Category: Entertainment

Entrepreneur Steve Antry is also the founder of the Indian Nations Blues Association (INBA) based in Tulsa, OK. Steve Antry’s interest in blues and Native American culture and history are the reasons he began the group.

INBA’s main mission is to share the message of the blues through music, education and scholarships to young Native American Blues artists.. However, the group also highlights the contributions of Native Americans to this genre of music.

One of the central discussions of blues is related to its origins. While research points to the African-American community as the origin of blues, there are also other groups with significant influence on the genre.

Counting back several centuries, researchers point to four or five groups that interacted with each other. The French, English, African, Native American, and sometimes the Spanish all inhabited the colonies and what would become the US-with each giving and taking from each culture. More specifically, the Native American diaspora reflects how this group could have easily been adopted and interacted with the tribal groups in the regions.

Two arguments point to this conclusion. For one, a unique aspect of the Native American consciousness is the idea of tribal connection, which is not based on race but adoption. For example, a person might appear to be Native American but not have tribal status, and alternatively, a person might appear as they belong to the American majority and have status simply because his/her birth mother was Native American or through adoption. Then, there is the whole idea of the ubiquity of American slavery, which included slave-owning Native American tribes.

However, there is actual proof of Native American connection to the music in Mardi Gras during slavery. While African-Americans were not allowed to participate in the celebration, Native Americans were. However, they did so performing music with language similar to a patois or language from the African coast.