When the beat of hip-hop converge with the power of literature, transformation beckons. Khodi Dill, is an educator and author whose narrative speaks volumes about the role of the arts in societal change.
For those who find solace in rhythm and rhyme, this conversation about the underestimated value of hip-hop in the classroom is an eye-opener. Khodi Challenges the status quo, advocating for a space where hip-hop is celebrated for its historical roots in activism and its potential to cultivate empathy within our youth. By embracing this dynamic genre as a literary form.
Relevant Links:
Khodi's website: https://thegreygriot.com
Tonight Its Poetry: https://www.facebook.com/TonightItsPoetry/
Write Outloud: https://writeoutloudcontest.com
Dr. Verna St. Denis: https://education.usask.ca/people/profiles/st-denis.php
Thank you to SaskCulture, SKArts, and Sask Lotteries for your generous support.
Visit our website: https://www.saskartsalliance.ca
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/saskartsalliance/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/skartsalliance
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saskartsalliance/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@saskatchewanartsalliance57
STARTING SEASON 2, THEME MUSIC PROVIDED BY:
Patrick Moon Bird: https://linktr.ee/PatrickMoonBird
https://www.facebook.com/PatrickMoonBirdMusic/
Kevin Power: http://www.kevinpower.net/ The Saskscapes Podcast: https://saskscapes.buzzsprout.com/
When the beat of hip-hop converge with the power of literature, transformation beckons. Khodi Dill, is an educator and author whose narrative speaks volumes about the role of the arts in societal change.
For those who find solace in rhythm and rhyme, this conversation about the underestimated value of hip-hop in the classroom is an eye-opener. Khodi Challenges the status quo, advocating for a space where hip-hop is celebrated for its historical roots in activism and its potential to cultivate empathy within our youth. By embracing this dynamic genre as a literary form.
Relevant Links:
Khodi's website: https://thegreygriot.com
Tonight Its Poetry: https://www.facebook.com/TonightItsPoetry/
Write Outloud: https://writeoutloudcontest.com
Dr. Verna St. Denis: https://education.usask.ca/people/profiles/st-denis.php
Thank you to SaskCulture, SKArts, and Sask Lotteries for your generous support.
Visit our website: https://www.saskartsalliance.ca
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/saskartsalliance/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/skartsalliance
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saskartsalliance/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@saskatchewanartsalliance57
STARTING SEASON 2, THEME MUSIC PROVIDED BY:
Patrick Moon Bird: https://linktr.ee/PatrickMoonBird
https://www.facebook.com/PatrickMoonBirdMusic/
Kevin Power: http://www.kevinpower.net/ The Saskscapes Podcast: https://saskscapes.buzzsprout.com/
Your collective voice for the arts across Saskatchewan. This is Arts Everywhere, the Saskatchewan Arts Alliance podcast. The principal at Cody Dill's school says that Cody is the kind of teacher who stands at the front of the room and has the most incredible dialogue, debate and conversation with his students to get them thinking in a different way, to find their voice and passion. Cody found his voice early on when he discovered that access to hip-hop music as an art form contributed to his ability to become, as he puts it, a fully actualized human being. Cody's work as an author, spoken word artist and anti-racist educator working in Saskatoon is making a difference. For example, two of his books, cipher and Little Black Lives Matter, are known for their creative use of rhyme and their socially relevant themes, and they are born out of Cody's observation that there is a big gap in Canadian literature for this kind of subject matter for younger audiences.
Speaker 1:There is a lot to unpack in making change and Cody says that the first step is to just start Start learning about racism. There's an image Cody paints in, quoting Dr Alex Wilson, a two-spirit scholar. We've been marinating in it unconscious racism that is, for too long. That's a powerful image to marinate in something, to have it penetrate on a cellular level. I come from a place of white privilege and while I'm affected by anti-Semitism as a person of Jewish heritage, and homophobia as a gay man, this conversation reminds me that there is more than enough racism and ignorance to go around. And look, it's not about pitting truth against truth. At best, we find similarities in our experience and move forward together. Okay now, admittedly, hip-hop is not in my playlist, although I'm a really big fan of the musical Hamilton, but I might need to revisit hip-hop. Cody says that it's dope. As a listener, I find Cody's story to be well dope. I suspect you will as well. Here's Cody Dill.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Arts Everywhere podcast, cody. Thanks for joining and agreeing to be a guest, um. It was interesting because my colleague, jessica reese, um, first ran into you or met you at a workshop you were doing at the regina public library. She had brought her her kiddos, there for for a workshop and and suggested you know, maybe you'd be a great person to maybe have on the podcast and do some writing for the Arts Alliance and I'm glad she made that connection.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, me too.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So maybe for the folks out there listening, maybe just give a little introduction to yourself who you are, what you do, that sort of thing.
Speaker 3:Sure, my name is Cody Dill and I'm an author, a spoken word artist and an anti-racism educator working mostly in Saskatoon, saskatchewan.
Speaker 2:Awesome. So how did you kind of get on your path? How did you get onto your path of doing your work as a writer and spoken word poet and anti-racism advocate?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, and they're all kind of connected for me right. But I guess, to start out like, I always loved writing as a child and just it took me a long time to really find my voice and a part of that was needing to wait until such a time that I was exposed to voices that resonated with me and so, you know, struggled to really, yeah, just relate to a lot of the writing I was presented with in school. Even though I did well in school, there was just sort of this like hollowness to a lot of like my engagement with the literary arts there. But just like on my own, discovering hip hop and stuff like that certainly was like a formative experience for me and like continues to be a really, really important part of my life and an important part of inspiration for my art, writing, the work that I do. And around 2010, when I was living in Saskatoon, I discovered Tonight it's Poetry, and Tonight it's Poetry was one of the province's first and coolest spoken word showcase. You know programs that was going on, and so they had these weekly poetry slams. They usually happened at this sweet little pub called Lydia's in Saskatoon. May it rest in peace. It's been torn down but honestly, that was a real turning point for me, just discovering the art of spoken word poetry spoken word poetry which of course was real conducive to like hip hop, happening in acapella ways as poetry in that same space, met a lot of people through that community who were very social justice oriented just as much as they were artistic and talented and everything like that. That fostered a lot of growth in, you know, my interest in social justice.
Speaker 3:Through university, though you know I had already been inclined to sort of get involved and study anti-racism and anti-oppressive education. It really was like a combination of the two passions, though that drove me to do my master's in the area of anti-racist education. I was sitting around at some staff function, you know, in my work as a high school teacher, and I was sitting with one of the grad chairs for educational foundations at the University of Saskatchewan, bob Regnier, at the time, and I was just talking to him about my love for spoken word and how I thought it was a really cool place to like do anti-racism and he said, sounds like a thesis area and I just had no idea that I could even possibly study these things that I loved in a way that amalgamated them and like made sense to me. But that was like a beautiful thing to discover, I think, is that in grad school, if you have the right people and you're in the right program, you can really really make it your own and you know for the first time, like just take ownership of your learning in a supported environment where you're not sort of being fed what to learn but you're actually sort of creating that new knowledge.
Speaker 3:And so I was super happy to be able to, you know, sit with poets from various identities, you know, people with experiences of oppression in an intersectional way and just unpack their experiences and learn about how this beautiful art form really was a healing mechanism. And learn about how this beautiful art form really was a healing mechanism, a change mechanism for, like people personally, but also for society. And so, you know now, in the work that I do, even if I'm doing an anti-racism speech, I'm always talking about the arts too, you know, and the power of the spoken word in that. And then when I'm doing my spoken word, I'm often talking about anti-racism too, you know. So it really is just all one big ball of awesomeness for me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's, that's pretty amazing, um, to be able to, you know, go and do your master's and really have this whole essence of, of worlds and and things that you're passionate about, yeah, yeah, that's amazing. I was wondering maybe. Okay, a few things kind of struck me out of what you just said that I'd like to kind of delve a little deeper into, I think, the first being you're a high school teacher, yeah, so what do you teach?
Speaker 3:So I teach at a really fantastic sort of alternative school in Saskatoon called Nutanac Allegiate. I'm a senior English teacher so I'm responsible for a lot of, you know, the grade 11, grade 12 English classes that our students take. Our model is a little bit different. We're on a quarter system instead of a semester system. We have our students for a lot longer during the day and I'm actually working in a really cool program where we have the same students in the same classroom all day long and all year long. It's called the NICE program. It stands for Nutana Industry Career Education.
Speaker 3:Our students get like a wealth of experience in terms of like industry training alongside their adult 12 education program and their core credits and things like that.
Speaker 3:They're partnering our students partner with a great organization called One House, Many Nations to build and furnish a tiny house that goes to someone in need on a First Nation, and it's just a beautiful thing to be involved in, you know, and so I get to teach English, but I also get to observe and take part in, you know, creating something powerful that's going to serve community, that allows students to give back and gain skills in the process.
Speaker 3:It's a really wonderful place to be and with that. You know, a lot of our students are students that are a little more mature than your average high school students. In the NICE program in particular, we've got a lot of 19, 20-year-olds, things like that, Students who were sort of not properly served by the schools that they had, you know, been a part of previously, where we're just doing our best to make sure that their holistic needs are met in a way that is conducive to their success. So it's a really wonderful program. Our students, I think, are the best students in the province, if not, you know the country. They bring such a rich diversity of talents and backgrounds and wisdom to the table so that we can all learn from each other.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's. It sounds like it would be a great environment to be, you know, working in and as a student.
Speaker 3:Oh, it's so cool and you know it's co-taught, so there's a variety of teachers in there. We all work as a team to support these students and they have the benefit of this this team of professionals as well to again just help them meet the needs that they have, that they require to be successful, which other schools unfortunately along their path, just haven't been able to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, there's. I kind of draw a parallel a bit. I think there's a lot of things happening right now in different sectors. I think you're talking about where the school you work in is a good example at you know governance structures and how can we do things differently and how can we not necessarily just do all these things that have been done for years just because that's the way it's always been done, when it's not necessarily like serving the folks who are involved with the things that we're doing? And yeah, I think that that's something that I'm starting to get a bit of a passion for is thinking, you know, why are? Why are we, why are we continuing down a path, necessarily, that isn't isn't working out for for the folks involved, necessarily.
Speaker 3:Absolutely yeah, yeah, no, it's good thinking. We we constantly need to be creative, be innovative and just think about what we can change right. A lot of, a lot of old school thinking around education would think how do we change these students so that they can be successful? But, you know, an anti-racist approach and an anti-oppressive approach would be more like what can we do differently? You know, because obviously we're not meeting their needs.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the other thing I was just going to circle back to there is thinking about Tonight it's Poetry and it took me kind of back because I back I don't know. Gosh, it must have been about 10 years ago now. I participated in this program and I got to meet I think was one of the founders of Tonight it's Poetry, isaac Bond.
Speaker 2:I got to meet, I think, was one of the founders of Tonight it's Poetry, isaac Bond. And yeah, we were in this program together and at that time too, I was involved in the venue that hosted Word Up Regina here, the community in Regina, and I didn't really I got to be, I was bartending quite a bit at the Word Up Regina events.
Speaker 1:And so.
Speaker 2:I got to soak in like all this amazing spoken word poetry, you know almost on a weekly basis and talk to a lot of amazing folks who are traveling across the country or, you know, locally or that sort of thing. And yeah, I just wanted to kind of echo what you're saying there the art form and a lot of the people involved. It was just always such a treat to get to experience that on a more frequent basis subsidiary of of.
Speaker 3:Tonight it's poetry with a youth and community engagement focus. Cool now, honestly.
Speaker 3:Uh, tonight it's poetry is kind of on hiatus but right out loud is having a heyday right, right now and, uh, these youth leaders who have taken over for for isaac bond and I'm thinking about people like peace akintade and lauren clausen, who's the current Youth Poet Laureate for Saskatchewan, dash Reimer, some of these other younger volunteers, are doing an incredible job of engaging community and bringing back through youth what has honestly been a bit of a challenged art form over the past decade or so, and one that has struggled to stay alive just due to, like, the really strange political uh turbulence that that it's been through and that we've all been through.
Speaker 3:You know, as a broader, you know uh nation, uh, let alone you know province or locale, but these young people are coming in with raw truth, they're coming in with talent and they're coming in with respect for one another and for each other's emotional safety, but also growth, development, reciprocal relationships. It's been really really incredible to see Because, honestly, the art kind of died for a minute there, uh, through spoken word, just because of yeah, just some, some conversations and some ways that that political pieces were were handled within community. But these young people came through and and they didn't have that, that history and, and so they just did what, what they felt was right and and what they knew was good and it's been beautiful to witness yeah, that is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um, so one of the things, you're also a writer and I've kind of had a chance to to kind of dig into one of your, one of your pieces a bit um, not as much as I would have liked to before this conversation, unfortunately, but I was wondering maybe um talk a little bit about some of the, some of the books that you've, that you've published yeah, sure.
Speaker 3:So it started with a picture book called welcome to the cypher. Uh, this is a picture book for young people about rap music and, um, it's one of those things, again, again, where you know I love rap music. I've always loved it Becoming a father. I wanted to share that passion with my kids, but unfortunately I couldn't find a single picture book out there about rap music, at least in my location, and so I penned one. You know, got got really, really inspired to do that, was lucky enough to have it published by Anik Press and illustrated by the wonderful Aradjua Affel, so it's available wherever you buy books.
Speaker 3:In my perspective, you know it's a really great, fun way to introduce young people to rap music. It is rhyming, it does use an authentic hip-hop voice and it's got some wonderful characters illustrated again by Aradjua, and I think it came together really, really beautifully. There's also an audio book for it that blends hip-hop beats and backing tracks with the actual narration, so I'd just like to encourage everybody to check that out as well. Little Black Lives Matter is a book that I wrote as a love letter to black children. It's illustrated by the incredible Chelsea Charles. These are two great black Canadian illustrators based out of Ontario, and again just super privileged to work with Chelsea, who did an amazing job on this book, little Black Lives Matter, which is published by Seven Stories Press, based out of New York.
Speaker 3:So really really lucky to work with them too, and recently it was actually translated into Portuguese for sale in Brazil and, yeah, I'm just so, so excited about that and and the fact that it may reach reach more of those young lives in in ways that I couldn't have imagined. Yeah, so the book you might be talking about, if you just scratch the surface, is I'm not surprised it's 77,000 words or so. It's Stay Up. This is a chapter book for thousand words or so. It's Stay Up.
Speaker 3:This is a chapter book for young people, young adults, to just start learning about anti-racism and anti-oppressive education, and it's got a little bit of my own memories of childhood and my upbringing as a young biracial black kid in Moose Jaw, saskatchewan. You can maybe imagine how interesting that was. But yeah, if you want to, you know, learn some details. They're mostly there. So it's called Stay Up Racism Resistance and Reclaiming Black Freedom, published again by Anik Press, and there's some beautiful, beautiful collage art by an artist named Stilo Starr on the cover and throughout the book. That I think really elevates some of the text as well. So I hope young people and people of all ages honestly, I've had a lot of grown folks read the book and if you're just new to the anti-racism journey, it's definitely a good place to start.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, I hope it resonates and I think one thing that's been missing from this anti-racism conversation is not just the youth element, which this book speaks to, but also the Canadian perspective. There's a lot of books out there, coming out of the United States, where the scholarship is deep and stretches back a ways, but in terms of books with a Canadian context there are few, and so I'm happy to be able to contribute to that. And I just have to shout out like, coming back to my thesis work and stuff like that, I had the privilege of working under Dr Berna St Denis, who is one of Canada's and the world's foremost anti-racism educators, and the work and the teachings that I was able to do and able to learn from her have really inspired. You know a lot of my endeavors, but certainly a lot of what I touch on in this book. Certainly a lot of what I touch on in this book.
Speaker 2:Right, I think one of the things that I'm you know that I think I found interesting about starting to starting to pick up, stay up and and, and you know, starting to read it is that you know, yeah, it's, it's a starting point, I think, and I think that's what a lot of people need in their journeys. I think that's what a lot of people need in their journeys and I was wondering, maybe if you could possibly speak to you know, I'm thinking the listenership of this podcast is small but mighty, I would say, and there's a lot of people working tirelessly in arts organizations across the province artists, that sort of thing, and you know there's probably I think we definitely have a few art supporters in the mix as well but definitely speaking to the arts community primarily, maybe if you could talk a little bit about starting to, you know, taking the first steps in doing anti-oppression work and anti-racism work, kind of how would you advise people to kind of start down that path?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, other than picking up, stay Up, you're right, there's nothing to it but to do it and to just start. But it really does start with learning and what we call unlearning in anti-racist education.
Speaker 3:We have all been conditioned to not only accept you know racism, but to just sort of almost promote it in unconscious ways, and we've been marinated in it, as Dr Alex Wilson would say. And so, honestly, we all have these sort of biases that may be unconscious to us, that require deep investigation, deep self-reflection and introspection, deep self-reflection and introspection, and that requires a look at the historical and ongoing context of colonialism, of white supremacy, of heteronormativity, of all of these systems of domination that pervade the fabric of our society, which otherwise remain invisible. You know, if you're not looking for them, you often won't or don't see them.
Speaker 3:The beautiful thing about anti-racism and anti-oppressive education is that once you start learning and unlearning, once you start seeing them, you can't unsee them, and so we need to educate ourselves and diseducate ourselves in order to become the tools, in order to become the lenses through which those problems are actually accessible and therefore changeable.
Speaker 3:Right, you can't change what you can't see. So it really boils down to doing the work and once you've, you know, sort of started that learning and unlearning journey, hopefully the allyship practice can begin right where you're listening to, taking direction from and doing your best to support communities who are, you know, more affected by, you know, forms of oppression than yourself, and we all are affected by oppression. Just, some people are more negatively affected and some people are positively affected in various ways. Right, so there's yeah, I would say, book learning and going to resources and online courses and things like that are a good starting point, and then connecting with communities, social justice communities and the communities who experience oppression that you want to support, start aligning yourself and, you know, asking what you can do to make the work happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I think that's a great place to start for people listening.
Speaker 3:Yeah, word up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, we've seen some, I think, steps in positive directions within the arts community, especially within the last three to five years as far as funding programs being launched and that sort of thing. But I think there's always going to be more work to do and more room for growth, and always room for more allies and change to facilitate.
Speaker 3:Yeah, definitely. Well, it has to be constant, it has to be ongoing and it has to be critically reflective. Right, you can never quite say you've arrived. I think that's going to take maybe a few hundred years before we get there.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, just constant critical reflection and action together are the key yeah, um, so we've invite, we've uh asked if you'd be interested in in doing a, a series, a written series for the arts alliance, which I'm really looking forward to. Um, I was wondering, maybe, if you would talk a little bit about, maybe what you're planning on writing about or talking about in that, and give folks a bit of a teaser.
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure. Well, I mean the basic foundation and the title is going to be something like how Hip Hop Can Save the World, and this again really just drives at the heart of those interconnections between social justice and spoken word hip hop that are so vivid and that I studied throughout the course of my grad studies at the University of Saskatchewan. I think there's so much potential there that is untapped, and partly it's untapped on purpose. Schools have been the gatekeepers of what literature is. You know, for many, many decades and decades. Hip-hop hasn't been necessarily brought into the fold, if you will. It hasn't been acknowledged as something of literary merit or brought in as a part of any canon or curriculum in any formal way, and I think that's really unfortunate. You know, from the very beginnings of young people's education, they should be able to access forms of art that speak to them. You know, thinking back again on my own experience, being restricted from access to hip-hop as an art form, as a type of literature and a type of literacy, was extremely limiting for my personal and emotional development and my ability to fully actualize as a human being. Right. And so to me just looking back on that and thinking about how many young people have been restricted in the same ways from accessing truly culturally responsive material is a travesty these days. You know, a lot of schools and school divisions pride themselves on being quote unquote culturally responsive. There's a lot of problems with the way that's taken up, actually, because it's usually not critical in nature whatsoever. It's usually not aligned with anti-racist values. It's usually not aligned with anti-racist values. It usually relies on stereotypical and historical manifestations of what culture is and means, while actively restricting modern forms of culture and censoring forms of dissent that would speak to equity and speak to justice for those exact groups.
Speaker 3:Hip hop is one of those things that does and meets those criteria. It is a cultural element, it is a culture. It's born out of the black community but it has become its own culture, its own way of knowing, and it's accessible to students of all identities, but particularly popular with students of racialized identities, especially Black and Indigenous students. Thinking about Saskatchewan in particular. This is a source of not just inspiration and joy, but also a source of freedom freedom of expression, freedom of person, freedom of conscience. For these people it's a source of anti-racist education and social justice. Education because it is one of the only education, because it is one of the only musical genres that is accessible today that was born out of protest and that continues to rely on social protest as a foundational element. This is one of the reasons why it's so restricted, though, of course, is because the powers that be, who are controlling things like curriculum and resources for education, are the same ones being criticized by hip hop artists, and they don't want to be implicated in the systems of domination and violence that create the conditions of poverty, create the conditions of poverty of, you know, mental health problems, addictions and other problems facing communities who are experiencing oppression. Those are the stories that rappers sometimes talk about and are met with finger wagging over being a bad influence or whatever. It might be right, but these are stories of what life is like on the other side of privilege, right On the other side of difference, and they're important. They're important pieces of information that can not only provide perspective but inspire things like empathy, which leads to solidarity, which leads to action and change. So I think that, for young racialized folks especially, hip hop is an important tool for them to be able to access just organic, raw forms of truth that are critical in nature, that inspire critical thinking about society in nature that inspire critical thinking about society and beyond that, it's just dope. You know why. Why wouldn't you want young people to experience this incredibly engaging art form that they're listening to anyways but that has so much potential to elevate even their own?
Speaker 3:You know language proficiency and things like that Hip hop is often criticized for. You know the way it uses slang or foul language or you know these other pieces, but first of all, that's a little bit stereotypical. And further, you know Ebonics or African American vernacular English is not slang, it's a dialect. The way that we, you know in education, ought to be looking at you know that is as a source of potential for translanguaging education, where we use different forms and uses and dialects of a language to help learn about our own and to compare and contrast and view how systems of grammar just work differently not work in worse or better ways, but work differently.
Speaker 3:In a language form that came out of a rich community, slang as well, like slang, is its own code because it provides relationship and relatability and access to identification within communities.
Speaker 3:You know, you think about the way that you know certain slang words exist in indigenous communities, for example, and how that actually creates a sense of membership in a community. For those who you know use those words and those terms, it's a beautiful, beautiful thing. It's worth studying. You know, these are fascinating, fascinating facets of life that are available to us through a study of something like hip hop, that are available to us through a study of something like hip-hop. For me, as well, it's been an incredible source of mental health wellness through the mindfulness that it creates, through the process of introspection that it inspires, where I'm able to literally digest and unpack the things that I've been through in my life so that I can understand them, traumas included, you know, traumas which are often connected to experiences of racism and other forms of oppression. If we're not allowing space for young people to process those things in their own authentic ways and voices, we're doing an incredible disservice to them in that respect as well.
Speaker 2:So I'm just a big fan of the arts and hip-hop is an art and we just, we just can't forget that, and and we can't forget it on purpose, because the cost is too great- yeah, man, there's so much there and I'm going to be thinking about that for a long time and and I really am looking forward to kind of reading what you, what you, you know, put out, what you write for us and and I and you know, thinking on that a lot more.
Speaker 2:Um, one of the challenges I think that we've faced at the arts alliance, uh, in advocating for the arts, uh, advocating for the importance of the arts in funding, in arts education, in for well-being in general, is, I think you know, we have, we, we, we have the arts community kind of as our main audience, and that's that's super important.
Speaker 2:Those are our people. But one of the one of the challenges that we've faced is, I think, getting helping the general public whether you know whoever that is out there to understand that the arts are for them, that you know, cause I think a lot of people kind of maybe, when you think of the arts, a lot of folks might not have that connection in their head to think, yeah, the arts, that's for me, and so I think this is why spoken word is is such a beautiful art form, and hip hop too is because they sort of began in community Right, grassroots we're talking about here, and they remain one of the most accessible human art forms like think about the rules of a poetry, slam, no props, no music, no nudity or something like that.
Speaker 3:Right, it's just like you. You, you don't need access to anything but yourself and a pair of jeans. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, and everyone is welcome.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's beautiful.
Speaker 3:Yeah, because it circumvents that gatekeeping that's been going on for so long. You know, the idea of spoken word and of hip-hop, I believe, are to give poetry back to the people where it really belongs.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Is there anything else you'd like to add or you'd like to talk about?
Speaker 3:You know, not specifically. I'm just super excited to yeah, have this opportunity to converse with you about this and, yeah, reach your listenership. Yeah, being approached, you know, by SAA was, you know, a real great opportunity for me. I'm thankful for it and, yeah, grateful for all of the you know beautiful things that lie in the partnership ahead as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, it's been really great to have this conversation with you and to get to know you, and I look forward to you know we look forward to working with you as we go forward and, you know, seeing where this path takes us.
Speaker 3:yeah yeah, it's been an absolute pleasure, thank you right on.
Speaker 2:Thanks, cody okay peace cool
Speaker 1:the next episode of arts everywhere is coming soon, so keep checking the saskatchewan arts alliance website and their social media pages for more information and if you're listening to the podcast through your favorite podcasting app, don't forget to hit the subscribe button so you don't miss a single episode. The Arts Everywhere theme music is composed by Saskatchewan musician Patrick Moon Bird, dancing to lo-fi from his album entitled 2021. Check out the show notes for links to Patrick's music. The Saskatchewan Arts Alliance would like to thank our funders, sask Culture and Sask Arts, both of whom benefit from lottery ticket sales through Sask Lotteries Proceeds from Sask Lotteries fund cultural organizations all across the province, and we wouldn't be able to do the work we do without your support. See you next time.