Sowing Songs is an album of original contemporary folk songs about Iowa ecosystems that I wrote during the spring of 2023 for my senior thesis at Grinnell College. Each of these songs look to the land for answers—answers that we might not be able to find or understand with our limited human perspectives. Yet these are answers that we must be open to hearing if we want to create a future in which all living beings have access to a safe, habitable planet. These songs address the devastation to the land since European colonizers arrived, forcibly displacing the Native peoples who had been living on Turtle Island (the name used today by some Native peoples in the U.S. to refer to North America) for thousands of years and whose stewardship of the land in reciprocal and regenerative ways are needed now more than ever.
As settlers spread across Iowa in the 19th century and Native communities were forced from their ancestral territories, another erasure was occurring—the tallgrass prairie which had once covered much of the Iowa landscape began to vanish with the transition to cropland. Today, less than one tenth of one percent of the original tallgrass prairie remains. With industrial agriculture now dominating the land across Iowa, other ecosystems have also been drastically altered as a result. Rivers have been straightened, forests have been cleared, and ancient grasslands have been plowed under to maximize agricultural land. In the short term, this has yielded profit for some people and big agricultural corporations, but at what cost to everyone else? At what cost to the land and waters and living beings that now face the devastating impacts of soil erosion, water toxicity from fertilizers and pesticides, and significant habitat loss? At what cost to future generations?
The Sowing Songs album seeks a balance between recognizing this devastation and finding strength and wisdom in the ecosystems themselves — and from Indigenous communities in Iowa and around the world whose knowledge holds the answers we need, if only we’ll listen. “Broken,” the first song in this collection, speaks to this devastation and brokenness—both literal and metaphorical—as the land is broken by the plow and as we face a brokenness on individual and collective levels. It also imagines how prairie seeds that sown on the land help to restore new native prairie projects, and are also in many ways sewing the broken land back together again. What other “seeds” can we sow in our lives that are hopeful, generative, life-giving? The rest of the songs take the listener on a journey from prairie into forest down to a river, back through the forest, and into the prairie again, where big bluestem—one of the tallest native prairie plants—grows, and which, when summoned in the song, allows us to glimpse a future beyond our present moment. The final song on the album is one I wrote while doing an AgArts Residency at Mustard Seed Community Farm near Ames, Iowa. This farm provides a beautiful example of community-based and regenerative agriculture which allows land, humans, and other living beings to flourish side-by-side.
Before writing the songs, I began by researching a few different topics. I studied the North American Folk Music Revival of the 1950s-60s, asking the question, “what was it about these songs that brought people together and empowered them to take action?” I also researched the role of music within social movements more broadly, learning about how music can create new worlds by communicating the vision of a movement. Finally, I researched the main ecosystems of Iowa—the prairie, woodlands, wetlands, and oak savannah. Immersing myself in these ecosystems through readings, conversations, and frequent visits to nearby nature preserves, allowing the land to become the foundation from which Sowing Songs emerged.
So many people are woven into the fabric of this project for whom I’m incredibly grateful. My academic advisors Dr. John Garrison and Dr. Ross Haenfler, Jon Andelson (who introduced me to the prairie), Cornelia Mutel (author of The Emerald Horizon, a book that provided many insights into the history and future of Iowa land), Johnathan Buffalo (who shared his stories and wisdom of what it means to call Iowa home), Stephanie Snow (who reminded me that even amidst turmoil one can find stability in nature), my dear friends (who have been the reason Iowa has felt like home during my college years), and my parents (who made it all possible). My gratitude is vaster than a big wide open Iowa prairie! You can listen to the album here: https://linktr.ee/sowingsongs
While most of my research revolved around non-human ecosystems, it was important to me to organize a creative ecosystem of people in the college and community whose voices I value and who have had an impact on me in some way during my time at Grinnell. I shared these songs and these people offered their creative contributions in a concert at Herrick Chapel in May 2023. The voices that are part of this creative ecosystem include Stephanie Snow, Jon Andelson, Arsema Berhane, Maria Eure, Josie Noland, Crys Kaczmarczyk, Joanie Fieser, Tim Widener, Tallulah Pellissier Lloyd, Jordon Ryan, Derin Sivrioglu, and Jenny Sammons. You can watch this performance at https://youtu.be/GlaKswbWep4 or in the window below. 
