In the finale Sisterfire concert of the 2018 Folklife Festival, Martha Redbone joined Toshi Reagon, BIGLovely, and the Bernice Johnson Reagon Songbook singers in a performance of “Drums.”
Written by folk musician Peter La Farge in 1964, the song describes the U.S. government’s mandate to remove Native American children from reservations for the purpose of education and assimilation into Western culture. It tells the story from the perspective of the thousands of families whose children were forcibly removed from their homelands. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Bureau of Indian Affairs founded additional boarding schools based on the assimilation model of the off-reservation Carlisle Indian Industrial School.
