Concert Hall on Feb. 19 and Kuumbwa Jazz Center in downtown Santa Cruz on Feb. 20.
Keefe fell in love with jazz the first time she heard Billie Holiday. “My mom had a Billie Holiday greatest hits album and I vividly remember her voice and storytelling making its way into my subconscious and really just living there. Four-year-old Julia was absolutely addicted to this sound,” Keefe said in an interview.
Keefe’s recordings highlight the music of often-forgotten Native American jazz trailblazers like Mildred Bailey and Jim Pepper. She also works with indigenous people to relieve intergenerational trauma associated with forced boarding school and other colonizer violence. Keefe appeared in the 2018 film Virginia Minnesota, directed by Daniel Stine.
John Malkin: Tell me about bringing together indigenous culture and identity with jazz music.
Julia Keefe: When I first began as a jazz vocalist it was very difficult for me to find a happy marriage between my indigeneity and my identity as a jazz musician. Oftentimes listeners of my shows would be almost offended that I would introduce myself as a Native American jazz singer. There was such a cognitive dissonance, as if these two things do not coexist. As I’ve begun meeting other contemporary indigenous jazz musicians, the more important I find it is to use jazz as a shared language, to express our common upbringing of being indigenous, and to tell those stories. From its infancy, jazz was a liberation music. It was about self-expression. It was about creation and transcending the very human level experiences of that time. So being able to integrate jazz with the indigenous experience really allows us to express and combat the injustice and heal a lot of trauma that each of us share.
Tell me about your work with Indigenous people around healing from intergenerational trauma.
Every single person on our stage is the descendant of a boarding school survivor. In my day job I work as a project director for Kauffman and Associates, Inc., a Native woman-owned consulting and contracting company doing American Indian and Alaska Native public health work. I’ve worked in substance abuse and suicide prevention in Indian Country and with the Indian Health Service on the creation of a toolkit around how to talk to survivors, or descendants of survivors, of Indian boarding schools and its lasting impacts on Indian country. It’s been amazing because I find that the day job often influences my work as a musician, and then my work as a musician often is brought into the work I do in my day job. Because music is a protective factor. It is an experiential therapy that is useful in substance abuse and suicide prevention, in healing from historical and generational trauma. It’s very simpatico.
That work on the boarding school toolkit really opened my eyes that each of us feels the impacts of that cultural disconnection created by Indian boarding schools, missionary schools and military schools. We feel that generational and intergenerational trauma and through our community as a jazz band, we’re able to heal and uplift each other, and as a result, uplift our communities. At the end of each performance there has been an indigenous person in the crowd who is crying and saying, “I’ve never seen a group of sixteen native people up on stage like this before.” It’s powerful to offer that representation and to sonically process that latent trauma is a very cathartic experience for both us as performers, and for indigenous people in the crowd as listeners.
‘It is a prophetic calling to be a musician. Our purpose is to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.’ — Julia Keefe
One original song performed by the Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band is “Blood Quantum,” composed by bandmember Mali Obomsawin. In a video from a performance last year at Joe’s Pub in NYC, you introduce the song in part by saying, “We stand in indignant defiance of the colonial constructs that try to disenfranchise us.” How important is it to use music to convey the history of colonization and ongoing violence against indigenous peoples and to support healing and empowerment?
It’s a hugely important aspect of what we do. This cultural connection is healing and protection against a lot of traumas and coping mechanisms that aren’t healthy. So, we serve a bigger purpose than simply playing music. It’s not just a gig. It is protest, it is celebration. It is a prophetic calling to be a musician. Our purpose is to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. It all flows together. The work I do is about supporting marginalized communities in their healing. Obviously, we’re entering a very complicated and tricky time with the new administration and the different changes that are being implemented on the federal level. The work we do is for marginalized communities and regardless of any administration, we continue to do that work.
You just mentioned that we’re living in a tricky time. There’s a backlash now against the steps taken forward in recent years through indigenous resistance, Black Lives Matter and the Land Back movement. I think the question on many people’s minds is; How bad is it going to get?
It is a scary time for black and indigenous people of color and for women. It’s a scary time for our LGBTQI, Two Spirit relatives. Trans is real, whether people want to believe that or not! The beauty of being one of those subsets is that together, we are the global majority. That is why the pendulum swings so hard when we do have these movements like Black Lives Matter, Land Back and #MeToo; in that unification oppressors become afraid of being treated the way that we have been treated by them for generations, for centuries. I’m not sure how bad it’s going to get, but I do know that it is a unifying time for marginalized communities.
Within the indigenous community, there is that sort of insulating moment of, “How do we take care of each other? And how do we build up our systems so that no matter what comes our way, we’re able to weather the storm?” It is also a time of reaching out to other marginalized communities, and being unified against this oppressive force. Connection is protection, connection is prevention. By recognizing the humanity of each other, we can see that we have more in common than there are differences. We have to move beyond self-care to community care. That’s kind of the vibe nowadays.
The federal government has a history of colonization and oppression built on the backs of slaves, on the land of indigenous people. No one’s hands are clean. Together we may not be in the same boats, but we’re all in the same ocean. If we pull together, we’ll get to the other side and create substantive change. Maybe that’s the eternal optimist in me but my teacher once said, “You can’t sing a ballad without hope.” So, while we’re in a time of mourning, we can’t sing a ballad without hope.
The first female big band singer in America was indigenous. Tell us about Mildred Bailey.
Mildred Bailey was the first woman to sing in front of a big band in the late 1920s early 1930s with the Paul Whiteman orchestra. She was a descendant of the Coeur d’Alene tribe. She helped Bing Crosby get his start. Bing Crosby and Mildred’s younger brother, Al Rinker, were The Rhythm Boys who performed with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra before Mildred Bailey joined. Mildred Bailey was an incredibly important figure in jazz history and she changed the soundscape for all of the vocalists that followed her including Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan.
What’s tragic about Mildred is that she disappeared into obscurity and when she died, her obituary was buried on page 52 of the newspaper in her local town, the Spokesman Review. She died poor and alone. When I was fifteen and learned about Mildred Bailey, I made it my mission to not only dedicate a song to her at every show I performed, but to have her inducted into the Jazz Hall of Fame at Lincoln Center. That hasn’t happened yet, but it’s still very much part of my personal and professional mission that this woman should be recognized, not only in the jazz community, but in native communities as well.
Listen to this interview with Julia Keefe on Thursday at noon on “Transformation Highway” with John Malkin on KZSC 88.1 FM / kzsc.org.
The Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band plays at 7pm on Feb. 20 at Kuumbwa Jazz Center, 320-2 Cedar St., Santa Cruz. Tickets: $26.25–$52.50. kuumbwajazz.org.
