Opening and Closing Events
With music featuring Soul-A-Mente
Soul-A-Mente is a collaboration between Indigenous Soul musician/activist, Goodshield Aguilar, and Mignon Geli on native-style wood flutes.
Their music is an eclectic mix of traditional Native, rock, and reggae mixed with spoken word and storytelling.
Soul-A-Mente
Good Shield
From a young age, art and music had always played a major role in his observations and expressions of the world around him.
Cultural identity was always important too, having grown up in California, far from his regional ancestral lands, he has successfully faced the challenge of keeping strong cultural ties.
Music and activism has taken him all over Turtle Island (and Europe), introducing him to the beauty and diversity of the many nations across this land and beyond and also the struggles and plights continuing today, from sacred site desecration, to revoked water rights, to contamination of the environment, and the slaughtering of buffalo and wolves.
When Good Shield isn’t traveling with music or isn’t up in Yellowstone with the Buffalo Field Campaign, he is a “green builder”, building eco-friendly strawbale homes and structures, enjoying nature, as he is a lover of the outdoors and is a blessed father of three beautiful young warriors.
Mignon Geli
Mignon Geli was born in San Francisco, California. She is of Filipino, Spanish, and Mayan ancestry.
For the past 17 years, Mignon has been living in the California Sierra Foothills by Coloma, in Nisenan-Maidu country. Thirteen years ago, her son gifted her with a native wood flute. She is self-taught, plays by ear, and has added native drums to her repertoire. She can flute along in many genres of music from traditional native to contemporary native, to folk, rock, jazz, funk, soul, etc.
Mignon is also a member of the Neena McNair Family Drum, a multi-cultural women’s traditional native drum group, a broadcaster with Indigenous Soul Music & Radio, a co-producer of the Global Indigenous Peoples Village at the California Worldfest Music Festival, plays with Soul-A-Mente, which mixes Indigenous soul music with diverse genres and instruments, and an active supporter of and participant with the Buffalo Field Campaign!
