On a Sunday afternoon in late October, the High Plains Western Heritage Center in Spearfish will hand its stage to a man who has spent much of his life explaining what the movies got wrong. JJ Kent, a Lakota educator and award-winning Native American flute player, will present "Lakota History & Culture" at 2 p.m. on October 25, 2026, a program that pairs a tipi demonstration with a concert on the indigenous Northern Plains flute.
The setting is fitting in a way that may not be obvious to a first-time visitor. The Heritage Center opened in September 1989 in Spearfish and provides more than 20,000 square feet of presentation space honoring Western legends and pioneers whose "rugged individualism" created the distinctive landscape and economies of a five-state region -- South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana. Its collections include both pioneer and American Indian material. The building's Cowboy Hall displays mounted Texas Longhorns, chaps, and the saddle Calvin Coolidge used when he dedicated Mount Rushmore and spent the summer in Custer State Park. Into that room walks a speaker whose work is largely about correcting the popular record on Native people -- a useful tension for an afternoon of programming.
Kent's biography explains where that mission comes from. He is the adopted son of a full-blooded Lakota woman of the Oglala, born and raised on the Pine Ridge Reservation, and he also carries Muskogee heritage. From an early age he was immersed in Lakota history, culture and spiritual traditions by respected elders, among them Floyd "Looks For Buffalo" Hand, James Dubray and Joe Brown Eyes. He began learning the Native American courting flute from his uncles and elders at the age of 10. His Lakota name is Wicasa Ho' Waste', which translates as "Good Voice Man."
What pushed him toward public teaching, he has said, was the gap between what he was taught and what he saw on screen. "As I grew up, ... I'd see a Western movie, the way a lot of the Natives were portrayed, a lot of the things that were said in those films about our people. I'm like, wait a minute, that's not right. That's not how I was taught," Kent told the Capital Journal ahead of a 2025 appearance at the Historic Adams House in Deadwood, part of Deadwood History Inc.'s History on the Lawn series. "I just kind of felt that it was my personal mission to try and help straighten out some of those myths and misconceptions about our people and our culture, and particularly the spiritual aspects of it."
At that Deadwood talk, he took aim at one of the most familiar phrases in American English. When Kent asked the crowd whether they had heard the term "peace pipe," nearly every hand went up. He explained that the phrase has no basis in Native tradition and never has -- it is a misnomer from American settlers and soldiers who observed the pipe being smoked at treaty signings. He went on to describe the pipe's actual significance and the protocols around it.
That combination -- a plain-spoken correction of a Hollywood myth, delivered by someone who learned the tradition from elders rather than from films -- is the core of what audiences at the Heritage Center can expect. The tipi demonstration adds a physical, hands-on dimension that a lecture cannot: a chance to see how a structure most people know only as a silhouette on a horizon actually goes up. And the flute concert is not an afterthought. Kent's recording and concert career has spanned nearly 30 years and crossed genres in unusual ways.
He came up in country music first. Kent signed with Brykas Records in Nashville; his first album produced the singles "Two Cups of Coffee" and "Pathway of a Fool," the latter reaching No. 1 on the country charts in June 1990. He was named Male Vocalist of the Year in 1988 by the Wyoming Rocky Mountain Country Music Foundation and again in 1990 by the Major Independent Record Label Association. When Brykas ran into financial and securities trouble and closed its doors, freezing his assets and his release plans, he went to London with Prestige Records to continue his country career abroad. He returned to the States in 2009 with Spirit Wind Records in New York and turned back to the native flute. That year he won Flutist of the Year at the Native American Music Awards and was a three-time nominee for Artist of the Year. In September 2024 he was inducted into the Dakota Country Music Hall of Fame.
His teaching career has taken him well beyond the Black Hills. In March 2010 he performed at the University of Kentucky's Worsham Theatre as part of the school's Cultural Diversity Festival, presenting what the university described as a cultural program built from stories, music and dance in the ancient ways of Native American tribes. He has said the pivot toward education began when he was asked to share his knowledge of Native American history and storytelling with schoolchildren, an experience that led him to keep presenting at every level from elementary schools to colleges in the United States and Canada. His storytelling, the university noted, is enhanced by flute, song, dance and art.
For the Heritage Center, the October program sits inside a busy fall calendar that leans heavily on exactly this kind of cultural and historical programming. The following month brings a Native American drum-making class with Debra Blair, in which participants tie-dye their own 13-inch black walnut hand drum and make a drumstick, and a Veterans Day weekend concert with Orion and Stacey Potter benefiting the Spearfish Veterans Monument. Later in November come a historical poetry workshop with South Dakota Poet Laureate Bruce Roseland and a free author talk with photographer and writer Paul Horsted. Kent himself is no stranger to the venue: he is also booked there with his band, the Aces & 8s, for a High Plains Live! country show on May 31, 2026.
That double booking says something about the range of the man at the center of the October event -- a chart-topping country singer and a Native American Music Award-winning flutist, a Nashville recording artist and a Lakota educator, all the same person. An audience in Spearfish gets both halves, plus a tipi going up in the museum and a few myths taken down.