Who Sings This Song?

Song story & origins

Introduction

Who Sings This Song? appears on the 2013 album Edge of the Known. It has ended up being one of my most-played songs—especially on YouTube, but also on Apple Music and Spotify. The record as a whole was a celebration of the natural world where I live—the Black Hills of South Dakota—but this track also became a way to raise questions about fairness, land, and our responsibilities to one another here.

Where the song came from

When I started writing for Edge of the Known, I had in mind a kind of rock anthem—something people could actually sing together. What rose up most naturally in that form were the questions I’d been carrying about land and equity in this region, especially as they relate to Indigenous communities. In my education work I’ve interviewed well over a hundred Native elders across South and North Dakota, and I’ve had many beautiful, hard, hopeful conversations. Their concerns—broken treaties, loss of land, and the particular history of the Black Hills—had been living in me for years. Those questions became the song’s questions.

What the song is saying

The opening refrain—“Who owns this land?”—pivots on two very different worldviews. In many Indigenous traditions, land isn’t a possession; it’s a relative—Unči Makȟá, grandmother earth. You care for her, and she cares for you. Your relationships—with the land itself, with rock and water, with the nations of trees, four-leggeds, winged ones, and fish—are spiritual and reciprocal. That’s a different way of living than the Western, property-first mindset that says: I mark off my plot; I own it; I do what I want with it.

From there the lyric turns to fences. There’s the everyday fence of ownership—this is mine, keep out. But there are also the political fences created by treaty and policy. Here in South Dakota we have nine reservations. Whatever words were used on paper, for many elders those boundaries functioned like confinement. I’ve been told stories of family members arrested simply for leaving reservation land. People come and go now in ways they couldn’t then; still, the feeling of having been fenced in has a long echo.

Then the song asks about peace—who broke it—and says aloud the word many avoid: occupation. In the American mythos we talk about the West as wide-open “free land,” but there were already peoples here who had learned over centuries how to live in right relationship to this place. The skirmishes and wars that came were often the result of disrespect—toward the land or toward neighbors. I’m encouraged that more events now begin with land acknowledgments, naming whose traditional homelands we stand on and honoring elders past and present. That recognition is long in coming. The goal isn’t for anyone to “leave,” but to make our coexistence feel less like occupation and more like neighboring.

Anthem and inspirations

The title line “Who sings this song?” invites a crowd response. The repeated How long? is drawn directly from the Psalms, and also through a band that’s formed a lot of my musical conscience—U2 (Bono’s psalm-shaped writing is a clear influence). The anthem form matters: it says these aren’t my private questions; they’re our questions. Who owns this land? Who built this fence? Who broke the peace? And then, together, how long are we going to sing until something changes? The point is to ask them loudly and long, together, until answers come—until occupation ends and neighborliness begins.

2016: Sacred Stone Camp and the video

In 2016 the Sacred Stone Camp formed in North Dakota during the water-rights struggle. I was able to visit—especially the school they set up for children—and it was a powerful gathering of Indigenous people and allies. The camp’s call, “Water is life,” spoke to everyone who depends on clean water here (the song reflects what I was hearing then about the Oglala Aquifer and the risks posed by pipeline projects). Things came to a head when corporate security came in with dogs, tearing things up and overrunning sacred burial sites—images many of us will never forget. In that moment I realized this song belonged with that footage, so I made a music video to bring them together. That’s when the track really found its audience, and why it keeps being shared: it became part of a larger creative response to a public wound, and it still resonates because those fights—and hopes—continue.

Why it stays with me

Who Sings This Song? keeps asking me to keep asking. It’s an invitation to sing as neighbors, to remember whose land we stand on, to listen to elders, and to turn away from the posture of occupation toward the posture of kinship. The questions don’t get quieter; they get louder, on purpose, until we’re living like relatives.

Source: New Music Memoir (1).docx