Katherine Paul of Black Belt Eagle Scout is Decolonizing the Party

Credit: Sarah Cass

You know how when you go to a show, the musicians like to name drop your city and the crowd goes wild? I always imagine they do this to remind themselves where they are, in a haze of tour bus exhaustion and sweaty bars.

When I go see Katherine Paul’s project Black Belt Eagle Scout in Chicago, she opens her set asking if any “Indigenous or people of color folks want to come to the front,” beckoning with her hands. “Thank you for having us on Miami land,” she says quietly, before transporting the Midwestern audience to the overcast of the Pacific Northwest with tracks from her two albums, this year’s At the Party with My Brown Friends and Mother of My Children, released in 2017 and re-issued last year on Saddle Creek.

Katherine Paul, who goes by KP, grew up on the Swinomish Indian Reservation in the Puget Sound region of Washington state. On and offstage, she’s outspoken about uplifting fellow Indigenous folks, people of color and queer folks. “It’s a thing that I think more people should be doing,” she told me over the phone, a few weeks before I saw Black Belt Eagle Scout open for Devendra Banhart in the city now known as Chicago (a name that came from the Miami-Illinois word chicagoua, a name for a wild onion; Chicago has the third largest urban Native American population in the country, with over one hundred tribal nations represented). After this land acknowledgement, the crowd cheered, but no one seemed to shift around. Towards the end of the set, she asked, “How many Indigenous people are in the audience?” A few people clapped and cheered; one person yelled “You rep us good!” 

Black Belt Eagle Scout sees KP embracing the creative freedom and control of being a solo artist, especially after navigating the predominantly white, male and straight music world. She honed her skills playing in a bunch of bands (including Genders and Forest Park) in Portland. She moved there in 2007 to attend Lewis and Clark College, after also playing in Portland’s Rock ‘N’ Roll Camp for Girls, and learned the business side of things working for Mississippi Studios. In high school, she’d drive her parents’ car to nearby town Anacort to catch DIY shows. 

The intimacies of place and sense of community among fellow Indigenous and queer people and people of color are integral parts of her music. Within the expansiveness of her melancholy sound, she creates room for intense grief and heartbreak, and personal as well as generational trauma—and comes back to the ways the power of friendships and relationships ground her.

“I wanted [the new album] to sound loud yet also quiet at the same time. The main goal was just for the sound to be very lush, very full and very warm,” she said. This abundance is also reflected in her artist name, which was floating around when she was playing in a different band, and she asked if she could use it for her solo project. “To me it symbolizes trying to find your strength in what you’re doing, ‘cause Black Belt and Eagle Scout [are] the highest you can go,” she said.

KP plays every instrument herself on her two albums; during the show, she plays both guitar and drums with her backing band. She flips her short black hair back and forth as each song builds, prioritizing chunky guitar riffs and KP’s pensive, deep vocal style that spreads over each song like long clouds on the horizon. 

She writes in her artist statement that the party is life in general: “I happen to be at the party with my brown friends—Indigenous, Black, POC—who always have my back while we walk throughout this event called life.”

“We will always sing,” she repeats on the opening track, “At the Party,” backed by a driving drumming beat, a reference to the resiliency of Indigenous communities. A track from her debut album, “Indians Never Die”, was written while witnessing the brutal violence against Indigenous water protectors fighting the Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota, as well as seeing gentrification in Portland.

She also wrote that the album might be about her anthropology degree, by which she means “studying the ways in which people relate to one another.”

“I feel what I’m like with you,” she sings on “Going to the Beach with Haley,” about fellow musician Haley Heynderickx (whose album I Need to Start a Garden made Audia’s 10 Albums We Loved In 2018). The fuzzy guitar solo lifts the listener into the physical expansiveness and emotional closeness of friendship, mirroring the romance of a road trip. 

On Black Belt Eagle Scout’s first album, “Soft Stud,” probably her most popular song, and what she called her “queer anthem,” processed the difficulties of an open relationship and breakup: “I know you're taken/Need you want you”. These songs tend to feel more contained, relying less on elongated notes.

You can still hear the aching frustrations of queer desire on songs like “Half Colored Hair” and “My Heart Dreams”: “You’re my dream/I need you/Screaming loudly/Screaming softly too,” she sings on the latter track.

“Being queer is such a big thing for many people … and I don’t know if there’s any one way of showing that,” she said, when I asked how she sees queerness reflected in her lyrics. 

Overall, she doesn’t consider herself a lyricist. “[Lyrics] sort of just come out when I’m creating a song on guitar. I’ll end up keeping them just because there’s something about that to me.”

This raw process might explain how all of her songs carry an openness and vulnerability to them. Similar to the ways she feels strongly about speaking out for Indigenous folks, she wants to be open about her queerness. “I need to be open about it, and hopefully that’ll just create more space for other people to be represented.”

She’s certainly not alone in fighting for decolonization and normalizing the experiences of people of color and queer folks, in indie rock or beyond.

“There are a lot of really amazing and beautiful talented Indigenous, queer, Two Spirit artists and creators out there and their work deserves to be known. Creating space together is just the beginning of creating space and opening of doors for other people,” she said.

She mentioned her friend Sasami (the musician Sasami Ashworth, who used to play with Cherry Glazerr), said something like, “Girls to the front, women to the front, that sort of thing is not revolutionary, it’s been happening for a long time. I think in indie music, though, people know that, but I don’t know if people are … centering Indigenous people and people of color.” 

She tries to do the land acknowledgement at every show, but sometimes it goes over people’s heads, or they just miss it while grabbing a beer. To make Indigenous land more visible, she has plans to make a zine about the Indigenous land she travels to on tour, as well as offer resources. “When we go and play other places, I’m visiting, just as much as all the other colonizers are,” she said. She also posts videos on Instagram asking her fellow indie rock musicians to show up for Indigenous artists, and all of her music videos are also directed by trans, queer or genderfluid Indigenous artists.

Music was embedded in her upbringing; her family taught her Coast Salish music, drumming and jingle dress dance, and when she goes back to the reservation, the tight-knit community is proud of her. In a lot of ways, she’s paying this forward. 

Before playing “You’re Me and I’m You,” the final song on the new album, she tells the audience it’s about her close relationship with her mother, who has always been supportive of her and her music. Her mother, Iñupiat (a Native Alaskan people), was separated from her family in a time known as the “60’s scoop” when Native American children were being separated from their families by state child welfare and private adoption agencies. This crisis led to the passing of the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978, which set federal requirements for adoption, though much of the generational trauma has not yet been healed.

“She’s had to work extra hard to find out about who she is and her culture,” she tells the audience. “This one’s for her.”

Catch Black Belt Eagle Scout on her fall/winter tour; At the Party with My Brown Friends was released in late August.