Film brings Native influence on US music out of shadows

New York : American music took shape and went global thanks to the country's melting pot of influences. Yet one of the most important sources of the sound often goes forgotten -- American Indians.

A new documentary, "Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World," shines a new light on the history and traces how indigenous people's rhythms, singing and dancing helped set the course of American music.

"I started, just out of curiosity, to look around for more people like myself. Are there other Native American people doing what I do?" said Stevie Salas, the guitarist of Apache origin who is the executive producer of the film, which is screening in New York before its broadcast in December on Arte, the  French-German cultural channel which coproduced it.

"It seemed like I couldn't find any. But then as I would start to dig I started to realize: there were a lot, it's just people didn't know it," he said.

Indigenous Americans, decimated by invasion, were not considered US citizens until 1924 -- more than 50 years after African Americans -- and continue to lag behind in social indicators.

In one of the final but most notorious acts of the conquest of the West, US troops shot dead 300 men, women and children at Wounded Knee in South Dakota in 1890 as they crushed the burgeoning "Ghost Dance" musical and spiritual movement.

"They went after our culture. It was genocide and they wanted to erase every cultural perception of reality that we had," John Trudell, a musician and activist who is Santee Dakota, says in the documentary.