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  • Hi, my name is Emchreska, and my name is Cyrus, and we are interviewing Ty today. Hello everyone, my name is Ty.

  • I'm from the Oneida and the Ojibwe nations, and I am Eagle Clan. When did you start playing music and start dancing? So I started dancing and telling stories from the time I was born in northern Wisconsin, in the lands of the Anishinaabe people. People where I come from, we use different parts of the animal to create very beautiful, adorned bags. What is the bag made out of? The bag is made out of deer hide.

  • This type of material that I'm wearing, the different colors, that's porcupine quills. I definitely would look at a bag like this and be like, "That person is Anishinaabe." How come some of these symbols are so important? So some of these symbols are important because they preserve culture and stories.

  • Look, there's a thunderbird, which is a symbol of power. And in Anishinaabe culture, there are different stories about thunderbirds protecting humans from things that live under the water. People tell their aunties, their cousins, their grandchildren stories.

  • These symbols ripple out, and so everything has a meaning. How come you're wearing these clothes and why is it important to your performance? I wear this on special occasions.

  • So today I was thinking, "Wow, I'm going to the Met, I'm going to tell these stories, I'm going to make new friends with people. I have to dress in a way where the clothes that I'm wearing feel like home to me." Out of the performance today, what was one thing that you were like, "Oh yeah"? Probably when you use the hoops, like you attach them to your body and then the colors, like the black, white, yellow, and red. They all sort of just reminded me of the bag, your culture, and how they passed it down from generation to generation. Those hoops are so cool because with that dance or story you can make symbols come to life. Thank you Ty.

  • Thank you Jackson.

  • Thank you both. My name is Recheska.

  • My name is Cyrus.

  • And we are signing off from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And then, yeah, shake it like this.

Hi, my name is Emchreska, and my name is Cyrus, and we are interviewing Ty today. Hello everyone, my name is Ty.

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