‘Rock the Rez’ camp gives Minnesota Native girls a place to play and be heard

For some Native youth, learning to play an instrument means more than making music — it’s an opportunity to explore their personal identity and expression.

Rock the Rez, a nonprofit Indigenous-led music camp offering arts and cultural education to Native adolescents, is coming to Minnesota this summer. The five-day camp blends song, ceremony and identity in a safe space where Indigenous girls, two-spirit, transgender and gender-diverse youth, ages 8 to 17, can feel free to fully belong.

“A lot of these girls have never felt welcome in a music classroom before, up until Rock the Rez,” said Jeannine Burnette, a camp volunteer and board member.

Rock the Rez, which has served the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations in South Dakota for the past eight years, will offer three camp sessions from June to August in Bemidji, the Lower Sioux Reservation in Morton and the Twin Cities.

The camp was founded in 2016 with the goal of music inclusivity and youth empowerment, aiming to provide music instruction and bolster cultural identity and confidence, said April Matson, executive director.

Girls, LGBTQ and two-spirit youth (who identify with both male and female gender roles) “have a voice that’s important to listen to, that they matter, that they’re going to make a difference in the world no matter what role they take on,” said Matson. “Continuing with that message year after year can only do good things.”

The program applies a grassroots solution to a systemic lack of music access among Native communities and removes potential barriers by providing free attendance, transportation and meals to all campers.

“Rock the Rez bends over backwards to accommodate every camper that attends,” said Burnette.

Across Minnesota, Indigenous youth face disproportionate barriers to accessing arts education.

According to 2023 data from the Minnesota Department of Education, 93% of American Indian students attend public schools. Yet few of those schools offer culturally relevant music instruction, according to a 2019 Minnesota Citizens for the Arts report.

Among educators nationwide, American Indian and Alaska Native educators make up 0.4% of the K-12 public school teaching workforce, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

With recent budget cuts in places like the St. Paul school district, where other programs have been prioritized over music and art, the gap is widening.

“There’s so many barriers, but at the heart of it is just there’s no Native people in music education,” said Burnette. “Therefore Native kids don’t feel safe in these spaces.”

Rock the Rez is the first time that many of the participants have entered a music space rooted in Native culture and run entirely by Indigenous community members, according to Matson.

The weeklong program weaves together modern instruments and traditional knowledge, with campers receiving music instruction each day — whether bass, guitar, drums, keys or vocals — alongside two culturally rooted workshops in areas such as plant medicine, beading and traditional language.

Over the five days, campers form bands, write their own songs and perform in front of friends and family at the end of the week.

Campers are encouraged to use their own styles and voices, according to Burnette. If they want to use a hand drum instead of a guitar, or sing in their Native language instead of English, they can. The camp prioritizes their choices, encouraging expression that feels personal rather than prescribed.

“The freedom and the power lies entirely with the campers,” said Burnette. “As a mentor, I’m just there to support their development.”

Volunteers follow the campers’ lead, supporting them as they set their own boundaries and define what expression looks and sounds like for them.

“They go to school and get told what to do all day long,” Matson said. “That’s not what we’re doing here.”

The camp helps bring youth out of their shell and shows them it’s OK to express themselves, said Dusty Nelson, a camp volunteer and board member. It provides them with a safe space to relax, be themselves and feel confident.

For some volunteers, the change in the campers is evident.

“It’s a week-long metamorphosis,” said Nelson. “They come in all cocooned up, holding themselves, and by the end they’re rock stars.”

Each session costs approximately $15,000 to host, with funding provided through a combination of grants and community fundraising, according to Matson. A large donor this year is Kith + Kin Chorus, a community choir based in the Twin Cities.

Every year the choir of 78 singers, ranging in age from 20 to the mid-70s, chooses a hyperlocal nonprofit for which to raise funds at its end-of-season concert through ticket sales and silent auction.

“When people are galvanized and brought together through song for something beyond yourselves, it’s just such a unifying and powerful thing,” said Rachel Ries, the chorus’ founder.

Over the course of seven seasons, Kith + Kin has raised more than $57,000 for various local organizations. This year’s concert, which takes place Saturday, is expected to raise more than $20,000 for Rock the Rez, according to Ries.

Volunteers and board members hope to see continued expansion of Rock the Rez in the years to come, and plan to continue cultivating safe, affirming spaces where participants can grow into women that are going to “rock the world” — one song, story and stage at a time.

“We hope to be a small piece of uplifting and showing people they do really matter, and they do have a voice and they have value,” said Matson. “And this is something we can do as a small organization to help with that.”