What If You Fly? Shawnee Kish Answers with Every Note

From the very first note of ‘Take Me Home’ on Shawnee Kish’s new album, Chapter 1, I felt my heart beat different. Not just with the music, but the knowing. That first wave of awe, followed immediately by a deep sense of nostalgia, like coming home to something I didn’t know I missed until I heard it again.

Shawnee Kish’s voice is power wrapped in familiarity. It carries the soul of country legends like Wynonna Judd and Reba McEntire, but also the strength of the women behind the drums at powwows, the aunties whose harmonies you feel in your bones. That duality? That’s the point. That’s the gift.

Because Kish’s Chapter 1 is so much more than a Country/Americana album, it’s a love letter to everything we’ve been told we couldn’t be. A declaration that Indigenous people not only belong in these genres, but we’ve always been part of their heartbeat.

A proud Two-Spirit Mohawk artist and winner of CBC’s Searchlight in 2020, Kish doesn’t separate the traditional from the contemporary. She threads them together, refusing to dilute who she is to fit someone else’s idea of authenticity.

Too often, Native artists are told to choose: be “real Indian” or be relevant. Ironically, the “real Indian” they want us to be is a far cry from authentic, as they aren’t rooted in who we are as Indigenous people, but in the tropes created to caricaturize and dehumanize us. Kish doesn’t entertain that nonsense. Her music is proof that we can be all of who we are, and that our identities as contemporary and traditional peoples aren’t contradictions, they’re continuums.

Blood, remembers / Love knows no limits / The meaning of the spirit / Fire, feet don’t fail me now / Freedom to claim back / To the place / We find our way home – ‘Two Spirits’

That knowing is not just resistance but medicine.

Chapter 1 is what Indigenous joy, healing, and identity sound like when we refuse to be told who we should be, when we say no to the binary. When we remember that the freedom to exist fully, as we are, as we’ve always been, isn’t a new idea. It’s an ancient one we’re finally able to live out loud.

While Country music is known for its heartbreak, for its love of the past, Kish uses it to speak to the present and future. She acknowledges struggle, but doesn’t center it. There’s no trauma porn here, no need to prove our pain to be heard. Chapter 1 is rooted in healing, resilience, and radical self-love.

And that might be the most revolutionary act of all.

This album is about owning our stories, saying yes, we’ve been through it, but we are still here and still dreaming.

Kish’s vocals? Unforgettable and Powerful. Her range and presence doesn’t just pull you in, it insists you sit with it. Her voice demands to be heard, just like our stories do. It’s the sound of survival, of thriving, of a people whose song never ended, even when the world tried to silence it.

The track “What if You Fly” captures everything Chapter 1 stands for:

There ain’t no harm / Darling / You’re born to survive / What if you fall / What if you fly

That lyric alone becomes a whisper in the back of your mind every time you doubt yourself.

And that’s what Kish leaves us with: possibility.

She reminds us that we are not defined by loss or trauma, we are defined by our ability to hope, to love, to imagine, and to rise.

In a world that has tried again and again to silence Indigenous voices, Chapter 1 is a refusal. It’s a sonic uprising. It’s what happens when we stop asking for permission and start taking up the space that was always ours.