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.
African Americans have moved forward to gain advancement in their communities. We as a native people are still struggling with our own civil rights and with equality on issues that many other communities take for granted, so definitely I think that there’s a lot of similarities. There’s uniqueness in the traditional aspect in the fact that we both come from tribal background and I think it’s important to remind folks who might have forgotten those things that there’s way more similarities than differences.
CT: Describe some of the struggles Native American communities face in the 21st century.
LITEFOOT: Well, as the United States of America rallies around Haiti right now and justifiably so, with all due respect to all the people that are suffering in Haiti right now, millions of dollars have been put towards helping those good people over there get the services that they need during this time. People have come out of the woodwork all across the United States in all facets, from athletes to celebrities to politicians and civic and political leaders. But right now as I’m speaking to you, the people on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota have no water. People in Pine Ridge South Dakota, as I’m having this interview with you, have no heat in their homes. So I guess we probably don’t have to go into much more detail than those two things right now. That conversation could last all day and tomorrow and probably the rest of this week into next week.
CT: As one of the few prominent Native American artists in the mainstream, do you feel pressure and responsibility to represent your cultural identity?
LITEFOOT: I think I would probably feel pressure to represent my culture and who I am as a Native person if I just really started to come into understanding of that right now. If I just started to realize I’m out here getting attention now as a mainstream artist you know, “I better not forget who I am as a person.” But fortunately, I think because of the way that I was raised and because of what has been important to me as a person, I’ve never not had that involved in my life.
CT: Why did you choose rap music as your medium of expression for these messages?
LITEFOOT: Rap music came to me because first I was a fan. I think equally with that it was very easy for me to write poetry and write words that just kind of flowed; it was never really hard for me. It was really my sister who was the one who wanted to sing. She wanted to be engaged in music and acting stuff and I was more into sports and athletics.
It’s crazy the way it turned out: She helped me actually to write a rap for one of her songs that she had put together. I told her that I didn’t want to do the rap, but I would write it for her and she got someone else to come in and perform it. At that time I had never recorded anything. Every rap or every song I’d ever written had stayed in my folder and notebook and that was about it. So I went in and the producer asked me to rap it so I did and he said, “Okay, well now say it again just a little bit more like this.” I did it and they said, “Thank you very much. You can chalk that up as your first rap in your record book.”
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.