[crunching sound
of walking on snow]
§ [humming] §

- Wade: People practice music
and learn how to play music,

but, a lot of times
they're filling all the spaces with so much
and, and they're not
letting it breathe,
and in nature,
there's a lotta silence too.
And even when you hear
a bird song, there's a sound
and there's a lot of silence
in between.
§ [playing guitar] §

Posoh netaenewemakanak
mesek mawaw niw wiyak.
(Hello, all my relatives
and all present)
Maecetawok aeswihsiyan
Wiciwen Apis-Mahwaew.
(My Menominee name
is Walks With The Black Wolf.)
Wade Fernandez
mokoman eneq aeswihsiyan.
(My American name is
Wade Fernandez.)
Netotaem awaesaeh awew.
(I am of the Bear Clan.)
§ [playing guitar] §
Most of my inspiration,
I think, comes from
my homeland
where I grew up.
Even on the reservation, I
grew up away from the villages.
It was eight miles
from the nearest village,
and my neighbors were basically the trees and the animals,
and that's what I could see
from my parents' yard.
And I'd walk into the forest
and I'd sit down by the streams
or the rivers or the lakes
and when I started to bring
the instruments out there
and that was
a huge inspiration.
§ [singing in Menominee,
playing drum] §

§ [playing guitar] §
When I was a,
when I was a very young child,
I remember watching a movie
with my parents
and I don't know,
maybe I was four years old
or something, and
§ [strums guitar] §
you know, you hear
just something like that maybe
and it's like,
"Ah...
what is that?"
You know, and then...
§ [playing guitar] §

And that's enough,
that was enough
to start to say,
"I want to do that."
You know?
§ [playing guitar] §

§ [cords hitting the ground] §
As a musician,
like, if you try to
define yourself as a musician,
you compare yourself
to other people.
Any musician that stood out,
I felt like I wasn't good enough
unless I could play
as good as those people,
in any style of music.
And I finally grew out of that
by accepting who I was,
and I remember
even when I went to,
I went to school for music
for a little while
for a performance degree,
and I remember my, my teacher
got very angry one day.
He said, "After two and
a half years with you,
you still sound like
Wade Fernandez."
And then, I was like,
"Maybe I'm supposed to...
"That maybe that's who
I'm supposed to sound like,
Wade Fernandez."
§ [playing guitar] §

And I think that's the key
is that
we don't need to sound like anybody else,
we just have to find a way
to deliver what we have.

§ [playing
Native American flute] §
Coming from the
Menominee Reservation,

I have roots here that,
that come into the music
and I guess it gives it
some uniqueness,
but at the same time
there's also,
there's a mixture of blues,
rock, jazz,
country, folk,
flamenco,
whatever,
whatever I'm feeling.
§ [playing guitar and flute] §

My own cultural identity
is something I guess
that's hard to define.
It's easy for people to say,
"You're this and you're that..."
and it's easy for us to say,
"We are Menominee"
or "We are Mexican"
or "We are whatever,"
but if you go far back enough
it's, it's difficult to define.
Okay, you're Menominee
since this point.
Before that, you were
of the Copper Culture,
your ancestors.
Before that, what were you?

To really truly define myself,
I'm, I'm part of life,
I'm part of...
I'm part of
what everybody else is.
I have the same substance in me that the trees have.
I have the same substance
that the animals have.

We are all influenced
by what's around us.
For me, that was,
that was the forest.
And I think that
that inspired my music to...
have a little more space,
have a little more peace in it, as well.
§ Nicianosaeh,
(My child,) §
§ Whapi-Mahwaewsaeh
(Little White Wolf)
Maecewatok somekoh
(Creator smiles on you) §

- Wade: People practice music
and learn how to play music,