Hello, my name is Luck Salway and I am Tohono O'odham and Oglala Lakota. My Mothers name is Mary Narcho and she is Tohono O'odham. My fathers name was Stacey "Lucky" Salway and he was Oglala Lakota. My father passed away in March of 2014 and my Mother is a healthy strong beautiful woman. I have 2 kids my Daughter Sonya and my Son Allen. I have 2 older brothers Duwayne and Marvin and 3 Sisters named Wanda, Stacey and Crystal. As an O'odham and Lakota this is a proper introduction.
So I wanted to talk today about my journey that led me to wanna start True Descendants. In 2011 I was asked to help join a youth collective that helped at risk youth to give them something to do and learn after school. The place was called Skrappy's and many kids in Tucson found refuge and love at Skrappy's. I was asked to help with screen printing and teaching screen printing. I was paired in a good size building that was cut in half with a makeshift dance studio and it also had a music studio that was below us. The dance studio was only used for break dancing and capoeira. Mainly break dancing was the focus of there half of the studio space. Sharing the studio with the b-boys and b-girls I became really good friends with a lot of them, we shared ideas and made alot of art together. Also during this time a lot of the youth were fighting the school system for taking out an Indigenous studies class. There's a great documentary about this called "Precious Knowledge". I was really impressed by these young adults who were very proud of there culture and history. Growing up most of the Mexican kids I knew put Natives down and would say things like I'm no fucking Indian I'm Mexican. So when I saw kids that grew up "Mexican" and proudly acknowledging there "Indian" bloodlines it made me feel even more proud and happy to call these young adults my friends. Out of these young adults formed many great organizations and relationships. Flowers and Bullets was one of them and I have a lot of respect for F&B and I encourage you to support them as well. The name of the b boy crew that I aligned with was called F2D which stands for Fresh 2son Descendants. A super dope name in my opinion! The homie Nate who goes by DJ Killa Who & Bboy Killa Robot was the founder of this movement that I somehow luckily became a part of by our shared space and vibing together all the time. I loved the Descendants name and came up with an angle more focused on Indigenous ways and values and wanted to call it True Descendants and Est.b.c. just rolled off the tongue next in a conversation me and Nate had and that became the so called catch phrase.