A Soul Touched by Sound
dg Hatch is a Chippewa artist, flute maker, sculptor, and flute player. He is a tribal member of the Chippewa of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. He has been a woodworker for over 40 years. dg makes Native American wooden flutes in a Woodland style. He refers to his significant flute design changes as generations; he’s currently in the 6th generation.
dg resides in Reedsport, Oregon, and is a 2020 First Peoples Fund Artist in Business Leadership fellow.
Surrounded by thousands of people at the LA County Fair, one sound reached dg’s heart. He moved toward the sound. Paused, listened. Moved again.
He soon discovered the source of the sound in a small courtyard where a man had a table set up with his flutes. dg purchased one and took it home.
“I sat alone and played,” he says. “I wasn’t very good, but it was like a download from heaven. It touched me like nothing had ever before.”
The next day, dg bought the tools he needed to begin a 24-year journey of making Native American flutes.
“It was the first time in a very long time I did something I wanted to do,” dg says. His artist brand features his initials lowercase in the same fashion that he signs his flutes.
At the beginning of 2020, dg was scheduled for a six-month exposition at the Great Law of Peace Center in New York. That was canceled due to COVID-19, but he still made a unique flute that would have been part of the display. He entered the flute in the Coastal Douglas Arts and Business Alliance “Recycle, Upcycle, Reuse” Art Challenge. He posed the question, “What can be done with a piece of rescued firewood, a lonely pinecone, a little stone, a little leather, a little skill, and a little love?”
In the next town up from dg, a tree cutter had a piece of American Holly atop his burn pile. dg asked for it and added it to his collection of random material.
“A lot of times, I feel a pull toward picking up things, but not sure exactly what to do with it,” he says. “After a while, they come together and make sense.”
For this flute, dg incorporated the holly, a pinecone from Sisters, OR, a block of Alabaster stone from Springdale, UT, and elk leather from the Wendake Huron Village in Quebec, Canada.
After a long, loving process to remake each object, dg nestled the finished flute in a bronze hand he sculpted of a man rising out of Onondaga Lake in New York, where the Great Tree of Peace once stood. The flute is being offered as a symbol of peace for the people of all Nations.
Tuned to a six finger pentatonic scale in the key of G, dg’s flute won the art contest and is ready to travel the world and do its work for years to come. Perhaps it too will draw a soul in through the sounds of life, and discover a new purpose.
