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Circulating Sound Music Series: Flyover Country

Flyover Country by Nat Evans is a multi-layered performance featuring a series of stories about Evans’ family and the United States, interwoven with strange dreams he had while traveling. Archival family images, drawings, and short films from site visits accompany music and storytelling.

This event is being held as an online meeting/webinar. You will be emailed login instructions approximately 24 hours before the event.

In the summer of 2017, Evans discovered a wealth of family history - family trees, stories, and an archive of hundreds of photographs dating back to the 1870s. As he began to assemble a history of his family and their westward expansion, he concurrently took a deep look at indigenous cultures of North America, and traveled to different places that had similar ecological features to places his family settled, such as the oceanic tallgrass prairie in the Flint Hills of Kansas. The deeper Evans looked at the wider history of America, the more the holes in the mythology of his family manifested themselves. Timelines of movement matched up with historical genocide at the hands of white citizen militias, treaties with the Lakota broken as millions of bison were slaughtered for the market hunt and white settlers flooded the sacred Black Hills of South Dakota to mine for gold, and unsustainable farming practices led to tilled under grasslands from Illinois to New Mexico, precipitating the Dust Bowl.

Made possible by Friends of the Library through gifts to The Indianapolis Public Library Foundation.