Collegiate Times

Describing Litefoot as a rapper is a bit like calling Oprah Winfrey just a talk-show host.

Indeed, the Cherokee-born actor and musician, familiar to many students as “Little Bear” from the film “The Indian in the Cupboard,” has released 12 albums over the past two decades in his award-winning “tribalistic-funk” style. What his discography doesn’t reveal, however, is the dozens of directions his career has taken — everything from motivational speaking tours across American reservations to creating his own clothing company.

Litefoot will be at Virginia Tech’s Haymarket Theater at 8 p.m. on Feb. 5 to deliver a speech titled, “Building Bridges Between Native Americans and African Americans.” The event is free of charge and will be followed by an autograph session.

The Collegiate Times spoke to Litefoot over the phone from his home in Seattle about Friday’s presentation and modern challenges facing Native American communities.

COLLEGIATE TIMES: Why do you think it’s important to build these bridges and what are you going to talk about in your speech?

LITEFOOT: It’s going to focus on the fact that together we can accomplish much more than remaining separate communities, that there’s much that we need to learn to understand each other, and that much of our plight mirrors the circumstances that we experience every single day and in some instances the history of our people. I think that there’s a lot that can come from uniting and looking at a lot of the same issues that we uniquely have in our own communities and understanding that they’re shared.

CT: Do you feel that both communities feel connection in a history of struggles in achieving success in America?

LITEFOOT: Between African American communities and Native American communities, I think maybe uniquely there are some struggles we both share. My community, the Cherokee nation of Oklahoma, did much in the way of trying to unite the African American folks into our own communities. ... We didn’t really subscribe to the fact that because you’re of a different skin color we have no need for you, which is something I think a lot of folks coming from there experience (on) a daily basis.

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A version of this article appeared in the Feb 4 issue of the Collegiate Times.