For Kite, composition is not a singular practice but necessarily collective. And her scores, both text-based and geometric, have Lakota origins, origins centered in Lakota symbology, symbology that is based on tens of thousands of years of Lakota ontology, science, astronomy, philosophy, and theory. To be clear, the work of Kite and the Lakota thinkers who predate her, is not a de-colonial practice, it is a non-colonial one. These practices have survived the ruptures of colonialism and their present insidious practice in part because they are highly malleable and based on deep-seated understandings and ways of being in the world honed over millennia.

For Kite, the development of a score often begins from the “Lakota Shape Kit” developed by Sadie Red Wing from Lakota symbols, used in a collaborative workshop where Kite shares some of the deeper meaning behind these shapes. The commissioning music ensembles then relate to these shapes through creating representations of their personal dreams; and dreams figure into the playing of the scores as well, musicians are often instructed to play until “a dream-like state is reached.”

There is also an ethos of self-determination at the basis of these scores for the musician. Kite’s “is a linguistic approach; these symbols have meaning not just form and not just sound.’ “These are semiotic symbols,” she relays, “they have to develop meaning for the musician” and this development of meaning is a necessary part of developing and performing the score. This is not the usual way that composers work—Kite’s formal training is as a composer, artist, and scholar. She is interested in deemphasizing the single composer as an author through this collaborative process with her players. There is a normalization of structures and roles in classical music, oftentimes with firm divisions between who is playing, who is composing, and who is conducting the work.

Kite is more interested in developing a new, collective language, one centered on the linguistic act of creating a shared symbology and interpretation of these symbols. Kite also notes that “classical notation is often trying to achieve an ‘ideal’ for a score.” That is, the way that the composition sounds, is performed, and interpreted. She’s not interested in this formal rigidity as her rules follow different priorities, this is the basis of Indigenous self-determination, something deeply rooted in Lakota political action, particularly via the Occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969 under a test of the Lakota Treaty of Fort Laramie. This sparked the Self-Determination Era for American Indian people and is another precursor for Kite’s practice.

Kite’s geometric compositions have also found their way onto factory tanned deer hides. The hides are stitched, sometimes with conductive thread made of silver, copper, and gold. More recently, they are carefully beaded and appliqued. The compositions are developed from this same set of Lakota symbols. Because the thread is conductive, these works imply that if hooked up and amplified, they might emit sound—Kite is interested in this potential, the potential for sound, the potential that they be played, that they be performed. And when encountering them, it’s important to remember that these aren’t simply objects of visual contemplation, they desire a different kind of engagement as they have another kind of agency. In this state, they are waiting, in another, they might be singing.

That these works exist on hides is no accident. Hides are the customary way that Lakota people have documented their histories, including the extraordinary (and extrajudicial) acts of violence and deliberate genocide by the United States government that they call “the Indian Wars.”

These weren’t really wars, these were the last stand that Lakota took to defend what little was left of their traditional territory. For the US Government and its cavalries, this was a part of Manifest Destiny, from their perspective, the inevitability that this land would be “cleared” for non-Native settlers. It is this very idea of settler innocence that is maintained and upheld in the face of this history, where the murdering of hundreds of unarmed women and children in a dawn raid by the US Calvary seen as sound and just. This of course followed a call for peace from Lakota leaders as they had seen enough death, they had seen enough destruction. So when looking at the hides, know that they also resonate with these histories. Their use of Lakota geometries, deeply embedded in Lakota history, science, and present ontologies, is an extension of what the Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor aptly named our survivance (that is an active practice and not simply our mere survival of near our total genocide that is ongoing since the first Europeans shipwrecked off the shores of the Caribbean in 1492, victims of profound navigational errors).

The final work in the exhibition, a video installed in its own room also stems from a dream. In Three Dreams (2021), the narrative is deliberately obtuse. An extremely tall bear walks alongside another figure. Conversation is heard, but it’s more like listening from the other side of a thin wall. As they walk side by side down a narrow hallway, it’s clear that their relationship is one more akin to mentor and mentee. The smaller person is asking the questions, the bear is providing the answers. Kite relayed that the work is a representation of a dream she had when she was in dialogue with Blackfoot professor and theorist, Leroy Little Bear (dreams sometimes literalize things, and here, Little Bear has become a bear). Together with collaborators and the Diné producer Blackhorse Lowe, Kite recreated the vignettes and props for the film from her recollection of this dream. A storyboard artist took her dream and transformed it into the storyboard for the film. The result is as strange as one might imagine. This is the place of dreams, they oscillate in the spaces between perception and belief, for Kite they are a means of bringing other worlds into being.