Adopted by a warm and loving white Catholic family in Worthington, Minnesota, it wasn’t until Paul Summers—the Minnesota recipient of Arts Midwest’s inaugural Midwest Culture Bearers Award—was 38 that he discovered his Native American heritage.
In 1993, he reunited with family from South Dakota’s Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. It was then that Summers’ music practice clicked into place with what would become his life’s mission: crafting a contemporary version of Native American music, tugging at the strings of reconciliation in the process.
“I was in a lull musically,” he says of that time. Afterwards, “the floodgates opened back up. I stepped back into the world of music with a vengeance.” He named his Native American cultural rock group Brulé after his tribe, and got to work.
Over the course of 30 years, what started as a one-man show blossomed into a cast of contributors, from lighting designers to sound engineers. Brulé dancers have included all three of Summers’ granddaughters as well as cousins, nieces, and nephews. However, it’s Summers’ daughter, Nicole, a flutist, and his son, Shane, who taught himself guitar in college, who form Brulé’s core group.
“I learned along the way that there were two ways to go,” Summers says. “We could have gone big-time hard rock… because there were a lot of agents out there who wanted to take what we had started and exploit it commercially.”
But Summers took the advice of his elders to heart. They gave him their blessings to take their musical traditions into the modern world but cautioned him that if he broke his spiritual connection, his journey would be without the spirits’ assistance. Summers took the less lucrative high road. “We knew it was going to be more difficult, and it has been,” he says. “But following the path that we did, we have been able to influence the younger generations,” which is why he undertook the work of performing for Worthington’s school district in May 2023.
There’s no circuit for performing for school kids—“no booking agents, no managers, there’s not much money in it,” he says. “You have to do it yourself,” which he did. Summers and company wrangled grant funding and worked with leaders across the district to orchestrate the two-day event.
Not only did the performance highlight the value of cultural heritage to a diverse audience, but Brulé’s work overall “falls under the category of reconciliation and the healing process that our country still has not gone through,” Summers says. As an Indigenous person who grew up in a white world, “I am a part of both sides and would like to see a peaceful resolution to where we are today.” Plus, he says, “the kids pick up on it almost more than grownups do.”
Paul Summers is a 2024 recipient of the Midwest Culture Bearers Award, which celebrates and financially supports the work of Midwest culture bearers and folk arts practitioners.
The Midwest Culture Bearers Award is supported by Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies with additional support from the National Endowment for the Arts for project management.