Biography
Black Belt Eagle Scout serves as the solo outlet for Portland-based multi-instrumentalist Katherine Paul, whose work fuses alt-rock textures with Native American traditions. After participating in several noteworthy Portland groups throughout the 2010s, she issued her first solo statement with the 2017 album Mother of My Children. That introspective record examined personal losses alongside her evolving sense of self as an indigenous queer woman. A follow-up, At the Party with My Brown Friends, arrived in 2019 and conveyed greater self-acceptance, while 2023’s The Land, The Water, The Sky struck a balance between shadow and brightness after Paul revisited her childhood reservation amid the 2020 pandemic.
Raised within the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, Paul sang and danced at Pow Wows from childhood onward. Her earliest musical exposure came through family Native traditions and worn VHS copies of Nirvana and Hole, which prompted her to teach herself guitar and drums during adolescence. In 2007 she relocated from Washington State to Portland, Oregon, for college and soon connected with the Rock & Roll Camp for Girls before gaining experience in the local groups Genders and Forest Park. Her initial solo recording under the Black Belt Eagle Scout name, a self-titled EP, surfaced in 2014, yet wider recognition arrived with her first full-length project a few years later.
Paul tracked Mother of My Children alongside Nich Wilber at Anacortes Unknown studio in Northwest Washington. Good Cheer, an independent Portland label, released the album in 2017; Saddle Creek later acquired it and introduced the project to wider audiences in mid-2018 via the single “Soft Stud,” whose cycling patterns, grimy riffs, and elegant vocal stood out. The reissued LP appeared that September. Her second album, At the Party with My Brown Friends, followed in 2019 on Saddle Creek and adopted a more measured approach, tempering the debut’s squalling guitars while drawing fresh inspiration from love, friendship, and desire.
When COVID-19 reached global scale in early 2020, Paul returned to her ancestral Swinomish lands, where the Skagit River, tall cedar trees, tide flats, and mountain vistas, together with the surrounding community amid shared trauma, left a lasting impression. Those elements of darkness and solidarity surfaced on 2023’s The Land, The Water, The Sky, which features the duet “Salmon Stinta” alongside Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum.
Raised within the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, Paul sang and danced at Pow Wows from childhood onward. Her earliest musical exposure came through family Native traditions and worn VHS copies of Nirvana and Hole, which prompted her to teach herself guitar and drums during adolescence. In 2007 she relocated from Washington State to Portland, Oregon, for college and soon connected with the Rock & Roll Camp for Girls before gaining experience in the local groups Genders and Forest Park. Her initial solo recording under the Black Belt Eagle Scout name, a self-titled EP, surfaced in 2014, yet wider recognition arrived with her first full-length project a few years later.
Paul tracked Mother of My Children alongside Nich Wilber at Anacortes Unknown studio in Northwest Washington. Good Cheer, an independent Portland label, released the album in 2017; Saddle Creek later acquired it and introduced the project to wider audiences in mid-2018 via the single “Soft Stud,” whose cycling patterns, grimy riffs, and elegant vocal stood out. The reissued LP appeared that September. Her second album, At the Party with My Brown Friends, followed in 2019 on Saddle Creek and adopted a more measured approach, tempering the debut’s squalling guitars while drawing fresh inspiration from love, friendship, and desire.
When COVID-19 reached global scale in early 2020, Paul returned to her ancestral Swinomish lands, where the Skagit River, tall cedar trees, tide flats, and mountain vistas, together with the surrounding community amid shared trauma, left a lasting impression. Those elements of darkness and solidarity surfaced on 2023’s The Land, The Water, The Sky, which features the duet “Salmon Stinta” alongside Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum.
Albums
