Collegiate Times

I didn’t really realize I was rapping the first day that I rapped and that it was going to be something that would be the beginning to many more things in my life. I’ve always been a fan of music and still to this day I am, so it wasn’t too hard for me to find that bridge. I just knew very much so that from the beginning I was going to definitely attack my journey in music as a Native person first and everything else second.

CT: Where do you see yourself going in the future and what would like to see for the Native American community?

LITEFOOT: If I could just limit it to one thing, I would like to see our people around the world understood and appreciated for what we’ve endured and at the same time recognized and given a place that we’re more than ready to earn in the world. To delete “used to” and “were” and “had” and “did” and replace those words with the current tense of “do” and “have” and “will” and “are” as opposed to what continues to be written in history books that eliminates us from modern society and reality today. We have so much to offer. We have so much that we’ve already offered the U.S. from day one, from the origins of the Constitution, to the food that probably 90 percent of people eat every night at their dinner table, to some of the greatest leaders and patriots that this world has ever known that go unrecognized on a daily basis to the world.

I think that if we can create understanding and if I can help build that bridge, then it will be one of the most important bridges that have ever been built in the history of our people. It’s possible. I truly believe that with every fiber of my being. If my life serves as nothing more than a catalyst for some Native person that is somewhere in an Indian country right now, or some young person no matter what race they are or where they come from to understand that they can achieve, that I’ve come from nothing and I’ve come from a lot of hardship and a very unique struggle and I’ve been able to be successful. We have many things that we can learn from each other and I think that that’s coming back into why I’m coming to Virginia Tech, to show that we truly all can accomplish more together than apart, that we have more commonalities and more similarities than we do discrepancies.

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