How'd you get the name DJ Big Rez?
I was a kid in middle school playing basketball. There was a guy playing basketball. He went by Big Country, and he was in the NBA, played for the [Vancouver] Grizzlies. [My basketball coach] said, ‘Man, forget Big Country. We got Big Rez.’ The name came and just stuck with me through all my sports and everything that I’ve done in Lummi.
You emcee a lot of events, including the Lummi Stommish Festival which you used to pull canoes in. How does it feel to help lead it now?
It’s crazy. The main three — me, my cousin Autumn Washington and Lawrence Solomon — we all pulled on the same crew. We all traveled the world together and now we organize it. We run it, and we help set everything up. It’s awesome and scary at the same time because we deal with so many people, so many problems. We deal with organizing everybody because we have close to 50 11-man canoes, and that’s a lot of teams. That’s just the people that are pulling, not to mention everyone that comes to the other activities — the stick games, the basketball tournaments, the softball tournaments.
How did you become a DJ?
I started out as a mobile DJ. One of my high school buddies, back in 2001, said, ‘Hey, we can make some money doing this, get into the business.’ We started the business doing weddings, doing dances, things like that, and it just blossomed into doing events for major artists like Lil’ Flip, Yukmouth, Spice 1. We got into festivals, and then one of my buddies DJ Defkawn — he DJs in Mount Vernon — asked me to come on air with him, gave me a guest spot. Then Bellingham, over at KZAX, had an opening and wanted a hip-hop show. I had a show for a couple years, and I brought a squad of DJs with me. Then, Seattle reached out to me — Daybreak Star [Indian Cultural] Center, the Native Indian collective down there. They said, ‘Hey we want to start a radio station. We know you’re a Native American DJ.’ And, I helped Daybreak Star [Radio] launch three years ago.
How does it feel to lift up other Native American artists through your work at Daybreak?
It’s awesome. When we started, there was no pay with it. It was all community radio. But, the whole aspect of shedding that light on all of our Native artists [and] our Indigenous communities was the biggest thing for me. Being a Native American, I know how hard it is to get into the industry and what it’s like to be in the industry. I wanted to teach other artists and other people coming up, like, don’t give up.
