As Donald Trump resuscitates oil drilling projects on Indigenous land here in the United States, a new generation of Indigenous artists is protesting — not with homemade signs, but with grinding guitars, ancestral wisdom and unrelenting soundscapes. One of them is Takiaya Reed, a Black, Cherokee, Two-Spirit musician, and one half of Divide and Dissolve, a doom metal band known for its slow, heavy, emotionally immersive sound that doesn’t need lyrics to make itself heard.

“Heavy music belongs to anyone who needs it,” she tells me. “That’s why I’m here.”

Reed’s work confronts not just one, but two historically male-dominated spaces: metal and classical music. (She is classically trained in soprano sax, but also plays guitar and bass.) Her reception in the latter genre has been complicated from the start.

“One of my first music teachers told me I couldn’t play an instrument because my lips were too big,” Reed says. “I told my dad, and he was outraged. He was like, ‘You can play anything you want to play.’ He said, ‘Play all the instruments — that’ll make you a better musician.’ And that’s kind of where it all started.”

Metal has long been linked to white supremacy, but Reed isn’t just unapologetically taking up space in the genre — she’s transforming it. By combining her classical roots with indigenous cultural expression and heavy metal, Reed’s music is reshaping metal’s sound and purpose, making space for Indigenous, queer and Black resistance. And she’s doing it on her own terms.

In metal’s painfully homogenous world, Reed’s presence is game-changing for fans who rarely see themselves reflected in the scene. “There’s not a lot of people who I can look at and be like, ‘Oh, my God, we have the same experience,’” Reed says. “But I just want to keep showing up. Eventually, I’ll go to a show, and it’ll feel like people look more like me. It requires a lot of effort, because that hasn’t been challenged.”

Even if you’ve never heard of Takiaya Reed or doom metal, you might remember when YouTube temporarily pulled a Divide and Dissolve Video for their song “Resistance” — a stark, wordless protest against colonial monuments in which said monuments are pelted with pee-colored liquid from water guns. Conservatives freaked, and the Daily Mail called the “desecration” of Captain Cook’s statue and cottage in Victoria, Australia, “disgraceful.” But if that debacle made you think Reed is only about rage (which, I think we can all agree, is sometimes necessary), you’re missing the bigger picture.

“Everything I do is about being present with the land, with the body. That’s where the truth is,” Reed says. “I hope [listeners] feel a sense of deep love that’s able to transcend the things that are out of our control.” One of the most fascinating things about Reed’s work is that it conveys all of that, and does so without hitting the audience over the head with overtly political lyrics.

Although some of her music does have lyrics, Reed doesn’t think they’re necessary to prove her point. “Music is great because it’s this language that can be spoken with many people, and many people understand what you’re saying without words,” she says. “We can hear a combination of notes, and all of a sudden, just be reduced to tears.” By omitting lyrics, Reed sidesteps the dominance of colonial languages — especially English.

“I speak English, and my friends who speak many different languages always say, ‘Oh, that doesn’t translate well into English.’ And I’m like, yeah — this language, this colonial weapon that people have been using to create confusion. It’s sometimes inefficient.” Instead, Reed’s music lives in presence and feeling — a natural fit for the slow, immersive terrain of doom and drone metal. Divide and Dissolve’s forthcoming album, “Insatiable,” does have vocals, Reed says, but I don’t expect that lyrics will get in the way of her message.

Reed recently composed a full symphony orchestra for the BBC, but despite her obvious virtuosity, she found she still had to explain her presence to people. Reed tells me that when she met people in the BBC building and tried to explain the event to them, they asked her if she worked in the building. When she told people she was a musician, they assumed that she was a jazz artist. Finally, she had to just straight up say, “I wrote the symphony.”

Reed meets ignorance with clarity and conviction. “The assumption that the composer is a white person is wrong,” she tells me. “That means there’s something inherently flawed in the system. Classical music has to change. I don’t want to complain about it. I want to create change.”

As environmental protections are gutted, protestors criminalized, Indigenous sovereignty is undermined and insulted, the urgency — and necessity — of her work both sharpens and broadens.

Reed says that staying in touch with her ancestral traditions and having a long-term view help her keep fighting the good fight. “I really lean on my ancestors and their deep wisdom and knowledge,” she says. “I really believe in working toward things that I won’t see in my lifetime. Things like liberation, reparations, sovereignty — even if I personally won’t see the results, it’s still something to work toward.”

If you pay attention, you’ll notice a growing movement of Indigenous artists is reshaping heavy music from the inside. Bands like Blackbraid, Nechochwen, Yamantaka // Sonic Titan, and Pan-Amerikan Native Front are also fusing aggressive metal with ancestral traditions to rage against colonial violence, environmental destruction, and the criminalization of land defenders. Like Reed, these artists aren’t just making beautiful noise — they’re building networks of solidarity, creativity and resistance.

Collaboration is part of Reed’s musical and political praxis. Over the years, she’s shared the Divide and Dissolve spotlight with several musicians, including drummer Sylvie Nehill, who is of Māori and white Australian descent. Reed’s recent tour with Chelsea Wolfe, a fellow heavy musician with radical values, reinforced that for her.

“Being on tour with Chelsea Wolfe was my favorite tour I’ve ever done,” Reed says. “She’s constantly posting about politics online, but she’s also living in integrity with it in person.” Actually, Reed says that she doesn’t even see a divide between art and politics. “I don’t know that there’s a difference between musical and political [connection],” she says.

Some of these connections feel unexpected to Reed, but she embraces them too. “Sometimes they’re just these really giant dudes with huge beards who are like, ‘Hey, I really like your music.’ I want to remain open-hearted. We never know how someone is going to be.”

That openness is a quiet revolution — with a drone heavy soundtrack. It’s why her music builds connective tissue between people, genres and generations — transforming heaviness into healing, and resistance into something communal. “It’s not just about me or what I’m doing,” Reed says. “It’s about all of us, together, working toward something bigger.”