Snotty Nose Rez Kids encourage Revelstoke youth to have courage to create

Snotty Nose Rez Kids sat down with students at Revelstoke Secondary School (RSS) Wednesday, Jan. 31 for a Q&A focusing on art, hip-hop and finding direction for your passions. 

The Q&A was in collaboration with Arts Revelstoke, which hosted Snotty Nose Rez Kids as part of their 2024 performance series. With Revelstoke Performing Arts Centre’s main stage hosted at the high school, Arts Revelstoke has collaborated with various artists and performers to host pre-show meet ups with students.

Dana Reaume, RSS’s learning support teacher and Stacie Byrne, Arts Revelstoke’s executive director co-led the Q&A before opening it up to students. For Reaume, the opportunity to provide students with the opportunity was an obvious one.

“I think demonstrating contemporary Indigenous music shows students what resilience and resistance can look like in a creative way,” Reaume told Revelstoke Mountaineer. “Hip-hop is so much more than just music, it’s oral history and a way of being in the world.”

Haisla Nation members Darren “Young D” Metz and Quinton “Yung Trybez” Nyce told the packed hall of roughly 180 students hip-hop was the obvious pathway for their creative expression when it came to sharing stories from and for their communities.

“My voice is my instrument, my weapon,” Nyce said when asked by Reaume why hip-hop was the musical avenue the duo focused on. “Hip-hop lets us tell our story the way it was meant to be told. I think there’s a lot of connection with native culture and hip-hop culture in general.”

The history of hip-hop as a venue of protest and storytelling within Black and Mexican communities in New York set the groundwork for the form to be a vehicle for truth telling and expression, Nyce explained.

“We both come from musical families,” Metz added. “Any instrument, they could play it. But that was taken away from us.”

Indigenous festivals, dances and other ceremonies were banned from being practiced in an 1895 addition to the Indian Act. Potlatches, a common practice throughout nations found along North America’s Pacific coastline, were banned from 1884 until 1951. But Metz explained to students that the elements of Hip Hop matched many of the cultural elements found within various Indigenous practices.

“If you think of the four elements of hip-hop, what are they?” Metz asked. “You have the B-boys, the MC, the DJ, then you have the graffiti artist. Not that much different from indigenous culture. MCs are our storytellers, DJ’s are our drummers and our singers. B-boys and B-girls, those are our dancers. West Coast dancers, powwow dancers, whatever it may be. The graffiti artist, we have our carvers and our painters. They really do go hand-in-hand.”

When asked what effect Snotty Nose Rez Kids’ music had on audiences and what they hoped it did, Nyce turned his attention to students in the audience and students back home in and around Kitimat and Kitamaat Village. 

He shared the story of returning to their old schools after a few years of touring and performing, where a guidance counsellor pulled them aside and shared how their music was helping connect Haisla Nation students together.

“‘What you guys are doing really changed the outlook of how the kids look at each other in school,’ she explained,” Nyce recalled. “That meant the world to us, something that inspired us to continue doing what we do.”

That focus on youth and empowering the next generations remains a theme in Snotty Nose Rez Kids’ future work.

“The future looking proud and real sacred as the Youth. Red future,” Metz rapped when asked from students to drop some bars. The lines were met with applause and shouts from students, and Nyce shared that the lines are from their upcoming album, Red Future.

“This right here? This is always so cool. Seeing you all accepting those lyrics and appreciating what we’re sharing.”

Student concern whether they were artistic enough to follow along in the work Snotty Nose Rez Kids does was quickly challenged by Metz and Nyce.

“I see a lot of artists out here,” Nyce said. ”Probably over half of you are artists, if not all. I think that we were all put here to create, in one form or another. We all have what it is within us to be able to do that.”

Creating isn’t the hardest part, Nyce added. Sharing one’s art and story to audiences you have no control over is the bigger battle.

“Once you start putting stuff into the world, making yourself vulnerable, that gets hard. And people can take however they feel about your music or your art, they can interpret it wrong. That was probably the hardest part, getting over people being able to criticize your music or your art for the way that they take it and just be okay with that.”

Still, neither Nyce or Metz regret being artists and emphasized that to students who were possibly getting cold feet at the thought of creating work to share.

“All the hardships that we faced over the years, the hardest part is having the courage to get started,” Metz said. ”It was just about growing from there, that was probably the hardest part.”