Frances Densmore spent fifty years carrying recording equipment into Indigenous communities. Between 1907 and 1954, she captured more than 2,500 songs on wax cylinders for the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology. Ojibwe. Sioux. Mandan. Hidatsa. Tohono O’odham. Ho-Chunk. The justification was preservation β€” the ethnographers believed the cultures were vanishing, so they recorded the music and took it to Washington.

The songs went out. Into archives. Into institutions. Into the collections of people who didn’t sing them. The communities that made the music didn’t hold the copyright. The Smithsonian did.

That was the direction for 150 years. Out.

Tyler Free-LaMere is twenty-one years old, an enrolled member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, and the first Winnebago citizen ever named a National Endowment for the Arts composer fellow. The composition that earned it was written for her mother Michelle’s Ho-Chunk dual-language immersion classroom at Winnebago elementary school. It premiered at a spring 2025 school program. It was published in October 2025. It is based on an Algonquin creation story about music. The lyrics are about acceptance and Indigenous pride.

The direction is in.

The composition is designed so any tribe can adapt the words into their own language. Educators can reformat it for contemporary styles. It is available across Turtle Island β€” from Mohican communities in the northeast to Diné in the southwest. Free-LaMere retains royalties from sales. The composer’s name stays on the work.

That last detail carries the weight of a century and a half. Indigenous music was historically recorded without consent, distributed without attribution, and copyrighted by the anthropologists and educators who collected it. Densmore’s cylinders sit in the Smithsonian. The communities that sang those songs have been fighting repatriation efforts ever since. Free-LaMere’s composition reverses the mechanism. The music goes into classrooms. The rights stay with the composer. The language stays with the people.

She joins three other Indigenous composers who have received NEA recognition: Louis Ballard, Quapaw and Cherokee, widely regarded as the father of Native American classical composition. Brent Michael Davids, Mohican Nation, selected alongside Leonard Bernstein in the NEA’s “American Masterpieces” project. Raven Chacon, Diné, who in 2022 became the first Native American composer to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music. Four composers. Across the entire history of the NEA.

Four.

Free-LaMere is two-spirit. At seventeen, she made a TikTok video about LGBTQ struggles in Indian Country that received over a million views and pressured the Winnebago Tribal Council to reverse a same-sex marriage ban on the reservation. The council had voted to prohibit same-sex marriage in March 2022. By April, they voted overwhelmingly to recognize it. A teenager with a phone changed tribal law.

The family carries the pattern. Her great-uncle was Frank LaMere, a Winnebago activist and seven-time delegate to the Democratic National Convention who spent eighteen years fighting to shut down the liquor stores in Whiteclay, Nebraska β€” a town of twelve people with four liquor stores that sold 4.9 million cans of beer a year, almost entirely to residents of the neighboring Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where alcohol is banned. LaMere tried protests, legal challenges, treaty arguments. In 2017, the Nebraska Supreme Court rejected the store owners’ bids to reopen. He died in 2019. The stores stayed closed.

Her mother Michelle teaches in the Ho-Chunk dual-language immersion classroom where the composition will live. She led a humanitarian effort to Minneapolis during immigration enforcement sweeps, gathering donations with Tyler. Keely Purscell, a longtime Winnebago leader who has known Tyler since childhood, watched her figure out notes on a ukulele before she could read. Purscell described the composition as an advancement comparable to reversing the direction of missionary hymn translations.

That comparison is precise. Missionaries translated Christian hymns into Indigenous languages as a tool of assimilation β€” the music went in, but it carried someone else’s story. Free-LaMere’s composition goes in carrying an Indigenous story, in Indigenous languages, with Indigenous ownership. Same direction. Opposite content. The reversal isn’t loud. It’s structural.

At the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Free-LaMere received death threats. The administration, by her account, didn’t adequately respond. She transferred to Little Priest Tribal College on the Winnebago reservation. She worked with the Hoocak Academy in Wisconsin to ensure cultural accuracy in the composition. She is finishing her undergraduate degree at the University of South Dakota. She is considering law school.

Cindy Melton Krafka, a UNO adjunct professor in Native American Studies, advocated for a Nebraska Native American student composer to an NEA representative. She arranged a powwow visit. “We need a culture bearer,” Krafka told the Flatwater Free Press. “She came in and blew them away because she knows her culture. She knows her language.”

Skye Junginger, a UNO professor and Indigenous composer descended from the Santee Dakota Nation, said the fellowship “signals increasing recognition of Native voices in areas where they have traditionally been underrepresented.”

Underrepresented. Four composers in the history of the NEA. That’s not underrepresentation. That’s a door that was mostly closed, being opened by the people knocking on it.

The composition sits in a classroom in Winnebago, Nebraska. It will sit in classrooms it hasn’t reached yet. It carries a creation story about where music comes from. The composer is twenty-one, two-spirit, survived death threats, changed a law with a phone, comes from a family that shut down a predatory industry and ran donations to immigrant families, and wrote a song for her mother’s students.

For 150 years, the direction was out. Someone took the songs and put them in a building in Washington.

The direction is in now. The songs go home.

// NEON BLOOD

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