Correction: The article has been edited to reflect that Paul Summers LaRoche was the recipient of the Midwest Culture Bearers Award rather than his group Brulé.
WORTHINGTON — Worthington musician and Brulé founder Paul LaRoche Summers was named one of nine recipients of the Midwest Culture Bearers Award on Monday Sept. 30. One of 250 nominees, the award recognizes artists throughout the Midwest that showcase, preserve and pass down their culture. LaRoche was only one of two Native American artists to be nominated for the award.
LaRoche said that being a recipient of the $5,000 grant was a surprise to him.
“I didn’t really have any expectation of being a finalist or actually being one of the awardees. It was a big surprise to us, even at this stage of (our) career,” LaRoche said. “Brulé’s career has spanned (nearly) 30 years and during that time, we’ve only received one grant way back in 1995 from the South Dakota Arts Council. We took a few stabs in the grant world but we never had much luck with it. We just kind of let it go after not having much success at it and really having more success being self-sufficient with our own concert circuit and producing and selling our own CDs. That’s how we survived over the years.”
It means a lot. I think it gives you some reassurance that you’ve made a dent out there in the world of the arts. I think it’s an acknowledgment of a lifetime’s worth of work. It’s the acknowledgment that you’ve done something worthwhile, especially from a cultural basis. It carries a great significance for us.”
Paul Summers LaRoche
LaRoche said that it was Memorial Auditorium Manager Tammy Makram that went out and set the wheels in motion for his application in the process.
“Basically, Tammy was sort of the mastermind behind the whole thing,” he said. “This started with our Worthington schools concert that we did almost two years ago. For that to happen took quite some doing. She’s seen a little bit of our plight within Brulé; we’re a little bit of an underground performance act. She’s seen our struggles. I probably wouldn’t have even seen the application because I don’t have a radar for that, we never really have. She gave me a call one day and said, ‘Hey, there’s a grant application out there, I think that you guys would be perfect for.’ She explained it to me and then she sent it to me. We were kind of a third party in the whole thing the whole time. When it came to filling out the grant, it was pretty straightforward and it really did fit right up our alley.”
As part of the application process, LaRoche submitted the PBS documentary “Brulé, Following the Seventh Direction: A Native American Experience in Sight, Sound & Soul,” which focused on the group’s Worthington school district concerts.
“I think one of the key things for the granters in their evaluation process, they ask you to answer these three important questions, there’s a few other questions that come up in there, your bio and all that. They also ask you for either a still photograph, a series of still photographs or a video of some of your work to demonstrate what you’ve been doing. We had done a documentary on the Worthington schools concert…and we used that as our submission for the visual form to demonstrate our reaching out to the communities and to the youth to to represent our culture and to showcase our culture. In this case, it was the Native American culture.”
After performing in Brulé for nearly 30 years, LaRoche said that even just the recognition is reward enough for him.
“It means a lot,” LaRoche said. “I think it gives you some reassurance that you’ve made a dent out there in the world of the arts. That recognition to me, coming along late in a career, has much more meaning than if we had received this early on. In this case, I think it’s an acknowledgment of a lifetime’s worth of work. It’s the acknowledgment that you’ve done something worthwhile, especially from a cultural basis. We’ve always had a couple of fronts on our mission. Music has been part of it and (for) a lot of groups, that’s the only thing for them. It’s the music but for us, it’s being pioneers in our own culture, musical pioneers and we’re doing something that hasn’t been done before. All you have is acknowledgment along the way that you’re on the right track. It carries a great significance for us.”
“It’s interesting that of all of our travels we’ve embarked on, coming back to this little town of Worthington… we come back to a totally transformed Worthington from the one that I graduated high school from,” he said. “To think that we come back to this small, small community of less than 15,000 people and we end up being able to fulfill our mission much more than we ever really could in any of these outside environments that we’ve been in… It’s really important that we connect with the younger generation. That’s been a big thing for us, it’s really been an important part of the vision that we had in the beginning. (It’s) really to get this whole thing in front of the young kids so they can carry it on.”
Samuel Martin became a reporter for The Globe in September 2023. He has a bachelor’s degree in media studies from the University of Sioux Falls.