Black Belt Eagle Scout (aka Portland-based Katherine Paul) is an indigenous queer musician whose debut album, Mother of My Children, is about “grief and love for people, but also about being a native person in what is the United States today.” Mother of My Children is out September 14th via Saddle Creek. After sharing lead single, “Soft Stud,” and then the brilliant “Just Lie Down”, Black Belt Eagle Scout now presents “Indians Never Die.” Directed by queer Diné Evan James Atwood, the “Indians Never Die” video was filmed on the ancestral lands of the Chinook, Chinnuk Wawa, and Tillamook tribes.

As Standing Rock was happening, many people in Paul’s life were coming together and fighting for the most basic thing necessary to sustain human life: water. “Our treaty rights weren’t being honored,” Paul laments, “Imagine hearing on the news that the government doesn’t support you as a human being and never has. ‘Indians Never Die’ is a call out to colonizers and those who don’t respect the Earth; they don’t care about the water, they don’t care about how they are destroying what is around them. Indigenous people are the protectors of this land. Indians never die because this is our land that we will forever protect in the present and the afterlife.”

Paul grew up in a small Indian reservation, the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, surrounded by family focused on native drumming, singing, and arts. From an early age, Paul was singing and dancing at powwows with one of her strongest memories at her family’s own powwow, called the All My Relations Powwow. Paul reminisces, “When I was younger, my only form of music was through the songs my ancestors taught the generations of my family. Singing in our language is a spiritual process and it carries on through me in how I create music today.” With the support of her family and a handful of bootleg Hole and Nirvana VHS tapes, Paul taught herself how to play guitar and drums as a teenager. In 2007, she moved to Portland, Oregon to attend college and get involved with the Rock’n’Roll Camp for Girls eventually diving deep into the city’s music scene playing guitar and drums in bands while evolving her artistry into what would later become Black Belt Eagle Scout.

Mother of My Children is a life chapter gently preserved. The access listeners have to such vulnerability feels special and generous.

Mother of My Children Tracklist:
1. Soft Stud
2. Indians Never Die
3. Keyboard
4. Mother of My Children
5. Yard
6. I Don’t Have You In My Life
7. Just Lie Down
8. Sam, A Dream