Before Wade Fernandez’s fingers fretted the Fender Telecaster hanging on his shoulder, he invited the audience to reflect on their surroundings. The towering elms provided shade from the relentless summer sun. The solid earth cradled their picnic blankets and chairs below.

The Menominee rock musician spoke softly into the microphone, each syllable lingering in the air at the 2024 Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall.

“These beautiful relatives—trees that have been standing here before us and before our grandparents; Kohkomaesaehkomekanow (Our Grandmother Earth) and her clothing, the grass; the insects and all these beautiful things in life,” he acknowledged. “Just paying respect to all that’s here, including our ancestors, because they like to pop in here and there, too.”

Wade wore a black bandana and a black shirt with blue and white stripes. Around his neck, a beaded chain with a wolf’s paw print hung close to his heart, a nod to his Menominee name, Wicīwen Apīs-Mahwaew, Walks with the Black Wolf.

Behind him, Wade’s son, twenty-one-year-old Quintin Fernandez, kept rhythm the drums, his face a striking match for Wade’s: the same dark eyes closed tight, brow furrowed as he locked in on the rhythm, only to break into a shy smile with the same curve as his father’s when the pulsating beat came to an end.

It’s hard to define the type of music the father-son duo plays: Wade glided smoothly from the gritty edge of a blues falsetto to the liquid hum of a blessing song in the Menominee language. After a fierce guitar growl, he often reached for the six-hole ironwood flute, letting loose a string of breathy notes. Quintin, meanwhile, roared with metallic rhythms on the snare and cymbal. He grabbed a flute at Wade’s signal, blending his tunes into their airy duet.

Over his nearly forty-four-year career as a professional musician from Menominee, Wisconsin, Wade has rocked stages from Woodstock ’94 in New York to the Felsenbühne Theater in Germany on over eighty international tours. He has played in jazz clubs and folk, country, and rock festivals.

“None of them fit exactly,” Wade said as we sat beneath the shade of a tree. “I wasn’t stuck to a style. Music is just whatever you feel at the moment.”

Wade and Quintin journeyed to our Festival in Washington, D.C., to share music rooted in the Menominee Reservation. Their sound knows no genre, only the freedom that comes from sharing a genuine love for the land, animals, and people.

“As Clear Waters Flow And Tears Come And Go”
Wahkamiw Pamenan, Nisaehcoq piw mesek mahchi

Early in life, Wade could not imagine singing in front of others. He called himself “extremely shy,” a trait inherited from his parents, who loved putting Sam Cooke’s smooth vocals and Led Zeppelin’s acoustic guitar on the radio at their reservation home in northeastern Wisconsin. His parents played instruments, although they never sang publicly.

Wade also inherited a deep-seated love for music. His father, who is of Mexican and Menominee descent, would pluck guitar chords, while his mother’s piano melodies danced through the house. Too timid to sing even in front of his parents and two brothers, Wade would wedge a butter knife in the door jamb of his room, crawl into the closet , and belt into a pillow, mimicking the shimmering highs of Robert Plant on Led Zeppelin’s “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You.”

At age four, a tender guitar note in a movie tugged at his heart. “Guitar spoke to me first,” Wade said. “It was like, what is that? I want to do that.” By the time he was eleven, he was consistently playing guitar.

Both Wade and Quintin grew up cradled by the 234,000-acre forest that covers 95 percent of the Menominee Reservation, a remnant of the 10 million forested acres once spanning Wisconsin and Upper Michigan.

“The forest is so thick that, once, a NASA astronaut looked down from space and radioed, ‘What’s that beautiful green jewel?’” he said, “They replied, ‘That’s the forest of the Menominee Nation.’ That’s where I grew up, back when I was just a little boy.”

Though the tribe’s lands were reduced through federal treaties in the 1800s, the woods the Menominee stewarded remain alive with natural symphonies of every kind. As a child—as an adult, too—Wade liked to sit on the riverbank and play guitar, the water murmuring and mumbling alongside the low chirps of ravens, herons, and eagles.

Human sound is an integral part of the natural symphony, too: powwow participants drumming on car hoods, their English-language and traditional songs wafting through Wade’s bedroom window, and his parents’ record collection brimming with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Otis Redding, and a good dose of Johnny Cash. At the Shawano County Library, just past the Menominee Reservation, Wade devoured albums from Joni Mitchell to Duke Ellington, even Beethoven, taking home every record available.

Music was as much a fixture in Quintin’s life as it had been in his father’s. It is so intimately woven into his earliest memories that he couldn’t pinpoint to a specific moment when he was aware of the rhythm. “It seemed to be there all the time,” Quintin said. It was with him on the road with Wade and in the sounds of Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, and Charlie Parker—musicians his father had loved as a child.

“The beauty of music is that it’s timeless,” Wade said. “Finding my voice was just about connecting with music at an early age and really feeling it deep down inside of me emotionally, like it could make me tear up. That’s how deep the emotions were when I started to recreate music.”

Wade’s first hit sprang from the everyday struggles and triumphs of the Menominee community. Right after high school, he landed a job at the “Commod Shop,” a small general store selling basic commodities. It was there that Wade saw the complicated face of his community: poverty, food insecurity, and health issues compounded by the nutrient-deficient offerings from the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations.

With these feelings, Wade turned to music. He penned “Commodity Cheese Blues” and gathered some friends to shoot a low-budget music video. The song was about those processed cheese blocks, once a staple for hungry Native people who turned them into tasty grilled cheese sandwiches.

“You could trade it for cigarettes, beer, or gas money,” Wade said. “It was like currency in prison.”

In the 2003 video, a young Wade decked out in a baseball cap and hoodie croons as the camera wobbles, while he and his friends handle the cheese with comical reverence: “I went downtown to the Commod Shop / Met the blues ’cause they were out of stock / Tell me please when I’ll get my commod cheese.”

What begins as a cheerful moment turns unsettling in the video’s latter half when the frequent bathroom trips triggered by the cheese reveal a more somber reality. USDA’s processed cheese holds little nutritional value for Native communities, where nearly 75 percent of adults are lactose intolerant. Low-income Native families relying on high-fat, low-fiber foods like commodity cheese are nearly three times more likely to develop diabetes and 2.3 times more likely to die from it than other Americans.

“If you take our traditional foods away from us, put us on a small piece of land, and then tell us not to hunt by taking away our weapons, which were really just our tools for hunting, it can be very depressing,” Wade said. “However, we can take what we have and put our love and heart into cooking for our children. When we served it to them, it became a new tradition.”

Wade captured the spirit of the blues with “Commodity Cheese Blues,” funneling ideas of inequality and oppression through lyrics filled with wit, sometimes off-color. The video seemed to strike a chord; it earned Wade the Best Music Video award at both the Cherokee International Film Festival and Indian Summer Film & Video Awards in 2005.

However, sharing his voice with the public didn’t always get a warm reception. Later, while studying performance at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Wade remembered his guitar professor hollering, “After two and a half years, you still sound like Wade Fernandez!” Red-faced, he trudged out into the biting Wisconsin cold. His European tour was just a week away, and here he was getting yelled at for being himself.

Today, he sees it as a lesson. “Maybe Wade Fernandez is who I’m meant to be,” he thought. After all, it’s Wade Fernandez who made it possible for him to tour Europe and record CDs—that’s the life he lived as a performing musician.

“There’s a battle inside us: how do we fit into a system that wasn’t designed for us?”

“We Fly Our Own Ways”
Pameq niyah, enahkah enes

Wade looked for the answer to his identity by reconnecting with Menominee culture through the rhythms of trees, rivers, and birds.

“The natural world was filled with songs before there were humans,” Wade said. “Whatever I’m doing at any moment, I try to be open to the spirits, to the ancestors, to their music.”

To tune into ancestral voices, sometimes you need an ancestral instrument. Wade was introduced to the Menominee Native flute, pepīkwan, in 2001 when he saw a friend selling one at a festival. In Menominee, pepīkwan translates to the sounds of spring: trees popping awake from winter’s chill and fresh life emerging from the forest floor to greet the warmth. After playing just a few notes, Wade found it “made music right away” and traded a guitar for it.

For Wade, the pepīkwan proved a direct link to his heart, soul, and nature. Unlike the guitar, which demanded so much more time before making that deep connection, the flute responded to him immediately. As Wade breathes into it, the flute becomes “an extension of the breath in life,” with notes flowing as naturally as wind rustling through leaves. “The flute goes back further in time, so it’s like awakening another part of me, another part of my ancestors,” Wade said.

When Wade turns his genre into a vessel of pure self-expression, the boundaries that once puzzled him about his musical identity dissolve. His tunes, mingling guitar and flute, flow with a natural ease.

“Others look at music people and say, ‘Oh, you’re a jazz musician,’ or ‘You are a country musician.’” Wade paused, searching for words. “We can be all of that and none of that at the same time. I’ve listened to and performed so many styles, yet still, someone may hear only one of my songs and then put me in one category. The way I navigate it is just to show up, be myself, and try to feel what’s necessary to deliver in the moment.”

In a Folklife Festival conversation with bluesman Murray Porter (Mohawk, Six Nations of the Grand River), Wade presented “Nokomah,” a heartfelt spoken-word piece paired with melodies expressing his deep love for his grandmother, whose eyesight and then life were taken at fifty-five years old due to diabetes. “She would feel my face to find out which child I was,” Wade told the audience. “Then one time, I am thinking of her, and I pick up the guitar, and then—”—a sweep on the strings, followed by soulful vocalizations.

That was Quintin’s signal. He left his seat in the front row and took his place on a cajón, his palms thumping out a steady beat to the guitar’s expressive bends and slides.

While Wade’s vocals and guitar took the lead in his concerts, it was impossible to ignore the driving heartbeat of the drums sending vibrations through the audience. Quintin, with his thick hair tied atop his head, provided a rock-solid foundation to the blues groove.

During a European tour in 2013, Wade realized Quintin’s natural affinity for music when his friend, singer songwriter Mitch Walking Elk, pointed out that the eleven-year-old was absorbed in their performance, tapping rhythms on his leg.

“My friend called him up on stage during our set and said, ‘Hey, Quintin, come on up. Grab a shaker.’ Then he started playing with the shaker and locked into the groove right away,” Wade recalled.

Quintin began drumming on a wooden cajón during Wade’s next European tour. They then added a twelve-note chromatic hand pan that Wade bought him after he displayed an innate ear for melody and rhythm the first time he touched it. He quickly moved on to a full drum set in 2018. Now, Quintin has been drumming for five years and learned the pepīkwan while on the road with his father.

“At first, it was just cool, exciting, and stimulating,” Quintin said. “Songs were there for me, consoling me when I was inconsolable, or when there was no one else there.”

Inconsolable moments hit hard when Native children like Quintin leave the safety of their reservation, only to face the sting of discrimination waiting just across their doorstep. A 2010 Minnesota student survey found that 54 percent of Alaskan Native and American Indian students reported being bullied. As recent as 2012, a Menominee seventh-grader in Wisconsin’s Menominee district was punished for speaking her Native language at school.

“Racism is always worse in border towns,” Quintin said. He went to middle and high school near the reservation and is currently in college just outside Appleton. “My brother and I felt some aversion to expressing our culture. People would perceive us and interact with us differently.”

In middle school, Quintin recalled that he was constantly having his long hair pulled. “They would ask if I had the internet or if I lived in a mud house,” he said with a bitter laugh. While he sidestepped much of the conflict then, he now works through some of those feelings with his music.

In 2022, during a gap year, Quintin’s ex-girlfriend died. “It was a very painful time for me, and that’s when I started writing songs,” he said. He turned to Menominee folk tunes, some of which have healing properties and are considered “strong medicine.” These tunes grounded him as he wrote his first song.

Now, he wishes to do the same for his audiences.

“Anyone who said the music was heavier than they felt through heart…means the most [to me] because of how my music impacts them emotionally or how they enjoy it, rather than hearing, ‘Oh, you’re so talented. You did a drum solo,’” Quintin said. “I’m happy to make those connections with people and share that moment with them on the stage.”

One anchor of reconnection to Menominee ancestors is language. From over 2,000 Native Menominee-language speakers, forced assimilation has reduced the fluent-speaking population to less than twenty today.  Currently , the Menominee are reclaiming their language in fresh ways. On the reservation, the grassroots group Menomini yoU is gaining traction with their language classes.

Meanwhile, Wade shares the Menominee language through his music, performing songs like “Sawaenemīyah (We Are Blessed)” at festivals. Each line of the slow, dream-like cadence hums a prayer for Grandmother Earth’s children, featuring the Menominee names of his children, such as Bear Claw and Little White Wolf, in blessings. For Wade, a father of six, it was also a prayer for his own children: one drumming behind him and another sketching offstage.

“We have to think about all those children, not just the human babies. What about all those little insect babies down there, those little nests from the birds back at home?” Wade asked as he introduced the song. “Think of all these relatives. Be thankful for what we got. We don’t know what tomorrow brings, but our power is right at this moment.”

Wade’s passion for the language and the culture earned him the 2010 Community Spirit Award from the Peoples Fund. Even though his music has traveled far, it always stays close to the Menominee people.

“Take These Seeds And Sow”
Kemenen eyom, kakenaha wapehtum

Touring with a rock-star dad is bound to leave its mark, and Quintin has certainly absorbed some of that influence. Yet he’s quick to point out where he diverges from his father’s path.

“I am more of an alternative or indie direction than he does sometimes,” Quintin said. “And sometimes I have more jazz flavors.”

But in finding his voice amid the bloodline connection from his father and his ancestors, Quintin often feels humbled by the wisdom of the elders and predecessors—a rich legacy he has yet to understand fully.

“I feel like I’m just a kid now. My music might be a little too zoomed in. I want to zoom out more, be more conscious of what blesses me, and embrace more of my culture and the people around me.”

Wade understands that. “Quintin is kind of shy and he doesn’t have the self-confidence yet,” he said. “But I was the same way.”

Discovering the confidence to let his own voice through took years for Wade, who battled low self-esteem, singing tentatively into the microphone, and it took him years to apply the traditional Menominee teaching of humility to a music business world that seemed devoid of those qualities. But seeing approving nods from diverse audiences, whether performing at Woodstock ’94 or teaching students at Marquette University, hearing from locals on his reservation, and recently visitors at the Folklife Festival, reminds him that the music coming through him was never about himself, but about a gift everyone can share in. And so, while no one may ever pin Wade down to a musical style, to him, it hardly matters.

In the shade of the elm, while wrapping up our conversation, I asked him what advice he would offer future musicians like Quintin for defining their musical presence.

“You just have to show up and have enough confidence to know that you’re not in command, but you’re part of this beautiful flow of life of music,” Wade said. “It’s not going to be perfect. But even a classical musician who trains forever doesn’t achieve perfection. Sometimes they carry all this anxiety that if their paper blows off the music stand, they can’t play. But it shouldn’t be that way.”

The tinkling bell of birdsong filled the lush green above where we sat, and Wade’s smile widened.

“Because birds don’t need a sheet of music. They just open their mouths and sing.”

Hope Zhu is a writing intern at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and a student at Wake Forest University, where she studies sociology, statistics, and journalism.

*All the section titles come from Wade Fernandez’s song “Sawaenemiyah.”