With November being Native American Heritage month Friendship Commanders bring awareness and show solidarity for indigenous communities, with their recent song honoring the life of Stonechild Chiefstick, a 39 year-old Chippewa Cree man who was part of a Suquamish Tribal community in Washington state, and was in killed in 2019.
Stonechild, which premiered on D//E last month, now becomes paired to a wonderful visual shot at Exit In, a historic Nashville venue, starring the band (Buick Audra, Jerry Roe) and Austin Strobel (Shawnee/Cherokee), and directed by the duo's own Jerry Roe.
Jerry Roe states about the new video: "Buick wrote such a great song in that, if you didn't know the specifics of the story or Stonechild's murder, you would still get the correct set of feelings, melancholy, and grandness that her words and thoughts about Stonechild intended to create. We wanted the 'narrative' part of the video to get the same feelings across too. I feel like there's a lot of confusion and displacement in his death, and his life was stolen from him by the colonizers much in the same way the land was stolen from his ancestors; with ego, malice, bigotry and a mindset of supremacy. I don't subscribe to the belief that you're in a better place when you die, or that there even is an afterlife, so I wanted to depict a sort of inbetween. An otherworldly place where he acknowledges that his mortality has been taken from him and he can peacefully let go.
"As for the performance shots, Exit In was a logical place for us because we love that venue and it's served as a touchpoint for our band at a vital turning point a few years back. The family that owns and runs it are on the correct side of things in local and state politics and are allies in general against the monopolization of live music and the destruction of local communities by developers, a threat that we all face with increased intensity in the current climate."