‘It’s where I belong’: Black Belt Eagle Scout’s latest album celebrates home

The cover photo of the new Black Belt Eagle Scout album is of a woman waist-deep in Washington’s Puget Sound. The seawater behind her ripples in paisley patterns. A flotilla of clouds looks as if it’s slipped free of gravity’s last grasp. It’s meant to be evocative.

“There’s waterways and beaches of beautiful rocks and shells,” says Katherine Paul, the Native American indie rocker who records as Black Belt Eagle Scout, of the area. “And then there’s our people. Our people are here, too.”

The album, her third, debuts Friday with the title “The Land, the Water, the Sky.” Ms. Paul is the woman on the cover, which depicts her connection to the ancestral lands where she grew up. The album was inspired by her move from Portland, Oregon, to the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community in Washington state during the pandemic. It’s an extended meditation on what constitutes true home. 

“I love how sparse the music is. There’s this quiet confidence in it,” says Sterlin Harjo, showrunner for the hit TV series “Reservation Dogs,” describing the artist’s style. The show, set on an Indigenous reservation, has featured several Black Belt Eagle Scout songs. “She’s a very humble person,” he adds.

Black Belt Eagle Scout’s music is often serene. But her guitar can also roar like a logger’s chainsaw. She first taught herself to play by studying bootleg video tapes of Nirvana. Following her graduation from college in Portland, Ms. Paul remained in the city where she was employed by local music venues who valued her great organizational skills. She also developed her song craft. Her first two albums, “Mother of My Children” (2017) and “At the Party With My Brown Friends” (2019), catapulted her toward indie-rock acclaim. Then her momentum came to an abrupt halt. The pandemic scuppered her first U.S. headline tour plus shows in Europe. 

Black Belt Eagle Scout is on the cover of her latest album. The scene depicts the musician's connection to the area in Washington where she grew up.

“It was devastating, to be honest,” she says via Zoom. But her career woes were supplanted by worries about her parents’ poor health. She was also newly married to her drummer Camas Logue, who has two kids. Unable to perform live, money was scarce. “I had to think about my family and think about what it is that was important to me,” she says. “A sort of shift.”

So, in July 2020, Ms. Paul, her husband, and the children relocated to the reservation.

“The hard element was moving back in the pandemic when we couldn’t really come together,” she says. “My tribe generally likes to have a lot of events. ... And those weren’t happening. So the challenging part was just being alone a lot and not having that sense of community.”

Ms. Paul’s family were members of a drum group, the Skagit Valley Singers, and her father, a carver of totem poles, had sung traditional melodies to her when she was a baby. 

“One of the teachings that Dad had passed down to him from my grandfather is, ‘When you sing, you sing from your heart. You sing in a good way and you bring good medicine,’” she says, adding that her parents are doing fine now. “Strength and healing, I think that’s always something that I try and put into my music.”

Her father sings backing vocals on a softly strummed song called “Spaces.” 

“He does it in his style. If you were to cut out everything of that song and just have him singing those notes, and maybe there is like a drum, it would sound like a Coast Salish song,” says Ms. Paul. “But because I do my own form of indie-rock music, there is this way in which it can fit together sometimes, too.”

Most of the songs on the album are about her yearning for connection and finding solace in her natural surroundings.

“Because I couldn’t be close to physical people and bodies, I went to nature,” she explains. “I went to my other relatives. I went to the plants. I went to the trees, I went to the water. And I found those forms of relationships.” 

A key song on the album, “Salmon Stinta,” expresses how the challenges of moving home made Ms. Paul want to “scream into the sea.” It’s also a song of healing. Ms. Paul wrote the song on a classical acoustic guitar with an open D tuning that she seldom used. While she was playing, she became fixated on a painting in the room titled “Salmon Stinta” that her husband had made for her. 

“Then this melody came to me and I started singing what I saw in the painting,” says the songwriter. “I was singing to it because I love that painting. Here’s my offering to this painting that was created for me.” 

When Mr. Harjo heard the song, he featured it at the end of Season Two of “Reservation Dogs.”

“There’s something about the elements that are great with her music,” says Mr. Harjo, who first discovered Black Belt Eagle Scout when he filmed the documentary “Love and Fury” (available on Netflix) about Native Americans expressing themselves through art. “It’s something that just marries so well together between her music and a really emotional scene that happens at the water, the ocean. Just a really beautiful coming together of visuals and music.”

This spring, Ms. Paul will tour Europe and parts of North America. And then she’ll return to the land of Douglas firs, verdant camas, and bushes of salmonberries, huckleberries, and thimbleberries. It’s where she feels grounded.

“Home is just another word for connection and love and, you know, family,” says Ms. Paul. “This place, it’s where I belong.”