Black Belt Eagle Scout creates new composition for walks around Washington County’s Henry Hagg Lake

Katherine Paul is an Indigenous musician who performs as Black Belt Eagle Scout. The band’s most recent album, “The Land, The Water, The Sky,” draws inspiration from the landscape of the Pacific Northwest and Paul’s return to her home on the Swinomish Reservation in Washington after many years in Portland. Paul recently created a 45-minute “soundwalk” in partnership with Third Angle New Music. The composition is meant to be listened to on a walk around Henry Hagg Lake in Washington County.

Paul joins us to talk about the new project and her work with Black Belt Eagle Scout.

Note: Due to unforeseen circumstances, Black Belt Eagle Scout will not be able to perform at Hagg Lake on Saturday, May 31. Oregon singer-songwriter Laura Gibson will now perform the live set to celebrate the launch of the soundwalk.

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Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Katherine Paul is an Indigenous Coast Salish musician who performs as Black Belt Eagle Scout. The band’s most recent album, “The Land, The Water, The Sky,” drew inspiration from the landscape of the Pacific Northwest and Paul’s return to her home on the Swinomish Reservation in Washington after many years in Portland. Paul’s new work is just as connected to the land and invites listeners to experience that connection for themselves. It’s a 45-minute “soundwalk” in partnership with Third Angle New Music, meant to be listened to on a walk around Henry Hagg Lake in Washington County.

Black Belt Eagle Scout will perform a free show at 4:00 p.m. at the lake this coming Saturday. Katherine Paul joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.

Katherine Paul:  Hello, thanks so much for having me.

Miller:  What was your starting point for this new project, this “soundwalk?”

Paul:  I used a lot of loops. I actually use a loop station when I write my regular music. So I went back to that this time. I just started playing guitar, and I would loop the guitar over and over again. Some of the parts on the soundscape are my live looping and recording what was happening, and then weaving it all together. But I started with the loop station.

Miller:  Let’s have a listen to part of it. Then we can talk more about the connection between music and land for this project and for your life. But let’s have a listen.

[“Soundwalk” music and narrating voice, then continuing as background]

Miller:  Had you been to Hagg Lake before you started work on this?

Paul:  I hadn’t actually, but I have a lot of friends who had been there and my husband had spent a good time, when he was growing up, at Hagg Lake. So it was interesting going there to see this area for the first time and to picture what it was like. Obviously, what we’re listening to is very much like lightness, I think, but also has this Militron dark with it too.

Miller:  Can you describe what struck you about the land and the water when you went for the first time or perhaps went back?

[“Soundwalk” music fades from background]

Paul:  I was interested in the lightness and how airy things were, walking around and seeing what this area is now, and seeing that there is still this lightness in this place. A lot of the guitar parts were very like [singing] “da, da, da, da.” I tried to envision sounds that would mimic when grass would go within the wind, or how delicate sometimes the water can flow along a creek, or even if something falls down from a tree onto the ground, like the lightness of that.

I took some field recordings as well when I was out there and listened to mostly what the land had to say. I listened to the wind and I listened to what the area is now exhibiting through how it sounds. And I tried to play along with that. I tried to play along with the field recordings and putting them in. I also did some spoken word type of thoughts when I was there of what I was feeling.

Miller:  This is not a natural body of water. This is not a lake that has existed for thousands or hundreds of thousands of years. It’s an artificial lake that was created just 50 years ago when a dam was put in for irrigation and drinking water for folks nearby. How much was that on your mind as you were thinking about a soundscape, the fact that this is a piece of Western control of nature?

Paul:  I definitely was thinking about it when I was there. But also, I was realizing too that even though it is this creation, there is still this land that comes up around it. And I wasn’t in the middle of it. I didn’t go out on a boat or swim out. I was in the surroundings looking with this peripheral vision, sort of witnessing this area and how it is currently.

I did find this lightness. I did find the land still coming out and saying, “we’re here, we have these sounds and we have these feelings.” That’s the connection that I was feeling to it, when I was there. And even when I was going through some of those creeks, there was one part of it where I just sat under a cedar tree. I was looking around and I was envisioning how things change, and how the roots of a cedar tree are still very long and are still very present – they still exist.

Miller:  You are now getting to be in veteran music maker territory, with EP and various full-length albums. But I imagine that for most of those songs, you put them out in the world and you have no idea how, where or in what circumstances people will be listening to them. In this case, you’re making music that is intended to be taken in a very specific place, certainly, but maybe even way. Did that change the way you thought about music, that you have a very different version of an audience?

Paul:  No, it didn’t cause I was even thinking I should put this out on a tape and listen to it. [Laughs]

Miller:  Oh, so it’s both. In some ways, it’s like all the other music you make and it can also be used as a soundwalk?

Paul:  Yeah, yeah. I was like, “oh, I really like this.” So I was thinking that it is great that they asked me to do this. But I also really want to put this out for other people to hear. It really was really fun to do. I had never, besides a really long time ago, recorded my own music by myself. I would always go into a studio. So this was the first time that I had spent in my own little studio, diving in, doing the mixing, the editing and putting it all together. And it was a really interesting and beautiful experience to me, because it was almost like an inaugural experience of me shifting how I create music and what I do. Even though you called me this veteran, this is the first time I have done really anything like this.

Miller:  That is fascinating because it does seem like the reverse order that many musicians move in. You start with bedroom music or recording on your own eight-track. Then you make it big in some way, and then you get the engineer and the studio. In some ways you’re going in the reverse.

Paul:  Yeah, that was a really nice and humbling feeling as well, because I had to look up so many things of what … how to record when I was doing it.

Miller:  I wonder if we can go back in time a little bit? It’s the first time that you and I have spoken. You’ve been involved with music listening and music making for decades. How did it first show up in your life?

Paul:  Music making first showed up in my life when I really discovered the piano, when I was a kid. I really loved how the piano sounded and how the notes sounded. My parents had gotten me this really big upright piano. I realized I loved classical music. I just wanted to have music all around me. And I come from a musical family. My dad is a cultural singer and my heritage is through cultural songs like canoe singing and powwow singing. So I think that I was attracted to how beautiful certain notes can sound.

Then, everything changed after that. I realized I wanted to pursue music and learn other instruments like guitar and drums.

Miller:  When it came to popular music, was there a division in your mind between being a fan and being somebody who could actually make it?

Paul:  Huh. That’s an interesting question. I think I definitely knew that I wanted to play music and I didn’t really know that you could do it as a profession until I started working at a music venue. After college, I started working at Mississippi Studios and then saw that you could have this as a career. And I thought you just play for fun and have it as a hobby. But no, there’s a possibility of having music be your career and your path forward in your life.

Miller:  My understanding is that at that time, and probably to an extent today, there are not a great number of very visible queer Indigenous artists making music. Did that impact your perception of how much of a space there was for you in music?

Paul:  Yes and no. I feel like, yes, when I was growing up, I didn’t see a lot of people that looked like me who had the same identity as me. But I had a lot of friends playing music who were just as encouraging to me, that wanted to play music with me, that were pushing me to continue playing guitar or to continue playing drums. So even though there wasn’t that full spectrum visibility, I think there was still this inkling inside of me and within my community that gave me this encouragement and support to continue playing.

Miller:  I want to zoom forward to what led you to leave Portland a couple years into the pandemic. Why did you leave?

Paul:  I left for a couple of reasons. It was a pandemic and there was a lot of stuff going on that year. I just really felt called to come home. I wanted to come home to where I grew up. It’s really beautiful here. And although Portland is really beautiful, I lived right next to Mount Tabor, I was really craving the water in the islands and being near my family. I think that was the real big thing. I wanted to come home to my family.

Miller:  Let’s listen to a little bit of the first track from your latest album. This track is called “My Blood Runs Through This Land.”

[“My Blood Runs Through This Land” by Katherine Paul playing]

I know you’re watching me

I know it’s hard to meet you

Waking up when the sun is dark

I want to see the peaceful light but

I know it’s hard to be here

Might as well once or twice

And I’m waking up in the dead of night

I want to see my natural light but

I know you’re watching me

I know it’s hard to see

When you’re waking up is, light shining

Wanna see the peaceful light but

I don’t know what you mean well

I don’t know who you see and

Waking up is light shining

Wanna see the peaceful light

[Music fades out]

Miller:  This, again, is “My Blood Runs Through This Land” from my guest Katherine Paul’s most recent album, “The Land, The Water, The Sky” by Black Belt Eagle Scout.

What has it been like to reconnect to that land as an adult?

Paul:  Really nice. I’ve been able to [have] a wider identity feeling, I guess, of being an adult and being around areas that I knew when I was growing up. But having this deeper sense of knowledge, of having independence and going wherever I want to go as an adult. Exploring more of where I grew up … I’ve had more time and space to have this connection and this alone time with the environment in my homelands. Whereas, when I was a kid, you’d be with your parents or whoever was hanging out with you, because someone was watching you. Yeah.

Miller:  Katherine Paul, thanks so much for joining us.

Paul:  Thanks.

Miller:  That’s Katherine Paul. She recently created a 45-minute “soundwalk” that people can listen to as they walk around Henry Hagg Lake in Washington County. She’ll be performing there, a free concert, this coming Saturday at 4pm. Her most recent full-length album is “The Land, The Water, The Sky.”

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